GRANT, John Linwood, &
Dave Brzeski (eds.), “Occult Detective
Quarterly #4, Spring 2018”, Ulthar Press Books & Magazines (through
Amazon US), 2018.
Quarto;
paperback; 108pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Near fine.
I
have to admit that I’d forgotten that I’d ordered this: what with one thing and
another (the approach of Christmas etc.), it took quite a while to reach my
front doorstep. Nevertheless, its arrival was greatly appreciated. There is
much to enjoy between the covers of every issue of this magazine.
Things
take awhile to develop. With something like this kind of publication, it
usually takes a few issues to pin everything down and to start to perceive a
sort of regular routine that can be followed in the production of each issue –
call it ‘muscle memory’ if you will, but in my experience it’s a steep learning
curve that only gets easier with each iteration. Gathering material, editing, commissioning
artwork, proofing and pre-production are time-consuming aspects of this type of
activity and, while never easy, get moreso with each turn around the block. This
is issue number four in the life of this journal and the experience gained with
the previous releases has obviously been taken on board to good effect. Even a
shift from the original publishing entity seems not to have overly affected the
production values and the result is a slick and pleasing product. And keep in
mind that all of this effort is performed by people who have lives and careers
to juggle as well!
Venues
for amateur writing have changed dramatically since the days of the first
Lovecraft Circle. These days, everyone has a computer and a word-processing
program; everyone who ever thought that they had a book inside them waiting to
be hammered down, can now spend the time to get it out there. Finding a place
to get it published however, is the tricky part: traditional publishers are now
awash with submissions and most of them get brought in by the post and taken
straight out by the trash. These days, unless you have an agent and a solid
publication record, getting your work into print is not easy. Fortunately, with
the presence of Internet-based print-on-demand publications such as this,
amateur writers can get points on the board and begin to generate the kind of
fan-based interest that might lead to more substantial published works in the
future. For this reason alone, “The Occult Detective Quarterly” (ODQ) deserves
your attention and your monetary support.
The
ambit of this publication is to publish amateur writing and art focussing on
the activities of investigators confronted by aspects of the supernatural: the
detectives may use supernatural means in the course of their searches, or they
may simply stumble across mystical hurdles in their pursuit of the Truth.
However the mayhem manifests, it adds layers of interest to the standard
offerings of the crime fiction genre. By this issue of the series, several
standard tropes have come to the fore: the US-based investigator who mixes
police procedure with various creole magical systems, such as Vodoun, Santeria,
or Hoodoo; the (generally, London-based) late-Victorian William Hope Hodgson pastiche echoing Carnacki’s efforts as
chronicled by that author; the Raymond Chandler stylistic knock-off; the
monster, or animal, as investigator story; and the New Age practitioner thrust
into a dangerous situation. Within these frameworks there are possibilities to
blend these forms creatively into each other to unearth new and ever more
interesting variants. Along the way there are echoes of various other styles of
writing – genre and literary fiction; weird literature; Lovecraftian tropes – which
get combed-over and explored in many highly interesting ways. This issue covers
much of this territory and delivers some stellar examples of the form. Let’s
unpack:
Putting
aside regular features for the moment, let’s jump straight to the stories.
First cab off the rank is Simon Avery’s “Songs
for Dwindled Gods”, an examination of mental illness and substance abuse
wrapped up in the hallmarks of faery weirdness. Right from the start I was
captivated by this narrative: it involves a recurrent manifestation of The
Little People in rural modern-day England which wipes whole hamlet-sized communities
off the map – they effectively become ‘forgotten’. Our narrator is the damaged
son of a man whose town was obliterated by the arrival of a 60s hippy folk
group - “Box of Trees” - who showed
up, performed a concert and took the townsfolk away with them afterwards. Our
storyteller’s dad was saved by the fact that he and his girlfriend decided to
engage upon a romantic tryst before going to the concert. Thereafter the father
– doomed to foster care for the rest of his pre-adulthood – developed an
obsession for the band and its trail of missing communities. After his father’s
death, our narrator finds his father’s notes on the phenomenon and picks up the
thread with his own damaged girlfriend in tow… Stories about faeries always
tread a knife-edge between believability and sparkly kitsch: not here. The Pale Folk in this story are as ferocious as
they come and our investigators couldn’t be more broken and realistically drawn.
The execution is brilliant and at no point did any of the plot (replete with
time slips and 60s hippy-trippiness) ring false. By the time I finished reading
this I wanted to break out all my Arthur Machen works and turn this into a “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying scenario.
