Matterhorn Redux...

There was just so much good stuff left over after my last post about Edward Whymper and his celebrated Guide that I thought I would throw some other interesting stuff up here for everybody's edification. Equipment is always good to know about, so here are some adverts:

For the most part, the Guide advertises the stock of London publishers, particularly those offering material of interest to travelers and mountaineers. For those back in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, books of this kind were almost always the first port of call in getting ready to ship out.

"Mrs Bishop" is, of course, the intrepid Isabella Bird, who lived in China with her missionary husband and who was instrumental in ending the practice of foot-binding among Chinese women. 

And finally, there's this: apparently Whymper traveled about the world's volcanoes collecting "volcanic dust" which he flogged off to the eager in glass bottles. I'm not sure what this material was actually used for, but intrepid Keepers might decide that Andean volcano-dust is an essential ingredient for making the Powder of ibn-Ghazi. Good, therefore, to know it's on the market!

Because you never know when something like this might happen...!

Happy Mountaineering!

Review: Black Wings of Cthulhu 3

JOSHI, S.T. (Ed.), Black Wings of Cthulhu 3 – Seventeen Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Titan Books/Titan Publishing Group Ltd., London, 2015.

Octavo; paperback; 400pp. New.

A colleague tossed this my way recently and thought I should take a look at it. I must confess that I didn’t know anything about this series before this, but I’m keen now to see if I can scare up the other titles. S.T. Joshi is a name to conjure with as far as HPL fandom is concerned and, going in, this felt like a project that was in safe hands. A couple of things gave me pause - the presence of Willum Hopfrog and one of the Pulvers – but I put my faith in Joshi and jumped in.

My experience of modern Lovecraftian fiction is a hit-and-miss one. Like most things – comedy; movies; literature – personal preference plays a part: I like my Lovecraft skewed in a certain direction; I don’t take it all onboard, willy-nilly, and exult that it’s all good because it drops the C-word every now and then (that’s “Cthulhu” people; simmer down). I particularly dislike any Mythos pastiche which borders on the splatterpunk, paddling around in the entrails just for its own sake. Like small children playing with their own faeces, it says more about the writers’ stage of mental development than anything to do with Lovecraft or his Yog-Sothothery. Harsh? Maybe; but also fair.

For my money, a Mythos story has to expound upon the ideas behind Lovecraft’s work and extend those notions into new and interesting areas. It’s not sufficient to simply establish a character, rip its head off and then hold it up for all to see. Without some theme pushing the drama, then what’s the point? Too many of these collections often become a contest between writers – any gore you can chuck, I can chuck further. Shock value for its own sake; certainly not art; and certainly not what Lovecraft – arguably – was all about.

So, having clarified my own thoughts about such matters, I waded on in to this particular effort. The first story – Jonathan Thomas’s “Houdini Fish” – riffs energetically off Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, one of several stories in this collection which does so, as Joshi points out in his Introduction. An archaeologist at a university in a town not unlike a modern Arkham, discovers a weird device beneath the quadrangle and decides to try and piece it back together, despite all the fragments glowing with a strange purple light. From the moment of its unearthing, strange creatures appear in the vicinity, most notably the “Houdini fish” of the title, icthyoid creatures that dwell in the hand soap containers of the university washrooms. The narrator muses as to whether these beings have newly arrived, or if they were always here and now human perception has developed enough to recognise them, thus harking back to the ideas in Lovecraft’s seminal tale. As the machine becomes more complete, these strange appearances coincide with unsettling disappearances among the student body and the police begin to circle our protagonist.

This is a nicely orchestrated piece which combines and extends Lovecraft’s original work into a pleasing whole. The main character’s mental disintegration and the unsettling manifestations of things from Beyond as the long arm of the Law reaches inexorably towards him are well handled, as is the creepy pay-off at the end. Joshi notes that this is one of two authors who actually live in Providence and feels that this familiarity grounds the tale; I’m not sure that this is the case myself, but then I’ve not been to Rhode Island. A jarring note: the writer is fond of dropping the articles throughout his work and this lends the work an annoying, crippled aspect. Maybe this is a speech trait of people in Providence, who perhaps feel a certain brevity is gained by dropping every “a” and “the” from their vocabulary; again, I don’t know, and the fact that I still don’t know is also a fault of this work.

The next offering is Donald R. Burleson’s “Dimply Dolly Doofy”. Here we are firmly in splatterpunk territory. This piece involves a terminal methamphetamine addict who abandons her baby by slipping it into the packaging of a lifelike eponymous doll. The baby then crawls forth to commit atrocities at the behest of a poorly-referenced Mythos rationale. The plight of the teenaged mother is unsympathetically treated and gleefully ghoulish in its approach, the Mythos elements are tritely and unbelievably handled, and...Ray Bradbury did it better. Moving on.

