The Art of Rosaleen Norton...

We had a bit of a coup in the shop this week – a very rare arcane text fell into our lap and negotiations have begun in earnest to secure a deal with the owner for us to sell it on their behalf. The book in question is The Art of Rosaleen Norton, which may sound a bit prosaic, but this is one of Australia’s most controversial Twentieth Century publications. A very small number of these books were produced and most of them where destroyed by zealous censors, which means that when surviving copies are located, they are eagerly snapped up.

Rosaleen Norton was born in Dunedin to Australian ex-pat immigrants. She was the youngest of three sisters and definitely the black sheep of her family. Enduring a contentious existence with her mother, she fled the family unit as soon as possible (after they had re-located once more to Sydney) and set about trying to discover her purpose.

She worked initially as an artist’s model, posing for Norman Lindsay amongst others, and travelled through a strange miscellany of other jobs before settling in King’s Cross and working as an illustrator for a magazine called “Smith’s Weekly”. During this time she read widely on subjects esoteric and became inspired by the teachings of that perennial snake-oil salesman, Aleister Crowley. Eventually, she codified her own system of pagan worship, a syncretric system infusing modern notions of witchcraft with elements of Qliphothic Cabbalism, Gnosticism and the sex-magic of Crowley’s Thelemite teachings. She became notorious as “The Witch of the Cross”, using her ‘powers’ to cast spells for clients and to undertake various ‘magickal workings’.

Her lifestyle was constantly coming under investigation by the Powers That Were: Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s was not a place to conduct a bohemian sort of existence without scrutiny. Although she and her lover, Gavin Greenlees, maintained good relations with the local constabulary, there were times when calls to ‘clean up the ‘Cross’ saw her home invaded by officialdom looking for easy targets in order to score points with Joe Public, and the pair were often pilloried in the Press. A short escape to Melbourne where an exhibition of Rosaleen’s art was shut down by a charge of indecency, saw them return to Sydney with their tails between their legs.

Perhaps the biggest scandal to strike Norton came from her liaison with acclaimed British musical conductor Sir Eugene Goossens. Along with Greenlees, he became Norton’s lover and partner in her sexual sorcery. Upon his return from an overseas holiday, he was found to have a bundle of pornographic material in his luggage and he was forced to return to England in disgrace. Blame for the episode was placed squarely on Norton’s influence.

Norton approached publisher Walter Glover with the idea of creating a book of her illustrations which would also serve to outline the essence of her magical thinking. The result of this collaboration was the 1952 release, The Art of Rosaleen Norton, a collection of turgid, magically explicative poetry by Gavin Greenlees, profusely illustrated by Norton. During production of the book, Greenlees had a mental breakdown and was hospitalised, being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Norton finished off most of the poems, editing them for production.

“The Adversary”

Inevitably, the book was met with opprobrium. Claims of obscenity were soon levelled at it, its creator and publisher, and it was removed from sale. Hoping to recoup some of his outlay for the project, Glover sent a large number of copies to the US, at that time seemingly less willing to proscribe published material as forcibly as Australia; however, the book was deemed pornographic and the shipment was burned. Thereafter, a court case ruled that the work could be sold directly by the publisher, as long as the two plates which caused most offense – entitled “The Adversary” and “Fohat”, respectively - were effaced by means of a black ink roller at the point of sale. Glover was, apparently, less than punctilious about performing this duty, if the customer was someone known to him and trusted by him not to ‘talk out of school’; but still, many extant copies of the book have ugly black squares obscuring the artwork.

“Fohat”

In terms of numbers, only 1,000 copies of the book were printed (and there is a question over whether even this many were actually produced). Of these, there was a limited, red-leather-bound run of around 350 copies and 650 red cloth-bound copies, most of which were burnt in America. As can be seen, finding copies in any sort of condition – with dustwrapper or without – is very difficult, and consequently prices are high.

The fate of those who embark upon a life of esoteric investigation and the consequent notoriety which it brings is not pretty. Most magical practitioners tend to fade away into poverty and disgrace, finally dying alone and penniless in abject squalor. This happened to Crowley and it happened likewise to Rosaleen Norton. She lived out her life squatting in a condemned building in King’s Cross, and living off her notoriety and the ‘spells’ she would cast for those willing to pay for the service. In 1964 she was attacked by Greenlees who had been released prematurely from care and who went straight back to institutionalisation before being released permanently in 1983, four years after Norton’s death. Norton herself died of colon cancer in 1979. Since then several books and theatre pieces have been made about her life, along with re-releases of her most notorious work.

Norton’s work has been compared favourably with the art of Austin Osman Spare and Norman Lindsay, and there is much to recommend her style. Her draughtsmanship is precise and her compositions are tight with a strong erotic overtone, lending a certain frisson to their otherwise heavily-symbolic formalism. There is little in them that would cause outrage these days and an uncensored re-issue of the book in the 1980s hardly caused a murmur.