This was an amazing and refreshing start to issue four.
Also
very appealing was Davide Mana’s “Black
Frog and Black Scarab”. This is a story about a group of Roman legionnaires
carrying out police duties in Cairo, under the aegis of the Roman Empire. A young girl summons the vigiles and takes them to her house
where a mummy has risen to seek her aid in obtaining vengeance for the theft of
certain crucial parts of its multi-faceted soul. The Romans overcome their fear
of the undead to seek out the sorcerer who is draining the nearby necropolis of
its spiritual power and – in true, hard-nosed, by-the-books fashion – bring the
situation to a satisfying conclusion. The author hamstrings himself somewhat in
his narrative by insisting upon correct, triple-barrelled, Roman names for his
troopers (including one distractingly-named “Troglodyte”) and by squeezing-in
certain jargonistic terms pertinent to the Legion’s policing activities. This
is fine if you’re writing an academic treatise on the period, or if you’re
writing a longer work where such insertions can be indulged, but here it bogs
the action down significantly as strange words and terms interrupt the flow of
the story. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a stickler for period accuracy; but there
are ways to seed these sorts of things into a fictional narrative without
having to sacrifice the punch of the story.
I’m
not a fan of paranormal romance. Too often it seems to me to be just Mills
& Boon writing for those who are into necrophilia, or bestiality. All of
the pretty-boys on the front covers turn out to be dashingly-undead, or shape-shifters
who transform into hunky wolves, bears, or panthers (where are all the
were-flamingos, I ask myself? Probably Las Vegas…). In “Charms” by Sarah Hans, we are definitely in this territory. This
story feels like an episode of “Charmed”
or, more pertinently, “Grimm”, except
that the New Age, rune-casting heroine of our tale isn’t some fictive legendary
animal in human guise but, rather, something far more sinister. When the son of
one of her regular clients comes to her straight from gaol and demands with
menaces that she convince his mother to bequeath all her wealth to him in her
will, our rune-reader wavers and decides to comply. Later, when a dashing
detective contacts her to ask if the son has been to her store and mentions that
he has just discovered that the ne’er-do-well has taken out a contract on his
mother, our rune-lore agent has a crisis of conscience. My main objection to
these tales is that really interesting moral conundrums get tossed out before
they’re fully examined, and everything plays out for the best – evil-doers get
justice; nascent lovers unite; and even regular rune-reading clients whose
trust has been sorely abused find an unlikely spirit of forgiveness. Like I
said: not my cup of tea, but
nevertheless engaging and amusing.
Josh
Reynolds writes a series of stories featuring the character of Charles St.
Cyprian, Royal Occultist and Defender of the Realm from Mystical Attack, in
tandem with his erstwhile assistant, the gun-happy Cockney girl, Ebe
Gallowglass. I’ve pointed out previously that – for me – these tales seem to be
all flash and no substance, what with their obsession for character wardrobe,
naff faux-Wodehouse dialogue and the
constant name-dropping of gun brands. Nothing says ‘American author writing
about British locales’ more clearly than an over-enthusiasm for period
ballistics. This tale, “The Bascomb Rug”,
is an attempt at a locked-room mystery set on a remote Orkney Isle that flags
all of its secrets before the end of the piece’s title. Seriously – after
reading the title, I knew what was
coming and all of the red herrings and misdirection that followed were rendered
ponderous and annoying as a result. Let it not be said that Mr. Reynolds cannot
write well – there are plenty of atmospherics in this story which he captures
to perfection – but the rest just comes off as too clever by half. I’ve read
Neil Gaiman’s attempts at shaggy-dog stories and they don’t work either: as a
rule, whenever you decide to throw down several thousand words in support of a bad
pun, don’t.
Wandering
into “The Burning Pile” I found
myself wondering how many ventriloquists could there possibly be in the
average-sized American city? A lot, if this story is anything to go by. In this
tale, our hard-bitten police detectives are on the trail of something sinister that
convinces professional ventriloquists to lock themselves away and starve
themselves to death while kidnapping their dolls. The only clue is a
transcribed ancient text in Sanskrit which our investigators decide to have
translated by nearby academics. This is a genuinely creepy story and absolutely
unnerving in its results and implications; however, my credulity was stretched
by the fact that it took twelve – count them – twelve starving vents before the police solved the crime. I was
perfectly willing to buy the supernatural underpinnings of the tale but I
simply baulked at the possibility of the police being so inept.