Richard Gavin takes us once more “From Beyond”, taking on the Lovecraftian idea of ‘things outside’ and blending it subtly with material echoing elements of “Dreams in the Witch House”. A young couple meet at a late night rave and unearth a stone with a hole in it. The young woman, Pamela, a student of archaeology, recounts superstitious lore about such objects and later, decides to sleep with it under her pillow after hearing at a lecture that HPL did so with a piece of stone chipped from a grave marker and wrote “The Hound” as a direct result. Pamela has a terrifying nightmare in which she perceives an entity watching her and her dream from some point outside of this reality. This perception leads to her complete mental breakdown which her partner, Mason, is unable to forestall. The horribly chilling ending is a logical conclusion to the many unsettling questions and effects that the hovering entity engenders.

Next we have the contribution which initially gave me pause – the Pugmire offering. “Underneath an Arkham Moon” is a collaboration between him and Jessica Amanda Salmonson, author of the Tomoe Gozen series of Japanese fantasy novels (although, given the content, I’m assuming the Hopfrog took the lead on this exercise). This story too, springboards off a Lovecraft canon piece, specifically “The Unnameable” and attempts to update that tale for a modern audience. The original story is fairly straightforward: two friends with tastes tending towards the macabre sit in a cemetery and watch for moonrise, their conversation turning to the crumbling house overlooking the grim scene and stories of what awaits within. This story does little to change the narrative apart from cracking open a case of grand guignol to spray across the proceedings. The protagonists in this version are two horribly-deformed descendants of the witch-y community of Arkham – the armless Ambrose and his cousin Allune, who carries her malformed conjoined twin on her back. Goaded by Ambrose’s taunts, Allune enters the witch-house and her twin gets raped by the horror lurking within. This is pure Pugmire: body-horror and lashings of incest tied up with the inappropriate descriptor “Bohemian”. Perhaps someone should lend him a dictionary...

With Darrell Schweitzer’s “Spiderwebs in the Dark” we really start to get somewhere. This story is a monologue uttered by the narrator – a bookseller – to an unidentified second party. We are not told where this conversation is taking place, but it slowly becomes obvious that the speaker is in a loony bin. He relates his meeting with a strange character who teaches him that the world is a steganographic puzzle spread across creation and that it only requires the right combination of elements to effect dramatic changes in the nature of reality. Specifically, he instructs him how to manipulate the webs that bind existence together. The narrator talks of fantastic journeys and shocking experiments in dimensional manipulation before revealing that the strands which hold the cosmos together are clogged with parasitic creatures which pursue those that swing upon the spiderwebs in the dark (Hounds of Tindalos, anyone?). The final revelations – about how the duo escaped from the parasites and what happened to the speaker’s friend – are chilling indeed. The best story so far.

Of the names presented in the contents list which I recognised only a couple didn’t fill me with apprehension. One of those was that of Caitlin R. Kiernan. Her story – “One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)” – is not so much the tale of a Mythos encounter, but the story of its after-effects. A freelance science journalist goes to a New Hampshire town to investigate a freak lightning strike, which blasted the top of a hill, killing a family of three and destroying their home. The local townsfolk are unhappy about his presence and the more he digs, the more unhelpful they become. He reads the local newspaper account of the incident and decides it covers up more information than it reveals, not least the identities of those killed in the accident. Strangest of all, is the female presence which follows him up the eponymous hill every time he climbs it and of whom he is too terrified to turn and face. Speaking to her over his shoulder he insists that the more that he is denied information, the more intrigued he becomes. Finally, she confronts him in the squalid hotel which he is using as a headquarters and he finally decides to drop the matter and flee. This is a dreamlike and hypnotic piece, drenched in the narrator’s own existential despair. Whatever did happen on One Tree Hill, it’s of no consequence to this story; this is the cover-up, with the Mythos entities ensuring that all loose ends are tidied away. It’s a nicely off-kilter creepy tale.