There is another reason that I’m bringing this work to the attention of readers: it’s the dedication page of this book. To be clear, I’ve known that this book exists for quite awhile now, but I’ve never actually seen, or held a copy before now. Greenlees’ poetry is pretty deathless and stultifying, it has to be said, but the real reason for diving in between these covers is the artwork, which is the fundamental raison d’être of this book. Imagine my surprise then, when I read the inscription on the dedications page:

Obviously (possibly), Norton was a Robert W. Chambers fan at some point in her life, or else this is some other “King in Yellow”. Regardless, I’ve discovered I have an affinity with the crazy lady with the “Impossible Man” eyebrows and the enamelled lips!

Incidentally, if anyone out there is ready and willing to pony up the AUD$1,200 to buy our copy of this book, leave a comment below!

Rip It & Run! Another Comics Offering...

As we’ve seen throughout this series, inspiration for horror roleplaying can come from myriad different sources. It can derive from movies of the same, or different, genre; from books; from art exhibitions – even from old knitting patterns. Wherever you look, there are stories which can be woven together out of the flimsiest scraps of information. Awhile back, I examined an old 70s horror comic and demonstrated how it could be turned from a one-page diversion, into material for a “Call of Cthulhu” gaming session; today, I want to look at a longer piece, one which I used to create a long “CoC” campaign, and which I think – personally – is one of the best Cthulhoid horror tales around.

This tale is entitled “Donald Duck in Ancient Persia”.

I’m not kidding. This is a rip-roaring story – in its essentials – which, itself, borrows from a whole series of pulp-horror tropes and genres from “The Jewel of Seven Stars” to “Lost Horizon” and, since it borrows so strongly from the roots of Lovecraft’s storytelling nexus, it should not be surprising to learn that it can be pillaged for a perfect “Call of Cthulhu” campaign. I’ve done it; I see no reason why anyone else can’t do it also.

The first thing to do, of course, is to eliminate the Disney magic. This story involves Donald Duck and his three nephews – Huey, Dewey and Louie – and is otherwise populated by the vaguely-animal second-string characters to which Disney comics were heirs (I assume that everyone else in a Donald Duck comic is supposed to be some kind of humanoid dog, much like Goofy, which explains the weird noses that we’ll see later on). The story has ducks as the main protagonists and deals out some wincingly-bad puns, some of the worst that you’ll see this side of an Asterix comic; it also bears the hallmarks of the writer and artist having done a fair bit of research on the historical material touched upon, and we’ll go into some detail about how to correct or rectify these - where they’re intolerable – and where to beef things up where they aren’t.

Let’s dive right in. The first thing to do while we’re reading here, is to concentrate on the narrative – forget about the Ducks and the jokes and most of the dialogue. Watch where the story goes and how it gets there.

The first page is all about the set-up. The kids (Huey, Dewey and Louie) draw Donald’s attention to the fact that there’s a strange character in town with whom they have some passing familiarity (if only because he passes by their front gate every day on the way to and from town). Keeping in mind that Donald and the boys are our team of Investigators, then the “Mad Scientist” is quickly established as our antagonist.

Obviously, in the course of play, the establishment of this character needn’t be accomplished through a single encounter as it is here; the party members of your campaign could run into the Scientist at the post-office collecting his parcels (“Chemicals – Do Not Drop!”), or they could encounter other NPCs of the locale who could mutter dire observations about the shady character or his place of chosen abode. As is usual in “CoC” adventures, these hooks can be peppered through the course of another story involving the group, setting up the next arc of their adventures.

Having piqued our party’s interest in the Scientist character, the next step is to go and check him out. Huey, Dewey and Louie do this as a direct result of disobeying Donald’s injunction not to poke their beaks into other people’s business but then, that’s their gestalt-character foible – to disobey authority. How you as Keeper get your players to do this will depend upon their characters and how they choose to behave in the face of the mystery.

Here we have some basic investigating skills on display. The kids have already revealed that they’ve heard where the “Mad Scientist” lives and so they hurry there to confirm the information (hurrying, of course, because they need to get back home for supper). Once arrived, they make an important Spot Hidden Skill check to note that the window to the basement is the only one that has been cleaned and therefore is the one worth investigating. They peer in through the glass and see their quarry at work.

This is a point where the world of children’s comics should give way to the adult sensibilities of horror roleplaying. We learn later that the Scientist was resurrecting a dead beetle at this point but, for all intents and purposes, he could well be doing his laundry as far as there is anything sinister about his actions. In converting this tale to a “CoC” narrative, he should be doing something unsettling, certainly something that would force him to take the boys prisoner, in order for the details of his activities to not get out. The simple removal of the “beetle” for an Egyptian mummy, for example, would probably make this work better.

In the next sequence, we have a cheap scare and then a definite shock: the branches of the bush supporting the boys as they peek through the window break, dumping them into the long grass. As they try to climb back into position, the Scientist grabs them and drags them inside, taking them prisoner – aghast! In altering this action for human Investigators, the method of imprisonment should be something more effective in trapping average humans than just glomming them through an open window.

Of course, the kids are prevented from showing-up for supper. Donald is annoyed but, knowing the kids and their tendency to disobey, he knows pretty well where they’ve gone. This can be read as a handy means of consolidating party members in a “CoC” version – make sure that enough of the party members know that their comrades were last seen heading to the spooky house on the edge of town, so that they’ll all head in that direction to seek their missing friends!

