Quirkiness...

Some years ago now, a small company rose up out of America’s east coast with the striking title Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This was a fairly low-key release over here and information about the book passed largely by word of mouth. Soon there were other books in the range – Sense and Sensibility and Sea-monsters, Mr. D’Arcy: Vampire, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer. When I first saw the zombie book, I smirked: I figured, since it looked an awful lot like one of those black, Penguin Classics releases, that it would be cute to place it on my bookshelf along with my standard Austens – other browsers would experience the double-take of seeing the anomaly, giggle over the cover and move on. How disappointed was I to discover that there was an actual novel contained within those joke wrappers?

It’s probably just me, but I would have expected that the book would turn out to be just a notebook of some kind – blank and ready for the owner’s musings to be housed within. Or maybe that there would be an acknowledgement by the people at Quirk Books that the book didn’t really exist, but here’s the actual Pride and Prejudice to read, in covers that would make the average male Austen fan not too uncomfortable to break it out on the train during the morning commute. Instead, it contains a boring, woefully ghastly piece of drivel that takes the dead donkey of the one-note joke and flogs it to Kingdom Come.

And then came the sequels: flog, flog, flog...

In genre fiction there is a place for pastiche; it works on the level of homage, to demonstrate the writer’s knowledge and attunement to the original work or author. These books aren’t even pastiche; they’re just bad. However, the publishers have tapped into a phenomenon that is having long-reaching and questionable impact on the world of literature.

Literary immortality used to be a lofty and idealistic concept. The works of an author – their canon – lived on after their death and became the scripted and peopled worlds which they bequeathed to humanity. Nowadays, due to the fast-food consumption of television programming and movie franchising, publishers are seeking to emulate the filmed media models and cash in on the money flow. ‘Jane Austen’ is now viewed as a franchise, available to be re-booted every other year or so, or re-imagined for newer audiences or target markets. All it takes is for someone to be roped in to writing the new material: in Austen’s case it’s P.D. James with her Regency whodunit Death Comes to Pemberley, or the whole slew of Young Adult re-imaginings of Austen’s books (with the same titles, no less) to ‘update’ Austen for the younger, iPhone-toting set. Ian Fleming’s ‘new’ Bond novels are being churned out by Sebastian Faulkes and others; Eric van Lustbader is pumping out ‘new’ Jason Bourne books for the Robert Ludlum Estate.

Literary immortality is no longer a theoretical concept; it’s a thriving business. However, more is not ‘more’; in terms of quality, ‘more’ is something far, far less.

It’s not that this concept is particularly new. “Clueless” was an extremely clever film adaptation of Austen’s Emma; Akira Kurosawa gave us “Throne of Blood” as an homage to “Macbeth”, and then he and Sergio Leone riffed off each other for the great samurai flick/spaghetti western to-ing and fro-ing of “Yojimbo”/”A Fistful of Dollars” and “Sanjuro”/”For a few Dollars More”. Great English literature and the undead have met before when Val Lewton turned Jane Eyre into “I Walked with a Zombie” and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” was transformed into “Forbidden Planet”. However, these reincarnations all contained a sense of affection for the source material. Nowadays it’s less about savouring the work of an author; it’s about growing obese on the bloated, low-grade pap that ghost-writers are spewing out in order to shift units.

We live in an age where most of us have access to a computer and can write down our thoughts and imaginings as we see fit. Self- and online-publishing are only a few clicks and a cash transaction away; publishing houses are divorcing themselves of the need to proof-read and edit material and they get their cues from the “likes” and “+1s” that social media flag in order to kill some trees and bankroll an actual physical book. Part of the process is the creation of new iterations of classic reads – these are safe options since they have been tested over time – and the works of standard, prize-winning, ‘safe’ authors, like Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco.

Quality has given way to quantity: people want to be immersed in a weighty tome, to be taken out of their humdrum lives by means of some brick of a book whose best feature is that it can hold open a door. And when that’s finished they want another one - as the fantasy genre of publishing has proven over time. Escapism is something that people have always craved and bad times are a spur to it – Hollywood has never suffered due to an economic downturn. All forms of media and entertainment are now being conflated, governed by the same marketing approaches and, sad to say, the priceless gems of literature – and our ability to appreciate them – are being eroded by the process.

We live in a world where Fifty Shades of Grey is a benchmark by which to measure good writing. God help us all!

*****

Which brings me back to Quirk Books of Philadelphia and around to Lovecraft. In my constant quest for Lovecraftiana, I have recently acquired the first two books in a series of YA fiction penned by one “Charles Gilman” (aka. Jason Rekulak), entitled Tales from Lovecraft Middle School. These books follow the high school misadventures of Robert Arthur and his friends as he settles in to the new local educational institution. From there on in, it’s strictly “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” territory. In the first instalment, the titular Professor Gargoyle turns out to be a demon working at the behest of a secretive Master, while in the second book the socially-adept Slither Sisters are medusae, seeking election on the student council in order to sacrifice the entire Seventh Grade to the ominous Master. And that’s it. The rest is geeks, slackers, cool kids, quarterbacks, cheerleaders and oblivious teachers. You do the maths.

The production quality of the books is excellent, but having had their previous efforts optioned as movies and even turned into a B-grade flick have ensured that quality of presentation is not an issue for Quirk. Both novels have high-quality lenticular covers – otherwise known as “winkies” – that shift as the book moves, turning high school girls into snake-haired monsters and scary-looking schoolmasters into even scarier demons. (The fact that I was wondering what would happen if I tried to scan these covers had very little to do with my presenting them here. Very little. Almost nothing. Almost.)

There’s nothing very Lovecraftian about these books: they throw about a lot of canon names – Tillinghast, Dunwich, Gilman – but the monsters are mainly of the Western mythic tradition, with harpies, medusa, demons and giant snakes. Not a Mi Go in sight. It’s as if the folks at Quirk are worried about some perceived litigious ramifications and are unaware of the ‘open source’ nature of the Mythos. The occasional tentacle intrudes; there’s a two-headed rat and a ghost, but not a lot of Lovecraft besides the name. And Mr Rekulak’s unspeakable writing hasn’t improved upon Seth Grahame-Smith's work on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but at least it’s aimed at a more appropriate audience.

For completists only.