Jason V. Brock’s “The Man with the Horn” is the story of an elderly woman who becomes more intrigued than she should with her unusual neighbour. Mr. Trinity leaves each evening in his hat and large coat and carrying his instrument in its case; he returns each evening at 11 o’clock and practices his instrument for another three hours. She has slowly become inured to the noise just as her life has faded into a solitary stasis – her husband and all her relatives dead and herself confined to her apartment by an automobile accident which hurt her neck. A postal error (or is it?) sees one of Mr. Trinity’s letters wind up in her letter-box and, intrigued, she opens it to discover a document of strange and incomprehensible garble. Later, she passes by her strange neighbour’s door and sees that it’s standing ajar; she lets herself in and... Well, let’s just say that she shouldn’t have been so nosey. Brock’s delineation of this sympathetic but flawed character is streets away from the callous disregard of Donald Burleson’s treatment of his main protagonist, in that we feel for the victim even though her own weakness is what draws her to her doom. Certainly, the ending of this piece is no surprise, but the journey is a very satisfying one.

Mollie Burleson’s “Hotel del Lago” is a very strange inclusion. It’s the tale of a driver who chooses to spend a night in the hotel of a one-horse desert town rather than risk falling asleep at the wheel. The set up is pure Innsmouth with strange locals, a boozey barfly who seems about to reveal the town’s secrets, then the revelation that the townsfolk are all engaged upon strange rites by a magical lake in the moonlight. Our protagonist drives screaming away into the night stopping only to tell his story to the police of the next town he comes to (they don’t believe him), before driving back to the haunted town. There he finds a gold object in the basin of a dried-up lake which proves...something? The reason that this is a strange inclusion is that 1) it reads like it hasn’t been proof-read – poor word choice and strange sentence construction mar the delivery - and 2) it reads like the author has a stereotypical and surface grasp of Lovecraftian tropes but no real feeling for the material. There are people out there who think that writing a novel set in Ireland requires only alcoholism, poverty, lashings of tuberculosis and a few potatoes to accomplish the deed; those people don’t sell their work. So I’m wondering how this got to be included?

Donald Tyson’s “Waller” is a step back in the right direction. Much Mythos fiction doesn’t bother with rationales and reasons – the unknown is terrifying simply because it is unknown. Tyson tells a story set in a world of his own devising. Our “real world” is simply an illusion, which superior beings sprinkle with “life seeds”. These grow inside our bodies, attaching themselves to our livers. They cause us to die and we call them “cancers”. However, people carrying these seeds are able to step through the walls separating the three different realms. The “real world” is like our own but at an earlier stage of technological development and slightly off-kilter; the people there call the carriers of the life seeds “wallers” and attack them on sight, gutting them in the streets and taking the seeds to their priests who bestow fantastic wealth upon them. We follow the trials of one such waller who manages to turn the tables on the murderous real worlders and their god in the final act. It’s a well-written story that grips and entertains. Apart from some tentacles though, is it really a Mythos tale? I’m not sure.

Don Webb’s wacky “The Megalith Plague” comes next and, for me, it was like reading a Darin Morgan episode of “The X-Files”. The story concerns a second-rate doctor of medicine who moves back to Texas to take over his grandfather’s medical practice. His best patient is a crazy-violent artist with a trust fund to back his lifestyle, and who is also distantly related. A discovery by one of the local farmers of an ancient text describing the true way to worship God – that is, by building stone circles – starts everyone in the district constructing miniature versions of Stonehenge out of anything that comes to hand. Our medical man tries to ignore it, then he tries to run away from it, but the locals are determined to make him stay. And what of his cracked distant cousin? Is he help or hindrance? Or is there method in his madness? Oh, and there are cockroaches...

The Pulvers – Jnr. and Snr. – represent for me the worst of current Mythos writing. I read, and abandoned, Ripples from Carcosa, edited by Pulver Jnr. because it was a splatterpunk dog’s breakfast. Writing, editing and proofreading are all disciplines that require honing, skill, and a modicum of talent; it’s possible to bend, or even break, the rules for effect, but if it’s your raison d’etre, your one constant performance, it becomes meaningless. Joseph Pulver Snr.’s “Down Black Staircases” started with an edgy quick-cut vibe, but ramped this up so much that, by the middle, I just said “life’s too short” and jumped to the next story. From what I could grasp through the garble, there was a guy driving to Providence to get laid; a car accident; some redneck yokels...Joyce Carol Oates did it better. Moving on.

Peter Cannon’s “China Holiday” was the story I was looking forward to, given my proclivities; however, it was less than edifying. The whole tale reads like a thumbnail sketch of a couple’s trip to the Peoples’ Republic, with added whingeing. The Mythos element – namely that Deep Ones are behind the damming of certain rivers and that the Chinese children being sent to America for adoption are the scions of these fishy villains – is cursory and tacked on. And obvious. Moving on.