Here, the Scientist lifts his game and plays for more dangerous stakes: at this point we discover that he’s not just some book-bashing egghead, but that he’s an Intrepid Adventurer as well (hinted at previously by the revolver hanging on the wall in earlier panels). Donald is a far more hardened opponent than the boys, so his abduction requires special treatment – dissembling and Persuasion followed by a lariat and a blackjack. Now that the entire party is held prisoner by the Scientist, we can draw a veil over the scene and jump forward in time.

Our party awakens in the aeroplane, flying high above the Mediterranean, which one of the boys identifies by making a Geography Roll. Trapped within the cargo hold, the party can do nothing but wait for the eventual destination.

(As a side issue, it’s interesting that the word “airplane” in the original version of this tale has been edited out in this Australian re-print in favour of the English term “aeroplane”. It’s these small details in licensing and re-printing ephemera which really melt my margarine!)

Our journey continues and the party consolidates its information about what has happened. While they do so, it becomes clear that the Scientist is listening in on them and taking stock of their attitude. Any regular party of investigators might well think of escape – it behoves the Keeper to circumvent this, otherwise there will be no story. The characters might well be chained in the cargo hold to prevent them poking through the supplies, or damaging the aircraft; more evilly, they might be chained in pairs (by mean of handcuffs, for example) but in sub-groups that cancel out their effectiveness (an Athletic character, for instance, tied to one with a very low DEX).

The pictures show the equipment tumbled in to the ‘plane in a very haphazard fashion. Ignoring this, as Keeper you could choose to have everything tidily bolted down. When the party starts to act up, have the Scientist threaten to open the doors of the hold – he doesn’t need all the party members after all. In this way you can channel the aeroplane scene from last year’s “The Mummy” and have the party face explosive decompression if they don’t behave (depending on the make of aircraft, of course).

We arrive in a barren waste. The ‘plane lands and the Scientist and his prisoners disembark. Here’s where your creation of the Scientist character has to prove its worth – he’s the one with the gun (as we are shown) but he needs to back up his dominance of the party with more than just a shooter. This guy is a cowboy Archaeologist, like those real-life diggers who travelled out to Western China during that county’s Republican era – they dealt with bandits, corrupt officials and army types, as well as urban thieves and criminals; they know how to get their own way. Underscore to the players that there’s nothing within three day’s march of their current locale, so trying to escape into the desert is a pointless proposition

Now the dig begins. After some abstruse calculating, the party is set to work shovelling sand. Of course, such activity needs to be supported by necessary infrastructure, so those not especially suited to such hard yakka can get busy setting up tents both for sleeping and eating, and rationing the food and medical supplies. Make a point of telling the party that there’s no water source nearby – all that they have is what they’ve brought with them.

Eventually, we hit paydirt – the entrance to a buried palace is discovered!

At this point we see that the Scientist is one of those shonky archaeologists of the Victorian mould who barge in without taking detailed sketches or readings. This is either a hallmark of his craziness (he does have a few kangaroos loose in his top paddock) or it’s just a means of getting on with things. It can go either way.

At this point, as a Keeper, you’re going to need to pin down the extent of this palace, creating a map and general layout to organise your players. While these images are quite evocative (and based, obviously, on some research by the writer/artist) there are some discrepancies – those torches and the carpets would certainly not be there after all this time.

Some things you’re going to have to provide. Without the torches, you’re going to have to give the party a means of lighting up the place – generators and electric lamps are a good alternative. The other thing that’s needed is a subterranean water source – a buried spring at the bottom level of the palace in an adjacent cave system would be champion. As we’ll soon see, we’re going to need a lot of water, certainly more than what’s available on the ‘plane!

And if we weren’t already worried about the Scientist’s sanity, he starts talking crazy once more!

Moments when the party members can confer about what’s happening to them are good for both character development and for planning and evaluation. Here we see Donald going over the events so far and coming to some conclusions. As well, we have an insight into how the character of the Scientist can be effectively portrayed – he has to seem capable and intelligent, but occasionally he says things that make others around him question his state of mental health.

The bathtub is important for the coming action. There’s a fountain of some kind in the background of this scene, but really? If there was such a decent plumbing network in the palace, it’s unlikely that it would have been forgotten in the middle of this desert landscape – water is life, after all. That’s why I’d propose a subterranean water source instead, far below the main palace rooms where it’s likely to have been overlooked across the millennia.

And here’s where the water should ideally be – down alongside the catacombs. The Scientist takes Donald down here to reveal what he’s really up to – resurrecting the ancient occupants of the palace. He tells Donald about the ancient drying process which converts people to piles of dust and shows him the vessels that contain these mortal remains. Selecting one of these – “a king and his whole retinue” – he returns to the now-filled bathtub and starts the revivification process. Of course, anyone who’s read HPL’s story about Joseph Curwen and his experiments with “essential saltes” knows exactly what kind of territory we’re heading into…

Here we see the Scientist at work. Obviously, through a Mythos lens, the “formulae” which he’s applying here are not so much chemical processes as they are Mythos Magic, so Sanity points are going to fall by the wayside. The spell is quite simply the bog-standard Resurrection one from the rule-book – no need to go and invent anything new for this purpose.