Another
return contributor, Aaron Vlek, gives us “The
Case of the Black Lodge”. The idea of a cabal of British gentlemen who
gather regularly to listen to the supernatural stories of a respected member of
their clique is a mainstay of this
type of fiction, dating back to the Victorian traditions of Christmas ghost-storytelling
– a la Charles Dickens and M.R. James
– and as featured in the Thomas Carnacki stories of William Hope Hodgson. This
useful trope is the set-up for this tale of inter-cult intrigue and warfare, in
which one London-based mystical sect attacks another and then gets their
magical comeuppance. The tale suffers from being revealed in this state of
several removes and it feels as if we are being told about distant events rather than being shown them. Again, the writer has a certain mastery of her craft –
there’s a nice touch of tension-breaking when a brandy snifter thuds quietly
onto the thick pile carpet of the room wherein the listeners are gathered – but
there is no real sense of urgency from this third-hand narrative.
As
a side note, the illustration which accompanies this piece, while well
executed, has little to do with the story it is supposed to be showcasing.
There is one female character in this story and her overt description reads
nothing like the image of her – if it is supposed
to be her - in the picture. Clearly the artist had no source material to work
from – and it may have been that it was unavailable at the time of the piece’s
execution (been there, done that!) – or they just chose to ignore it. Either
way, while a small quibble – although possibly not for Ms. Vlek - it’s odd.
After
I started reading “The French
Lieutenant’s Gurning” I had to stop and look closer at the details: once I
clocked that the writer was Rhys Hughes, I settled back in with better
understanding. Mr. Hughes is a long-time member of the ergodic literature
crowd, particularly of the Oulipo group based in France, which has included
Italo Calvino and Georges Perec in its roster. These authors play with the
structures of writing, seeking not only to provide a piece of fiction, but to
come up with one that springs from carefully-formulated arbitrary restrictions
and manipulations – Perec wrote a novel in French several hundred pages long,
for example, that deliberately doesn’t use the letter ‘e’ at all. Spring-boarding
off the title of the well-known John Fowles novel, this piece has our
Paris-based detective chasing the ghost of a disembodied face – sliced from the
head of a French officer by means of a super-sharp scimitar - through the city
in an attempt to prevent it occupying such things as clouds and drying bed
linen, from which to leer lecherously at passersby and harass them with its
gurning – a traditional form of face-pulling. It’s an unusual take on the
occult detective form which is wacky and mildly humorous; not everyone’s shot
of bourbon though, I suspect.
“Those Who Live in Shadow” by Paul M. Feeney is a story of the
monster-detective variety. True to its type, our investigator conceals his
monstrous nature behind a human-seeming exterior and only breaks out the beast
when the plot requires. This is a classic film
noir cross-and-double-cross plot which fires on all cylinders although we
never get told just what kind of a
monster our narrator is. Whatever he is, he seems to take lower billing behind
a second-string barman character with no mystical sensibilities whatsoever,
apart from an unholy affinity for guns and gym-piggery. While the story is
serviceable enough, I just wondered who it was about at the end of the day.
“Abduction in Ash” by Dale W. Glaser is a story from a
collection of tales concerning the supernatural detective Kellan Oak, scion of
druidic parents who deplore his desire to walk the urban landscape and truck
with the failings of industrialised humanity. Our hero gets called in on a
missing persons case by the absent girl’s distressed mother – she hires Kellan
after being told by the police that they can’t open a file on the incident
until after 72 hours have passed, something that by now, I’m sure, we’re all
aware is a fallacy, right? Time is crucial in these cases and the 48- or 72-hour
limit has never been anything other than a convenient literary concept to gain
time. Anyway, moving along, it turns out that an Archura, a horned and toothy woodland
spirit of great strength, has abducted the teenager with the intent of
sacrificing her to its deities at a later stage. Kellan sets out to pin down
the perpetrator of the crime driving between an abandoned housing estate and
his mother’s herbarium before finally identifying the miscreant and working out
what to do with it. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on here – how did he get a
dryad to work as his receptionist, for example? – and these glimpses into a wider
magical world serve to help the tale become grounded in its own reality.