The next two tales bear a striking similarity and I’m going to go out on a limb here and offer my theory about why that is the case: neither story started off as a Lovecraftian vehicle. It’s as if these tales had run out of energy and had fallen by the wayside until someone contacted the author to say “have you got anything for ‘Black Wings of Cthulhu 3’?” Not having anything explicitly Cthulhoid to hand, various tentacled and batrachian tropes were rapidly bolted-on to the unfinished works and – less than stellar results eventuated. Lois Gresh gives us a story about two aged women, one of whom is dying of cancer. There is a lot to like in this piece but then the Mythos stumbles in and makes it 1) incomprehensible, and 2) pointless. Mark Howard-Jones relates a story about an uncle and his nephew and the desultory affair both men are undertaking with the same young woman on a beachside holiday. The set-up and the character interactions are steadily engrossing until the girl transforms (offstage) and heads out to sea never to be heard of again. These are shining examples of how some people set out to write a non-Mythos tale and then jury-rig it into an awful Mythos story as an afterthought, by running out of steam.

The last three stories are where things really start to hit their stride and reveal that Joshi was saving the best until last.

In “Weltschmerz”, Sam Gafford takes on a journey into the dull workaday existence of his narrator who crunches numbers at a Providence RI bank. His routine is mind-numbingly tedious extending also to his relationship with his wife, his colleagues and even his own understanding of himself. This is a man who awakens each morning angry that he didn’t die during the night – heavy stuff. Then one day he meets a young woman from the mailroom who encourages him to do some research on H.P. Lovecraft, in whom our wage-slave perceives a sympathetic worldview. Taking up an offer to visit the tattooed and pierced mailroom girl, they have sex and she offers him a drug which completely blows his mind... The conclusion, wherein the narrator realises the pointlessness of all human existence, borders on the splatter but, given the rationale outlined in the lead-up, Gafford manages to pull it back from the brink.

“Thistle’s Find” comes from a truly dark, nasty and deplorable place, stemming from familial dysfunction and low-grade criminal activity. Our narrator, Owen, on the run from a police enquiry of unspecified seriousness, pays a visit to the neighbour of his long-suffering parents, Dr. Thistle. Thistle is not strictly a medical man although, growing up next door and getting acquainted with him, Owen determined that he hoarded a lot of expensive equipment and so figured that he had some cash squirreled away, which might come to him if he toadied-up a little. Also, the “Dr.” met with disapproval from Owen’s parents and he enjoyed the approbation which this association engendered. Arriving at Thistle’s house, he is met by an older man than he remembered, dressed in his underwear; the doctor takes him down to the basement to reveal that he has opened a gate to another world, roamed by almost-human creatures which he calls ghouls. Then he reveals that he has one of these creatures tied up in a basement room and that he has been systematically raping it for weeks. He wonders if Owen could help him market the creature as a novel sex slave? Before things wander too far down this unsavoury track, the creature escapes, Dr Thistle gets torn to pieces and Owen shuts down the gate before more of the nasties push their way through. This is a truly dark piece and very disturbing in its amoral implications.

“Further Beyond” by Brian Stableford is, as the title suggests, another story springboarding off HPL’s “From Beyond”. Hands down, it is the best story in this collection. The narrative takes off after the events in HPL’s tale and after the narrator of that story has been released by the police for lack of evidence in the death of Crawford Tillinghast. He reveals that he has been contacted by three researchers of varying credentials and motives, to ask if he has kept any papers or items from Tillinghast’s work, to which he replies in the negative. Then, at the request of Tillinghasts’s widow Rachel, he agrees to return to the scene of the experiment and sort through what remains of his friend’s life there. Despite trepidations arising from the events which transpired at the house, and the frequent migraines which have plagued him since that time, our hero agrees to stand by his friend’s bereaved partner and help her dispose of his effects.

This story is by far the most polished of the stories presented. It borrows from its original set-up but not so slavishly as to appear as pastiche. The writer knows the period as well, filling in the narrative with many details that ring true from the time. That being said, there are one or two anachronistic turns of phrase, but these are easily overlooked. The story works with and extends the notions aired in HPL’s original story but ties these together in a very satisfying conclusion that is distinctly its own. Highly recommended!

Well that’s it. Overall, there was a lot of drek in this book – stuff that was half-arsed, ill-conceived and fed by the onanistic maunderings of the splatterpunk oeuvre. Lovecraft isn’t pornography people! When will the “current trend” of Lovecraftian fiction awaken to this fact? There is also a disturbing move – if this selection is representative in any way – towards objectifying women in these tales as merely victims to be horribly dealt with, or strange unknowable beings whose cosmic rationale cannot be fathomed. I said earlier that these works speak more to the mental stage of development of their writers; they also reveal a lot about their social development too.