I really like the fact that Donald and the boys are suddenly able to read the cuneiform writing on the walls and understand the language of the revived people due to “inhaling thought processes”. It’s a cute touch that facilitates much of the action from this point on, without seeming too outrageous. It’s also kind of creepy – the revival process is thus lent a kind of contagious effect that might have ramifications down the line…

Suddenly the dead people rise from the water. Here in the comic, it’s played for fun; but in a Lovecraftian version, this scene can be as creepy as you want (certainly worth losing a few SAN points over). We learn quite quickly that the king and his retinue went to oblivion rather than face public disgrace after a “rascally” prince jilted his daughter on their wedding day – it seems a bit extreme, but there must be layers and layers of political ramification over things like this.

There are things to explore here and the first is the all the names that we’ve encountered so far. First, the ancient kingdom is called “Itsa Faka” – obviously, you‘ll want to change this to something else that’s more appropriate. Then there’s the king’s name – “Nevvawaza” – which is trying to work a pun off a famous name like Nebuchadnezzar – it should probably go too, along with the daughter’s name – “Needa Bara Soapa” – and the nefarious prince “Cad ali Cad”.

In fact, the daughter should have a complete makeover. Here in the original story, the humour is jump-started by her being physically dumpy and unattractive. There’s no real reason why this needs to be the case and we can surely remove this kind of cheap-shot at laffs. There’s no reason that she can’t be a repository for a whole range of Mythos magicks – a witch, or sorceress, if you will – lending weight to the controversy of her being dumped at the altar (people who have power aren’t lightly contracted into marriage, or jilted afterwards).

Here’s where the Scientist oversteps his mark. He’s been in control all this time, but now he’s not in the poll position. A king outranks an academic in any culture, living or dead, and the Scientist is quickly shown the state of play. The gun at his hip is suddenly much less effective when the rest of the king’s retinue materialises, fully armed and armoured.

Then the bombshell hits: one of the characters in the party is the spitting image of the jilted daughter’s feckless betrothed! This is an old trope but perfect in this context. Suddenly, one character is going to get hitched to an ancient creature – possibly possessed of sanity-blasting ancient magicks – and dwell beneath the sands forever! Suddenly, things are a lot more desperate for our team!

It should be heavily underscored during these events that the actual betrothed of the princess went to the “driers” rather than face the prospect of the wedding; this should prompt the rest of the party to go looking for his receptacle down in the catacombs. If they don’t think of it, then the Scientist certainly will.

With the guards, feel free to add to their number, more or less, as the strength and wiliness of the party dictate. You can also make them more hideous by having some of them only partially re-formed, some of their dust having gone astray during the process!

At this point, our story is set up to run to its conclusion. The king and his retinue begin to organise the wedding to correct the ancient wrong done to them; the Scientist goes off to wander the palace, trying to find the means of drying people into dust; while the boys run to the catacombs to try and find the dried prince and return him to life…

*****

Obviously, as a roleplaying exercise, things can’t be expected to run along rails to a satisfying narrative conclusion, as outlined in this piece. Things will be tried by the players; efforts will succeed, or fail, as the dice dictate; and things might go astray. As Keeper you’ll need to adjudicate wisely as things happen. What happens if the evil princeling makes it out to the modern world, for example?

In the original version of the story, as you’d expect, the prince is resurrected and cunningly switches places with Donald in order to escape the impending nuptials; the boys help him escape out into the open world only to realise – too late! – that they’ve made off with the wrong groom; the wedding proceeds back at the palace, only to be interrupted by the Scientist who finds the canister of "radium vapour" that converts people to dust and who proceeds to use it to his – and everybody else’s - cost. Donald survives by hiding in the bathtub of resurrecting water while his copy, freaked out by the modern world around him, flees back to the palace only to fall into dust as he enters. After the air clears, the ducks are re-united and must now try to find a way back home…

As a Lovecraftian re-think, this is a classic tale that definitely re-pays the effort involved in re-tooling it for gaming purposes. It has resonances with a bunch of weird fiction from “She” to “The Mummy: Ramses the Damned”, and, if you like, you can transplant it to any other ancient civilization you prefer, if that suits your ongoing campaign better. There’s very little here not to like. If you’re at a loose end with your players, why not give it a shot…?

The Inevitable Betrayal...

Just when you thought it was safe to start roleplaying again…

In the last handful of years, Chaosium have changed their base of operations, altered their marketing and production strategies (pulling themselves out of a huge fiscal black hole), ejected the dead wood, garnered new staff and re-imagined their core product. They’ve gone from strength-to-strength and kudos for that. A world without Chaosium would have been all the poorer for their absence.

Which begs the question as to why – WHY? – in the name of all that’s unholy, would they bother to re-release that abysmal waste of space and time, “Masks of Nyarlathotep”?

In the last week, announcements have been made and excitement generated; but I ask myself, what for? Another iteration of this bloated, incomprehensible time-waster is the very last thing that the hobby needs. So what if there’s a new rule system doing the rounds? If anything, that should have been a spur for the Chaos wranglers to get some of their new thinkers in a room and hammer out something of equal impact, but actually good, for the punters. Instead it’s this – the same-old, same old, cynically tarted-up for a new generation.

