Two Titles from Miskatonic River Press...

Having had a good time with “Shadows Over Innsmouth” I decided to look around for some other Mythos-fiction compendia and my searching led me first to Military Simulations (a fantastic local distributor of gaming and associated material whose existence I had completely forgotten about!) and the productions of Miskatonic River Press. From the available selections I chose two titles: “The Strange Dark One”, a collection of the writings of Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, and “Seasons in Carcosa”, a gathering of tales inspired by the works of Robert W. Chambers and his King In Yellow cycle. My reasons for taking on these two books were quite specific so, without further ado (as they say in the funny pages) let me start my dissection:

PUGMIRE, W.H., The Strange Dark One – Tales of Nyarlathotep, Miskatonic River Press, LLC, Lakeland, FL, USA, 2012.

Octavo; paperback, perfect bound in illustrated wrappers; 154pp., with 6pp. of adverts. Mild wear to the covers; else near fine.

I feel that I have to offer a caveat before jumping into this. I have always felt that a writer should let their works speak for themselves; if there has to be a level of pageantry or theatre surrounding the work then, to me, it’s a signal that someone somewhere feels that some extra marketing on the side needs to take over in order to make up for the shortcomings in the writing, or at least muddy the waters so that close inspection is rendered void. Neil Gaiman’s work – and again, this is a personal issue – suffers from being overshadowed by too much self-promotion, and even Terry Pratchett’s moody, be-hatted back flap photo portraits seem to me a little contrived. A brief look at the back cover of this volume really says it all: Pugmire’s photo makes him look like a cross between Boy George and a Formula 1 race car driver; all bad drag and Mythos branding.

Now, I have no qualms about people wanting to be themselves and expressing themselves as they see fit; but when the persona of the writer invades the writing to the extent that there are axes grinding in the background, then it becomes less entertainment and more proselytising. Call it catharsis; call it “freaking the mundanes”: it’s still self-indulgent. In terms of Lovecraftian fiction, Pugmire has sketched out a little corner of the universe and - along with Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite and Richard Watts – has populated it with vicious pretty-boys, indulging in sordid, bloody, rent-boy sex. Like the very worst in current vampire erotica, being from Sesqua Valley is a metaphor for being outside the mainstream, for being “Bohemian”, for being on drugs, bisexual, or gay. In this vein, with his personal baggage clearly in view, Pugmire then steers a very dangerous course towards becoming a Stephenie Meyers clone.

And this is a shame. In the first story of this collection – the titular “Strange Dark One” – Many good things happen: we are introduced to the quietly off-kilter inhabitants of Sesqua Valley and gain a sense of what’s amiss there through the eyes of an outsider, April Dorgan. She arrives from Wisconsin following up some unfinished business left by her late grandfather, whose bookshop she has inherited. Despite his written injunction to not offer the residents of Sesqua Valley the books locked away in his safe at any price, she blithely tosses the hoard – which contains copies of De Vermis Mysteriis and the Book of Eibon - into a cardboard box and drives there to make a deal. Why? Because there's no story otherwise, but mostly because, like all of Pugmire's protagonists, she's a selfish ingrate. Everyone she meets in town is strangely alluring, darkly mysterious and wrapped in enigma. She discovers an instant connexion to a local youth named Cyrus who rescues her from a near-fatal attraction to a piece of glass rescued from a New England church, an incident which focusses the attention of Nyarlathotep upon her. The locals are all very welcoming and ‘olde worlde’ and, this being a realm of the Mythos, we readers are left in no doubt that April’s books will become the property of the Sesquans as soon as the Big N. has finished with her. And for free!

There is a tinge of the ‘Bella and Edward’ stench hanging over this story and while it gets reined in somewhat, later stories aren’t so fortunate. “One Last Theft” shows no restraint whatsoever, as rent-boy Stefan (it would have to be ‘Stefan’) returns to Sesqua Valley to be pawed at, ravished and coddled by a selection of old queers before being taken by Nyarlathotep at an annual festival. It’s all very dreary and tawdry.

The enigmatic figure of Simon Gregory Williams hovers over these stories even when he doesn’t appear in person. We are often told that his features are strange – like a blending of frog and wolf – but in many instances, having dispensed with this nod to his hideous unearthly nature, many of the protagonists end up succumbing to his savage sexual allure. At which point I roll my eyes: either he’s grotesque and every inch the beast he’s often called, or he’s Edward from Twilight. Pick one: you can’t have it both ways.

It’s a crying shame: these stories are couched within an excellent understanding of the Mythos and carve out a solid branch of new possibilities. There’s a masterly quality to the writing: it’s definitely new but it has that touch of the ancient to it which works so well in Lovecraft’s own style; I was often impressed by the way that dialogue, replete with ‘thees’ and ‘thous’, mostly didn’t jar or seem forced. Mostly. The descriptive passages are suitably unearthly and strange, and work well in a community where the Crawling Chaos is a person in the neighbourhood (a person that you meet each day!).

The rest is just editing, to which I’ll turn in a minute.

PULVER Snr., Joseph S., Ed., A Season in Carcosa, Miskatonic River Press, LLC, Lakeland, FL, USA, 2012.

Octavo; paperback, perfect bound in illustrated wrappers; 282pp., with 6pp. of adverts. Near fine.

The thing that really underlines the horror in Chambers’ writings is the fact that very little is explained. There are events – discovery; pursuit; revelation; madness – but often no rationale as to what’s going on to create the issues. Nevertheless, the reader gains enough glimpses of the madness beyond to grasp an inkling of the hideous premise. That’s all that’s required – just a glimpse. Horror is at its best when this happens: spelling out the mechanics obviates the fear, and – as a horror writer – that’s the last thing you need.