In the final analysis, I don’t know. I won’t say get out there and bust a gut tracking this down; there’s not a lot within these covers that’s at all memorable, and some of it is just plain bad. I’m pretty sure that, if Lovecraft was alive today and if he was informed that this is the quality of work that his efforts have inspired, he’d snap his pen in two and vow never to write again.

Two-and-a-half tentacled horrors from me.

*****

Chapter Listing:

Introduction – S.T. Joshi

“Houdini Fish” – Jonathan Thomas

“Dimply Dolly Doofy” – Donald R. Burleson

“The Hag Stone” – Richard Gavin

“Underneath an Arkham Moon” – Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W.H. Pugmire

“Spiderwebs in the Dark” – Darrell Schweitzer

“One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)” – Caitlin R. Kiernan

“The Man with the Horn” – Jason V. Brock

“Hotel del Lago” – Mollie L. Burleson

“Waller” – Donald Tyson

“The Megalith Plague” – Don Webb

“Down Black Staircases” – Joseph S. Pulver, Snr.

“China Holiday” – Peter Cannon

“Necrotic Cove” – Lois Gresh

“The Turn of the Tide” – Mark Howard Jones

“Weltschmerz” – Sam Gafford

“Thistle’s Find” – Simon Strantzas

“Further Beyond” – Brian Stableford

Review: The Matrix

AYCLIFFE, Jonathan, The Matrix, HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 1995.

Octavo; paperback, with gatefold wrappers; 238pp. Minor wear; light toning to the text block edges; mild bumping to the bottom corners of the wrapper. Very good to near fine.

The name Daniel Easterman is somewhat familiar to me; but then, many names of many authors are familiar to me because I have worked in a long line of bookshops. Ask me who Jonathan Aycliffe is, however and – before this book – I would have just shrugged: no clue. This innocuous volume was sitting out front of the shop on the specials table before it caught my attention; I assumed – as you might have, given the title of this post – that it had something to do with the movie. How wrong can you be! Still, the parallel titles must have had some unusual effects on the sales of this book...

It turns out that Daniel Easterman and Jonathan Aycliffe are one and the same person: Easterman writes the sort of blockbuster-y books you pick up at airports while the Aycliffe pen-name is the one he uses when he’s penning stuff of a more personal interest. His background is as a researcher in Islamic Studies; he speaks Arabic and Persian and he lectured in Fez, as well as in Newcastle-On-Tyne. He is also a bibliophile, as represented by this creepy tale which centres upon a book of forbidden knowledge and the dangerous effects it has upon those who open its pages.

The story involves an academic named Paul McLeod, who hales from the Western Isles of Scotland. We learn that he recently lost his wife and returned to live with his parents during the grieving process. As the novel starts, he is just returning to his life once more, taking up a research position in Edinburgh. Encountering an unwelcoming and rigid academic hierarchy which perceives him as an unnecessary drain upon grant money, he decides to keep his head down and pursue his chosen topic without ruffling too many feathers. His area of study is the sociological organisation of the New Age fringe counterculture, how it manifests and promulgates, what its markers and other identifiers entail, how its presence affects the members who contribute to its existence. Accordingly, he goes undercover and begins networking through a murky underworld of tarot card readers, Wiccans, amateur folklorists and ghosthunters.

Inevitably, he focuses upon a core of magical practitioners who seem to be the real deal and he becomes initiated into their weekly rites and “workings”. Even here though, he suspects that there is another organisation, even more secretive than this one, and he starts to inveigle himself with a member who appears to bridge the two cabals – high-flying lawyer Duncan Mylne. The eminently knowledgeable but somehow strangely dispassionate Mylne takes Paul under his wing, offering him weekly tutorial sessions in the ways of True Power and access to some extremely rare and arcane books.

Paul becomes obsessed and his research goes out the window. With Duncan’s help he gains access to the cabal’s library and there discovers something that causes his life to quickly unravel...

Lest anyone out there still thinks that this is about the movie and are wondering when Keanu Reeves will make his grand entrance, let me disabuse you. The Matrix here is actually a book, an ancient grimoire of unnerving power, which Paul finds tucked away hidden in the library and which he takes home without permission. Aycliffe even gives us the title page, and this made me go all gooey (I’m a sucker for title pages).