Advance material and reviews have all said exactly the same thing that they always say – pretty pictures; not enough source material; too much incidental material – and this all goes to prove that nothing about the offering has been changed in any significant way. Go ahead: find a current review and compare it to a review from the last iteration: Nothing. Has. Changed. The other thing that obviously hasn’t changed is the fact that most gaming critics will say anything you want in return for a bunch of slick, advance product...

The folk at Chaosium are simply crunching numbers. Every time they re-launch this dreck, there is a spike in sales, because – let’s face it – we roleplayers are all about the shiny. We generally have a bunch of disposable income and we may as well buy the “new” as not, just to fulfil our desire to be completists and to own everything in the range. Chaosium have learned that, if you slap a new set of artwork on it, you can sell just about anything to geeks.

The scuttlebutt roll-out in tandem with the launch has it that Chaosium are in line for a bunch of industry awards: that’s fine; let it be. You’ll notice that “Masks” is not in the running for any of them, but that doesn’t stop Chaosium shoving it in our faces. Chaosium have reached a level of capability where they can energise the fans and inspire a response – they aren’t as remote and impersonal as Wizards of the Coast (whom pretty much everyone regards as a bunch of corporate shills dressed up in “Lord of the Rings” hand-me-downs) because they’ve hit a sweet spot between being the cool kids and just another bunch of accountants. This re-launch will see that line being quite sorely tested.

Already the new material is being questioned at online forums – where are the pronunciation guides? Why are some sections filled with background material that’s not necessary, while in others - where such information would be welcome - it’s obviously lacking? These are complaints that have been around the block many times in the past and which have obviously not been addressed. It’s as if feedback and commentary from the punters is being deliberately ignored (and that’s not surprising since what Chaosium patently wants is something that can be re-painted every five years or so and trotted out as something “new” without having to do too much work on it).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (probably each time this monster gets pushed back out into the world in a new frock): “Masks” is a monumental cluster-fuck. It’s the brainchild of Larry DiTillio, for a series of linked adventures along the lines of (the arguably better) “Shadows of Yog-Sothoth”, hopelessly muddled and obscured by the heavy-handed, so-called “editorial” input of Lynn Willis. It absolutely bewilders me that this mess ever saw the light of day, and that it continues to do so, whereas other material goes begging, or falls by the wayside – “Unseen Masters”, say, or even “Horror on the Orient Express” (which has its own issues, but still). I can only assume that Willis and DiTillio know where the bodies are buried…

So here’s a challenge. Put your wallet back in your purse (or pocket, or wherever). Take out your old copy of “Masks” and read through it again with a cup of coffee and your critical faculties working. If you feel at the end of it all that you desperately need a new copy of the same information, updated to the 7^th Edition rule system, then grab your credit card and do this:

Buy a copy of “Harlem Unbound” instead. Give credit where it’s due and reward smart, savvy roleplaying efforts; not lazy, inconsequential, catch-penny rubbish.

Broom! Broom!

In establishing a “Call of Cthulhu” setting, you and your players will inevitably fall back upon the elements of history and society in order to re-create the world in which your story takes place. Of these, history is probably the easiest to form a consensus over and to take as read. Social aspects of a past milieu are sometimes trickier to ascertain; however, the world of advertising can provide valuable insights.

There are two main accoutrements which players will acquire for their Investigators in order to provide both capability and period flavour – these are cars and guns. Weaponry of pretty much any kind is fairly useless against anything that most “CoC” narratives will throw at a character, but cars lend something which is of an actual benefit – getaway power. A car has the twin advantages of grounding a character within the time of the story and also of ensuring that they can get their buns out of the fire when it all comes down.

The other day at the shop where I work, a punter came in to try and sell me some books. There was one on early Twentieth Century cars which looked promising; however, when I took a closer look at it, I discovered that a bunch of pages had become detached and that these had then been torn in half (for some inexplicable reason). Obviously, we could do nothing with the book in that condition, and so we refused to buy it. The punter got angry and yelled a bit and then stormed off, taking his books with him – except for the damaged, detached pages. By the time we noticed, he was long gone. We kept the pages around for awhile but the fellow never came back to claim them. Inevitably, they went out with the trash.

Before binning them, however, I decided to take a closer look. The pages contained a number of black-and-white adverts, culled from magazines dating from the 1910s to the 1930s. Each focuses upon a different make and the many models of associated cars and trucks, with accompanying details about prices, ordering and performance. I felt there was enough simple information of value to a “CoC” gaming crowd that I thought I would delay the recycling and present it here. And so, here are a bunch of ads for period cars: use them in creating documents for your games, or winnow the details from them, if your Investigators are looking for a new set of wheels.

*****

The Studebaker “40”

Apparently this car was made by a different company called Garford, for whom Studebaker were organising the marketing and promotion. This unannounced re-naming of the vehicle heralded the soon-following takeover of Garford by its marketing arm in 1911.

The Nyberg Six

This refers to Nyberg’s range of six-cylinder engine cars. These ranged from two-passenger roadsters to seven-passenger saloons, depending on preference. Nybergs were very popular vehicles in 1912 – from which year this range derives – mainly due to their low-pricing policy.