There are a lot of stories in this selection and they all represent gung-ho attempts to splash about in Chambers’ paddling pool and make some waves. Unfortunately, while most of the authors are down with the ‘don’t explain too much’ regulation, they get too hung up on the phantasmagoria. Pages of psychedelic description in ponderous prose don’t make for entertainment; whenever your readers have to brace themselves before diving in (“if I’m not back by page 24, come get me!”) then - surprise, surprise – you’re doing something wrong. There’re some very ‘splatterpunk-y’ efforts here, and it’s not difficult to see that the writers are out to shock, rather than to say anything of especial interest, and the whole production falls flat as a result.

Which brings me to editing.

When I jump into a collection like this, I usually read the introduction just to gain an insight as to what the editor is trying to accomplish. In this instance, the introduction is barely legible, peppered as it is with half-sentences, run-on sentences, bizarre and excessive uses of the exclamation point (“! !!”) and a wayward, fan-boy focus. I took this as a bad sign. Reading through the garble, it seems that Joseph S. Pulver Snr. could get no-one to helm this project so he fell back upon his own resources and then wrangled a bunch of close friends and associates to write for him (I admit, I could be reading this wrongly – it’s hard to tell). What Mr Pulver Snr. fails to recognise however, is that to be an ‘Editor’, one has to ‘Edit’.

The third story – Don Webb’s “Movie Night at Phil’s” is so bogged down with typos, errors of writing, and errors of sense that it’s just painful to read; not to mention that it also suffers from the splatterpunk need to shock mentioned above. “The principal sent him hose for three days”, “more evil fro the lack of a name”, “he was loosing his thinning hair” and “just else something to hide”: these are a selection of phrases from just two pages, which should have been cleared away on even the most sophomoric editing effort.

It’s interesting that this story is the worst affected, which indicates that maybe it was shoehorned in before a deadline, or that the writer insisted that it be left alone. Regardless, with this amount of poor attention to detail, it proves merely that authors are not best-served by the staff at Miskatonic River Press. I expect to find some errors when reading from a small press, but the amount of sloppiness in these two books is unprecedented. You’ll find fewer errors in your average DAW or ACE paperback.

In Pugmire’s effort there is also a slew of similar corruption: on pages 55, 62, 65, 70, 82, 91, 106 – the list goes on. This is too much for a book of only 154 pages. Too, there is no such place as the “Cote d’Ivorie” and you can’t summon the Haunter of the Dark from a shining “trapezium”, no matter how hard you try. And would it have been so difficult simply to justify the text on each page? Every now and then, Pugmire becomes so mired in description that his ability to indicate action, or produce dialogue, falls flat. Try this:

“...I pushed away the blankets and got out of bed, absent-mindedly knocking the book that I had been reading and was beside me on the mattress to the floor. I reached for the book and touched the floor in stocking feet and gingerly opened the door of my upper bedroom...”

...or this:

“‘Wait a minute,’ she told him. ‘The last time you offered me a drink I came to regret it. Damn, what was in that hooch you gave me in the club? I’ve never hallucinated like that before. I can’t tell what was memory and what was dream.’”

The first extract is awkward and repetitive; the second sounds like the sort of dialogue that regularly appears in Penthouse magazine’s Forum. These are not the only instances of this type of thing either.

Why weren’t these problems addressed? Certainly, every author should recognise that how they look in print is how they will be judged; the manner of presentation here is extraordinarily lacklustre. Perhaps, Pugmire is too much of a diva to accept criticism; nevertheless, a good editor should stick to their guns and make the alterations and cuts required. If the author doesn’t like it, they can always go elsewhere.

The introduction to A Season in Carcosa attempts (in broken, fan-boy English! !!) to define the material to be included in the volume; in particular, it asks of the writers that they do not simply draft a version of the play, “The King in Yellow”. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what many of the writers try to do: great slabs of purported text from the work appear, especially in Edward Morris’s “The Theatre and Its Double” (along with the residuum of a semester in theatre studies). Again, an editor in charge of such a project should draw a line in the sand and choose to exclude material which doesn’t fit the bill. At 21 pieces, the collection is not exactly slender, so some judicious excisions might have trimmed the unwanted fat.

Nevertheless, amidst the splatter, the writing as if one was texting to a friend, and the appalling editing, there are some gems: “Ms. Found in a Chicago Hotel Room” by Daniel Mills was a pleasant surprise; as was “it sees me when I’m not looking” by Gary McMahon (although someone should have just bitten the bullet here and presented the thing entirely in lower case).

The bottom line for a publishing outfit should be a reputation for presenting a particular range of material in a format that is pleasing and for which the punters are willing to pay. These two products are choppy and difficult to wade through; whilst stemming from the Mythos and associated weird fiction, they fail to adequately define their own parameters and butcher the presentation along the way. Each time that the reader is forced to stop and disentangle a mangled sentence is a moment when the journey has been lost; the adventure stops; the excitement is well and truly killed. Repeat sales are not being promoted here.

Due to its indulgence and laziness, I’m giving three tentacled horrors to “The Strange Dark One”, a book that really could’ve been so much better; due to its sheer incompetence in terms of editorial support, “A Season in Carcosa” gets only two.

PS: I have just read online that Pugmire has revised his book since this 2012 edition, so maybe he was just as appalled at the initial result as I was. Hopefully the re-write makes for a better book!