The book is early attempt to translate an Arabic text into English and it renders the original language phonetically into gobbledy-gook. Of most disturbing import to Paul is an engraved plate showing a monstrous figure before an open tomb in an ancient cathedral-like building. Once having seen this image, the book plays upon his mind. A scratching presence haunts his apartment building and he feels as though he is being pursued. In desperation he burns the book to ash, but the strange obsession continues. His health fails and friends stage an intervention, after which he is sent home to his parents to recuperate.

The story partakes a little of M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” as the book curses those who accept it. Having taken it (stolen it) from the occult library, he destroys it (he thinks) but he doesn’t realise that once accepted the book returns. As in the James tale, the only way to offload the thing is to give it to someone who wants it. At a later stage, Paul tries to buy a Bronte novel which he knows one of his interventionist friends is looking for; when he opens the parcel, there’s the Matrix instead.

Under Duncan’s tutelage, Paul loses his position at the university but his new master takes care of all his material wants, such as rent and food. They travel, beginning a pilgrimage which takes them on a wide circuit through North Africa, visiting Duncan’s associates and their covens. At one point, they arrive in Fez and Paul is led deep into the labyrinthine net of the old city, to meet Duncan’s spiritual master, a decrepit old Arab whom Paul is convinced is more dead than alive.

These scenes, trapped in the heart of the crumbling town with the unemotional Duncan and his corpse-like patron are truly strange and disturbing. Paul slowly begins to realise that he has wandered into a nexus of true spiritual power, not the stylised witterings of bored nouveau-riche retirees, and despairs of finding a way out. The two return to Edinburgh and, shortly afterwards, Paul decides to break his connexion with Duncan. The key moment happens while they stay at Duncan’s estate outside of the Scottish capital. During the night, unable to sleep, Paul sees Duncan walking through the snow to the edge of a dark wood. Out from the trees shuffles a zombie-like female figure, lurching spastically and howling horribly. Duncan stands with this creature for awhile and they both pass from view. The next morning, Paul can’t leave quickly enough.

But ditching Duncan is easier said than done. After skipping a few tutorial sessions, Paul is notified by the police that his wife’s grave has been disturbed and it appears to have been a ritual desecration. Having sold his soul to Duncan with the promise that his wife would be returned to him, Paul knows exactly what’s going on, but it’s hardly the sort of thing one can offer to the constabulary by way of possible motive.

The book wends its way to its shattering conclusion – which I will say nothing about. This is an excellent tale about the dangers of inveigling one’s way into a magical organisation and the methods that they can use to twist such an investigator out of shape. The cultists in Duncan’s control are multifarious and unexpected but each of them is exquisitely established so when they appear, the reader is not incredulous, but rather chilled. As twist piles on top of twist, the insidious Duncan’s long game becomes ever more apparent and the truly terrifying thing about the tale is the width of the net that the cultists cast to catch Paul in its mesh. At the end of the day, the victory is all but hollow, and everyone is damned ‘cause they did, damned if they didn’t.

My only gripe with this book is that it tries just a little too hard to cover a range of different cultish tropes without really sinking its teeth into any of them. The descriptions of Scotland – both mainland and the Western Isles – are evocative and form a stark counterpoint to the equally wonderful and mesmerising scenes in North Africa, particularly Fez. It’s obvious that Aycliffe knows the shortcomings of academia also, because he paints a nicely cynical portrait of university life. There’s much that gamers could borrow from this to incorporate into their roleplaying – the Matrix Aeternitatis is a very similar book to the Mythos tome Saracenic Rituals as it contains all of the same kinds of necromantic incantations.

This is not going to be an easy book to find, but I highly recommend it, especially to any Keepers out there who are thinking of running the campaign series “Shadows of Yog-Sothoth”. I’m giving it four tentacled horrors.

Lovecraftian Poetry...

JOSHI, S.T. (Ed.), The Ancient Track – The Complete Poetical Works of H.P. Lovecraft, Night Shade Books, San Francisco CA, 2001.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine and upper board titles and decoration; 557pp. Very minor wear. Dustwrapper. Near fine.

Funny the way the world works – HPL has a birthday and I get the presents. This week not only did I score a copy of Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, but also a copy of Night Shade Books’ The Ancient Track – The Complete Poetical Works of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi. Serendipity-doo-dah!

COLLINS, Tom (Ed.), A Winter Wish and Other Poems by H.P. Lovecraft, Whispers Press, Ann Arbor MI, 1977.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-title and upper board decoration; 190pp. Number 93 of a limited edition run of 200 copies. Very minor wear; signed in ink on the limitations page by the editors. Dustwrapper. Near fine in a buckram slipcase.