Cadillac, 1913

These were the days when advertising copy could make any outrageous claim and not have to provide proof. In this way, Cadillac could blatantly claim its cars to be “the Standard of the World” as much as they could claim 100% sales on all its stock before the mid-point of the (northern) fiscal year. The prices would speak somewhat against this optimism, however.

Maxwell, 1915

In stark counterpoint to the lavish ideals of the Caddie world, Maxwell dials it down a notch and focuses upon what it perceives the main goal of the would-be-driver to be – economy. Not only is the car cheaper than the Caddie models, but – according to the copy - the upkeep is cheaper as well.

REO Dealers, 1917

Did anyone else out there wonder where 80s supergroup REO Speedwagon got their name from? I guess now we know.

This advert takes us right into the marketing and distribution heart of the REO Dealers: retailer sold-out where you live? They can ship from a nearby dealership. REOs are known across the country: there are no “bare spots” of demand in any of the ‘States. REO won’t let you down; they will keep on lovin’ you…

The Hudson Runabout Landau

This 1918 model is a six-cylinder engine pushing a trim two-seater chassis – that’s almost too much getaway power! Further, the copy claims that no adverse changes in technology will affect the buyer – the car is well-nigh perfect and will remain so from hence forth, even in the face of World War One shortages! And in a range of colours to suit your individuality!

The Dodge Six

Dodge Brothers created a “smooth, vigorous” vehicle with a “squeakproof, rattleproof” Mono-Piece Steel body for less than $900. Unfortunately, they did so in 1930, at the height of the Great Depression, which must have knocked the shine off it a little. Rest assured, however, a Dodge can get you and your family in close-range of cult communities across the country, if this ad is anything to go by!

Review: Children of Lovecraft

DATLOW, Ellen (ed.), Children of Lovecraft, Dark Horse Books/Dark Horse Comics Inc., Milwaukie OR, 2016.

Octavo; paperback; 367pp. Mild wear; some mild edgewear and creasing to the covers; some scraping to the hinges. Very good.

I’ve been sitting on this for awhile. Recent Lovecraftian compilations which I’ve encountered have, frankly, left a bad taste, and I was wary about diving in to this offering. Other books have either been dubiously curated, or have wandered into areas more splatterpunk (and, necessarily, indulgent) thereby losing the point of what it actually means to be an offering along the lines of Lovecraft’s work. This collection, however, directly addresses this issue and sets the entire notion of Cthulhoid horror back on track. (And it has a cover by Mike Mignola – how can it be wrong?)

The directive to the various writers assembled here is to create fiction with a clear, but understated, connexion to Lovecraft’s work. This means that all of the tales between these covers explore ideas and tropes well-known from HPL’s canon, but in such a way that they are not bleedingly obvious: this is not fan-fiction, or pastiche explorations along the line to ‘What Happened Next?’ Each story here is a strong and resonant piece in its own right, gaining strength from its source material without ever leaning too hard upon it. In this way, they explore the concepts of Lovecraft’s Yog-sothothery without going over the same old territory.

The major benefit to be gained from such a project is to see Lovecraft’s ideas focussed through different lenses, those through which he himself would probably have been unable to project them. Lovecraft’s witch-y villains gain greater depth when written free of a sexist worldview, for example, and writers with better insights into science and history can take the material to more interesting and nuanced places; the simple fact of these stories having not been penned (or, in most cases, set) amid the restrictive and conservative sensibilities of the early years of last century, means that extra layers of depth, meaning and ramification can pervade.

*****

The first story – “Nesters” by Siobhan Carroll – conflates the 1930s Dust Bowl horror of the American Depression with “The Colour Out of Space”. Lovecraft’s take on the blighting of the land, while undoubtedly creepy and disturbing, falls sharply into the background when the subtleties of a real-world equivalent catastrophe are superimposed. By bringing in these touchstone elements, Carroll grounds the tale in a horrifying reality that reeks of truth. As expected, there is a blighted landscape with a secluded farm at the heart of things; Government investigators convince our narrator’s father to take them to this heart of darkness and she follows out of concern, only to encounter the horror that eventuates…

“Little Ease” by Gemma Files, takes chunks of HPL’s New York material – “The Horror at Red Hook”; “Cool Air” – and wraps it up in a “Shadow over Innsmouth” story by way of “Dreams in the Witch House”. This is not to say – let me be clear –that it is anything less than its own beast; however, it takes the concepts, moods and locales of those other tales and makes new, whole cloth out them. We follow a hard-bitten pest exterminator as she trudges through a septic urban scenery, a landscape of crumbling brickwork filled-to-bursting with way too many strange and desperate people, along with the vermin which the slum conditions attract. At the behest of urban developers, keen to have the area evacuated for gentrification, our exterminator agrees to help out for a cash reward. In examining the levels of infestation, she encounters crazily-dogmatic visionaries who talk in high-magical terms about creating angels and then discovers a nest of human-insect hybrids quietly gestating, from which she flees only to discover that she, herself, is one of them too.