There’s
a large slice of Lovecraft – or, more correctly, Robert W. Chambers – in Aaron
Besson’s “Yellow Light District”. The
set-up is pure Chandler: femme fatale
mother employs hard-bitten P.I. to find her wayward daughter where others –
including the police – have failed. Our detective, is jubilant to get the cash,
and mutters pointedly about the need to pay his rent in the manner of all such
detectives. He hits the streets of the seedier side of Seattle and turns up –
bupkis. A whingeing conversation with a shot-glass polishing barkeep reveals that
the daughter is now a torch-singer at a nightspot that you can only find if
someone tells you about it. Having thus been told about it, our detective finds
the bar and has his worldview massively interfered-with. This is
meat-and-potatoes gumshoe detection, spiced up by the fact that our private
dick bears the name “Rex Giallo” (“King Yellow”), his pale-faced albino nemesis
is called “Leroy Jean” (also, “King Yellow” – Jean is a play on the French jaune, or “yellow”), his pub is called
“Dim Carcosa” and the mother and daughter are “Cassilda and Camilla Lake”,
respectively. How many Kings in Yellow do you need exactly? The story is moody
and engaging with some interesting song-lyric poetry, but, apart from giving us
a private-eye Everyman to follow about, what was the point? My experience with
Hastur-based fiction is often that there’s no
point – something happens; everybody goes mad; chaos ensues. In fact the best
example of this Mythos trope I’ve encountered was T.E. Grau’s “Monochrome”, re-printed in Volume One
of this magazine. Besson’s story strongly reminded me of Kim Newman’s novel The Night Mayor which has an identical
set-up; however, in that instance, the device has a solid raison d’être which plays out across the narrative. Here, it just
seems arbitrary and in service to some more bad puns, more’s the pity. This
tale was re-printed with permission from an earlier journal – perhaps it had
greater relevance in that vehicle?
Now
for the regular features. First up, the ever-delightful “Borkchito: Occult Doggo Detective” by Sam L. Edwards and Yves
Tourigny. What’s not to like about a Chihuahua private-eye dealing with
cross-dimensional presences who are messing with his canine clients? The
artwork is endearing and the story quite serious in its intent; it takes a
couple of reads to get into the swing of the doggy patois in which all of the characters speak (and monologue
interiorly), but once you’re there it’s absolute magic.
The
ongoing series of linked stories entitled the Occult Legion continues in this issue with a contribution entitled “Faultlines” by publisher Sam Gafford.
After this, the Reviews section – a bit
light-on in this issue and with an absence of articles which were a pleasing
feature of previous entries – gives us an overview of new and thematically-pertinent
literature available in electronic form and also hardcopy. James Bojaciuk then continues
his column of audio material and podcasts – “Aural
Apparitions” – with a review of the latest series of “The Omega Factor” which started life as a televisual property of
BBC Scotland in the 1970s – lasting only one season due to opposition by Mary
Whitehouse and her gang of prudes - and which has been revived as a series of
audio plays for a modern audience. This kind of trawling through the archives
of past efforts is one of many places where, for my money, ODQ really comes
into its own – I had completely forgotten about this show, but now I’m intent
on tracking down all of its iterations.
*****
The
body of lore that can be termed supernatural is a vast pool of information and
the current focus of fictional and speculative writing teases this ball of
twine into many and varied configurations depending upon the aims of the
storyteller and the needs of their story. The multitudinous ways in which the
writers come at their subject and use the vast expanse of mystical lore
available to them to gain their ends is revealed nowhere so well as between the
pages of this magazine. Each new story reveals slants and creative cogitation
on many levels and leads to fascinating avenues within the canon of
supernatural lore. All I can say is that I’m looking forward to more!
*****
Contents:
“Borkchito: Occult Doggo
Detective”, Sam L. Edwards & Yves Tourigny
“Songs for Dwindled Gods”,
Simon Avery
“Black Frog and Black
Scarab”, Davide Mana
“Charms”,
Sarah Hans
“The Bascomb Rug”,
Josh Reynolds
“The Burning Pile”,
Justin Guleserian
“The Case of the Black
Lodge”, Aaron Vlek
“The French Lieutenant’s
Gurning”, Rhys Hughes
“Abduction in Ash: A Kellan
Oakes Adventure”, Dale W. Glaser
“Yellow Light District”, Aaron
Besson
Occult Legion: “Faultlines”, Sam Gafford
Reviews:
Deal or No Deal
(eBook), William Meikle
Hex-Rated
(paperback, eBook), Jason Ridley
Monster Town
(paperback, eBook), Bruce Golden
Quest for the Space Gods
(paperback, Kindle), Jim Beard & John C. Bruening
“Aural
Apparitions” by James Bojaciuk: “The
Omega Factor” - series 02 (2017)