This isn’t the first compilation of HPL's verse that I’ve been able to add to my collection of Lovecraftiana. Awhile ago, I picked up a copy of A Winter Wish and Other Poems by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Tom Collins and issued by Whispers Press in 1977. With this new volume, I thought I’d trot out both books and write an overview, not only about Lovecraft as poet, but about Mythos-inspired poetry generally.

Some time back I wrote a review of the new Penguin Classics compilation of Clark Ashton Smith’s work. It contains quite a bit of his verse - probably too much - and suffers as a result. As I said then, the style of poetry to which he aspired was hackneyed and trite, outmoded in his current milieu and therefore dated. Too, it reeked of the adolescent, pushing the envelope of melodrama and often, blithely crossing that line. There are many things that we leave behind us in our childhood; our tortured, over-emotional poetry is one of them. Obviously CAS didn’t share this view.

“O Love, thou Judas of the martyred soul!

Thou pandar to the painted harlot, Life!

The rankest lies wherewith thy heart is rife

Too fulsomely illume thy lips' red scroll,

Whereon is writ the secret of our dole,

Of mortal woes immortalized by thee,

And wisdom, through thine olden perfidy,

Drawn back to life from some Lethean shoal.

Away! I know the weariness and fever

Kisses compounded of the world's old dust

With fire that feeds the seventh hell for ever!

The grave shall keep a gentler couch than thine,

Though round my heart the roots of nettles twine,

Wreathed in the ancient attitude of lust”

-“Amor Aeternalis”

Robert E. Howard was also fond of versifying and his collected works are dotted by the experiments which he carried out with the form. These are, as you’d expect, grim paeans to destroyed and forgotten empires, extolling and lamenting their faded glories. In the context of his other writing, they stand up well, lending shade and nuance to his oeuvre. I doubt, however, that you’d ever buy a slim volume of his verse: you can have too much of a doom-laden thing.

“The Black Door gapes and the Black Wall rises;

Twilight gasps in the grip of Night.

Paper and dust are the gems man prizes –

Torches toss in my waning sight.

Drums of glory are lost in the ages,

Bare feet fail on a broken trail –

Let my name fade from the printed pages;

Dreams and visions are growing pale.”

-From “Lines Written in the Realization that I Must Die”

The main difference between HPL and his contemporaries in terms of their verse, is that HPL didn’t simply try to carry on his Yog-Sothery in a metered format; much of his poetry is written as a response to things that happened to him in the course of his daily life. He wrote poems inspired by the Great War, upon reading about Robert E. Lee, to his friends on their birthdays and at Christmas, and as satirical comments on world and other affairs. He experimented with form and style, working with poetical formats to test their limitations. Like much in his literary canon, there was a sense of analysis and experimentation, not a simple tendency towards pastiche.

“Whilst you invade with prattling joy

The chrome-blue swamp oneiroscopick,

And like a multivalent boy

Divagate some bidextrous topick;

Whilst, as I say, you thus amuse

A modern mind with Eliot leanings,

Pray laugh not if your Grandpa choose

A simpler rhyme, and one with meanings.

We old folk know, of course, the world

Is but a chaos frail and vicious;

A very rubbish-vortex, hurl’d

In shapes delusive and capricious;

But split me, Child, if we can mend

Our stale empirick imperfection,

Or keep from making outlines blend

The way they do before dissection!

And so tonight with pen in hand

To wish the blessings of the season,

I’m curst if I can well command

The mode in analytick reason!

I can’t take Santa Claus apart,

In shreds denigrate with strabismus,

So Child, I’ll quit the quest of art,

And wish an Old Man’s Merry Christmas!”

-[Christmas Greeting to Frank Belknap Long]

Like his contemporaries in the Lovecraft Circle, his taste ran towards the archaic and the outmoded. Not for Lovecraft the joyous springing and capering of Walt Whitman! Nor the mind-numbingly footnoted, rhizomous growths of T.S. Eliot. HPL preferred the “despised pastoral” and valued adherence to meter and rhyme, things that contemporary poets were negligently disposing of, to his view. True to form, A Winter Wish begins with a quartet of connected essays extolling the virtues of what HPL considered ‘proper’ poetry, in the face of the upheavals which the modernist wave of authorship was creating around him. Like “The Supernatural Horror in Literature” HPL established a road map to the form, on the basis of his own experimentation, before cruising ahead.

“XXXI. The Dweller

It had been old when Babylon was new;

None knows how long it slept beneath that mound,

Where in the end our questing shovels found

Its granite blocks and brought it back to view.