Stephen Graham Jones’s “Eternal Troutland” is a bravura performance, a slow-burn walk through the mind of Chuck, an obsessive-compulsive trying to re-assess his life at a holiday cabin near a trout-fishing reserve. His strange hallucinations and magical-thinking get thoroughly combed through in an attempt to discover whether or not hungry cosmic beings outside of the timeline (Hounds of Tindalos, anyone?) are trying to hunt him down for food. The pay-off is just too good to spoil so all I’ll say is – find it and read it!

Next is John Langan’s “The Supplement”, a riff off the notions of bibliophily that run amok in the work of Lovecraft and his disciples. This story concerns a librarian who, through a chance encounter with a sinister Scot, comes into possession of a blank book which allows the reader to experience the road not taken in their life. In this case, the librarian gets to experience an existence wherein her daughter doesn’t die of a heroin overdose and one in which her husband doesn’t blame her for the girl’s death and then divorce her. This is an interesting thought-experiment along “what if-?” lines and the horror comes from the cost the reader has to pay to keep on reading; but is it Lovecraftian? I’m not sure…

“Mortensen’s Muse” by Orrin Grey dumps the Mythos squarely into Hollywood. This is the story – told by an ageing former Hollywood B-grade movie star – of her life with an avant-garde photographer (Mortensen) who took her from her Salt Lake City home and introduced her to the bright lights, enabling her to become an early form of scream queen for her portrayal in a horror flick entitled “A Mountain Walks” (get it?). Her photographer friend becomes obsessed with some rather abstruse theories of technical camera work, involving the summoning of otherworldly entities through the manipulation of their potentiality during photo-shoot construction (or something like that). It all goes pear-shaped – obviously – and chaos ensues. There is an engaging Hollywood Babylon feel to this piece, riffing off the Mansfield-LaVey tawdriness of 50s tinsel-town and also HPL’s “From Beyond”. Anyone who has ever played the “Devil’s Canyon” adventure from Chaosium’s “Shadows of Yog-Sothoth” will feel right at home here.

“Oblivion Mode” by Laird Barron stalks the unsettling landscapes of HPL’s fantasy works, bringing a more modern sensibility – a la Gene Wolf, or Michael Moorcock, say – to the writing. There is a little bit of everything here – vampires, vengeful robots, talking animals – but it’s the writing style that drives it forward. Rather like Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel Winter’s Tale, occasionally you need an anachronism to leap out of the woodwork to prove a point – as in that book where a screaming, katana-wielding samurai appears without rationale to prove the battle-effectiveness of our hero (it’s called magical realism). Here the anachronisms are thick on the ground but it’s the lush writing and the focussed narrative which keeps it all on track. Apart from some rather oblique Dreamlands references, it’s the vampires – which are all offshoots of a main, extra-worldly sentience - that really speak of cosmic horror. Oh, and the ending is completely evil…

“Mr Doornail” by Maria Dahvana Headley continues the dream-like focus, bringing us a story which is part fairytale, party creepy-pasta product. This is the tale of a witch and her five daughters who live in a house with their ancient grandmother and the monster that she took from the ocean, the tentacular Mr. Doornail. Mr.Doornail survives on the hearts of the witch’s husbands, which she steals with her spells. Unfortunately, her last husband refused to die after this treatment and made a nuisance of himself in the local town, befriended by a herd of goats who seek to avenge him after his eventual demise. The delayed funeral of the witch’s goat-allied husband is the setting for this story, which rolls along like a homespun almanac to its gloriously Gormenghast-ly conclusion.

Richard Kadrey’s “The Secret of Insects” was a weak point in the onslaught for me, which was mildly disappointing. Having been a fan of his Metrophage from way back, I had high hopes, but this was pretty standard fare – good execution but nothing particularly groundbreaking. Two police-officers take a captured serial killer into custody and transport him from his cell to another facility; en route, he talks to them both with the result that they pull over to the kerb and allow him to leave while they kill each other quite unpleasantly. The notion of the villain calmly talking his way to freedom is a solid narrative trope (cf. “The Portage to San Christobal of A.H.” for example), but not – I think – of Lovecraftian fiction.

I also had great hopes for Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Excerpts for An Eschatology Quadrille” and I wasn’t disappointed. This story plays on the multi-part format of “The Call of Cthulhu”, telling the fractured narrative of a jade idol and its passage through the hands of many different owners and investigators. The Lovecraft story unfolds a line of inquiry established by its narrator, following clues from place to place until a horrible reality is eventually, undeniably, displayed. Here, Kiernan follows the hideous artefact itself as it passes through divers hands to the moment its destined power is revealed. We see the unfortunate and paranoid Maxie in Los Angeles 1969, refusing to look after the idol for Charlie “Six Pack”, while a meet-and-greet with a potential buyer can be set-up; then, in Atlanta 2007, a police officer takes it from the hands of a woman who’s been sewn inside a fifteen-foot Great White Shark hanging from a ceiling on the third storey of an abandoned warehouse; In 1956 just west of Denver after leaving Providence in Rhode Island, an academic writes to her colleague concerning a strange incident in a mutual (and distrusted) colleague’s domicile in that benighted town, where she was brought to examine the idol and during which meeting she is sure that a young man was horribly murdered in the room next door; finally, in a post-Apocalyptic 2151, two hard-scrabble beach-combers encounter the idol and ponder its value on the open market before the being that it is destined to summon starts to emerge offshore…

“Jules and Richard” by David Nickle devours HPL’s “Pickman’s Model” and regurgitates it out as a thing transformed. Jules, a Canadian graphic designer working in the New England area of the United States, has an accident while riding his pushbike to work and is taken in by an enigmatic woman living in a grand house nearby. Eschewing medical attention, he is captivated by the outré art which adorns the house’s walls and is soon embroiled in a sexual escapade with his saviour. Afterwards, while trying to make a discreet exit, he encounters the enigmatic Richard in the kitchen, who dissuades him from leaving. Richard, it turns out is the artist who produced all of the building’s canvases and is not, Jules is somewhat relieved to discover, the husband of the woman with whom he has just had marathon sex. The after-effects of his encounter mess with Jules’s head: he can hear kittens (meeping) everywhere; he can’t really see what Richard looks like; and he certainly can’t see what he’s been eating. Richard then takes Jules on a subterranean journey and the veils of what’s happening – in all of its ghoulish glory – begin to fall away…

Brian Evenson’s “Glasses” is a short piece which plays inventively with the ideas to be found in “From Beyond”. A woman of a certain age goes astray en route to a public protest and ends up in a sleepy satellite village outlying her usual urban environment. At the local drugstore she sees that the establishment sells spectacles, so she decides to purchase a pair in order to remove the possibility of her misreading the subway signs again. She asks for “bifocals”; the drugstore owner confirms that “biofocals” are what she wants. Thinking that his mispronunciation is a Hicksville signifier and of no consequence, she says “yes” and comes away with a pair of glasses that not only allow her to see terrifying extra-dimensional entities, but which allow them to see her. Some satisfying mayhem ensues…

“When the Stitches Come Undone” takes the basic – very basic – premises of HPL’s collaborative effort “The Mound” and his “The Picture in the House” and moves them into a new place by way of Stephen King. Our protagonist returns to the village where he grew up after enduring a dead-end job and a doomed marriage elsewhere. His unease at returning centres around an old Indian mound and a shack in the woods where as children, he and his cousins encountered a strange old woman – a meeting that resulted in his young cousin, Eric, being erased from existence, leaving our hero the only person to know that he ever existed at all. With flooded quarry pits and “double-dog-daring” childhood companions, this feels a bit like “It” and something like “Stand By Me”, but it turns into a quite unnerving tale of generational cosmic horror.

Eventually, we’d have to get something that felt like “At the Mountains of Madness”. “On these Blackened Shores of Time” by Brian Hodge follows that masterwork in tone if not details. “AtMoM” is all about the preparations, the descriptions of the environment, the shattered histories of those gone before, not to mention blind, squamous, subterranean things. Hodge constructs a story of an action-mannish former FBI agent who sees his son disappear in his car down the maw of a suddenly-appearing sinkhole. Investigation fails to find either son or car, but a story of olden-days mining accidents and hasty corporate cover-ups, leads our hero and his wife down dim, abandoned and flooded tunnels to an ancient, cyclopean edifice, locked in a coal seam, that slowly mutates the world around it. When the intrepid couple find their missing son he is definitely not who – or what – they expected to find.

Livia Llewellyn’s “Bright Crown of Joy” is a whole bag of fireworks going off at once. The writing and construction of the piece are both inspired and the narrative – while tricky to fathom – is satisfying and effective. The tale is told by means of a memory implant – like a cybernetic diary – surgically-inserted in the skull of our narrator. The world she lives in is afflicted by rising tides and devastating tsunamis and her North American society is being driven higher and higher up the sides of mountain ranges. We switch back and forth between the content of the diary and the new existence in which she lives – a time known as “After” - which is strange, weirdly organic and definitely pelagean. Our heroine’s new life as the mother of all Earthly sentience is starkly contrasted with vignettes of her greedy, opportunistic life before the change. What was the catalyst which created such a bizarre alteration across the planet’s face? Well let’s just say that it was enormous and came up from out of the bottom of the ocean…

*****

This is what all Lovecraftian collections should be like – solid, powerful writing; hat tips to the source material (but not blatant, or verging on pastiche); and ideas that, for the most part, carry the concepts into strange new territory without descending to splatterpunk levels of self-indulgence. With a couple of exceptions, this collection gives HPL a generational shift and drags him and his work well into the Twenty-first Century (probably kicking and screaming). I can’t recommend it too highly. Thank-you Dark Horse; thank-you Ellen Datlow.

Four Tentacled Horrors.

*****

Chapter Listing:

Introduction by Ellen Datlow

“Nesters” by Siobhan Carroll

“Little Ease” by Gemma Files

“Eternal Troutland” by Stephen Graham Jones

“The Supplement” by John Langan

“Mortensen’s Muse” by Orrin Grey

“Oblivion Mode” by Laird Barron

“Mr. Doornail” by Maria Dahvana Headley

“The Secrets of Insects” by Richard Kadrey

“Excerpts for An Eschatology Quadrille” by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“Jules and Richard” by David Nickle

“Glasses” by Brian Evenson

“When the Stitches Come Undone” by A.C. Wise

“On These Blackened Shores of Time” by Brian Hodge

“Bright Crown of Joy” by Livia Llewellyn