There were vast pavements and foundation-walls,

And crumbling slabs and statues, carved to shew

Fantastic beings of some long ago

Past anything the world of man recalls.

And then we saw those stone steps leading down

Through a choked gate of graven dolomite

To some black haven of eternal night

Where elder signs and primal secrets frown.

We cleared a path – but raced in mad retreat

When from below we heard those clumping feet.”

-From “The Fungi from Yuggoth”

That’s not to say that HPL didn’t bring the Mythos to poetry: “The Fungi from Yuggoth” is an extended poetical narrative in many parts which lays out a horrible patchwork of his dreamlike imaginings. However, the instances of such material are fairly few and far between. A lot of his verse is of the “occasional” kind, that is arising from a particular occasion wherein the poem would be read aloud as part of the celebration – for example “The Members of the Men’s Club of the First Universalist Church of Providence, R.I., to Its President, About to Leave for Florida on Account of His Health”. It doesn’t get much more particular than that! Other poems are private musings and reflections such as “On Cheating the Post Office”. From this, you might surmise that HPL had little of world-shaking importance to impart with his poetry and, on balance, you’d be right. I would say though, that his poetry is a definite window into his psyche and persona, and adds much to consider about the man, quite apart from his body of prose work.

“The law, despite its show of awe, a soft thing to infract is,

And crime, mere theory in its time, too soon is put in practice!

My soul, now on its downward roll, in crafty scheming romps on,

And ne’er will rest till I can best a Bickford or a Thompson.

-[On Cheating the Post Office]

Like many things about HPL’s work, his poetry stands as a rejection of the status quo and an unfulfilled wish to return to a different – and to his mind “better” – way. Lovecraft obviously had a spiritual affinity to the Augustan poetry of Alexander Pope and his coterie, with its almost atavistic urge towards Classical reinvention and its slavish adherence to meter and rhyme. Modern poetry wasn’t to his taste. Unfortunately, as in most elements of HPL’s life, the world is what it is, and, though he strived valiantly, he couldn’t completely escape it. It shows a degree of astuteness therefore, that he didn’t depend upon his poetry for his income and stuck to his, more saleable, prose offerings.

Most noticeably however, is the fact that HPL had a sense of humour about his poetry. Whether writing to friends or savaging some current topic of discussion, he has a sense of proportion and a self-awareness which is leavening and appealing. Not for him the passionate melodrama of CAS, or the doom-laden negativity of REH: poetry, was a means of communication, along with a sense of discipline, and he used it as a gift to others and a means of affirming his personal relationships. Never wealthy, it seems that he gave the gift of poetry as his seasonal contributions and offerings at social events: in many ways, it was a truer signal of his affections than any other present might have been.

In summary, if you’re looking for creeping horrors from beyond the edge of the universe, or insidious cult practises from the darker parts of the planet, stick with HPL’s prose fiction; most fans aren’t going to find much of value within his poetry, no matter how garish the cover art might be. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an insight into the private life of Lovecraft and a sense of who he was and where he came from, you might find much here to enjoy.

Review: "Suicide Squad"

AYER, David (Dir.), “Suicide Squad”, Warner Bros., DC Entertainment, 2016.

Harry S. Truman was the last of the idealistic American presidents and, ironically, the first of the long line of cynical pragmatists who followed in his footsteps – cynical electoral rorters and political dirty tricksters all. HST was very tall with the demeanour of a hard man who suffered no fools; he was once described as having a voice like honey poured over red bricks. Whenever he needed to convince anybody to see things his way, he would shake their hand, drag them in close and loom over them while patiently explaining what he wanted them to do. It was referred to as “The Treatment” and it invariably got results. This kind of intimidation tactic is probably the least of what you’d expect Batman to be able to pull off; and certainly a staple within the armoury of anyone in his gallery of villains. What we get however, is a bunch of stuffed shirts.

When I heard that DC was putting this group together as part of their opening salvo for the DC Universe, I just shook my head: this was a bad call. I didn’t need to hear who was directing, writing, starring – any of that. If the 90s demonstrated anything about DC, it’s that they don’t do bad guys well. (The 90s weren’t kind to Marvel either, for that matter – see: Deadpool – but at least turning to the dark side wasn’t that much of a stretch for them.) DC is Superman; it’s Wonder Woman. Their hardest hitters have always been the shiny, happy people (with the exception of Batman, but more later). It’s what they do best, and it’s always seemed to me that they did themselves a disservice by not being true to themselves by taking the dark and gritty route – it just smacked of keeping up with Marvel.

The problem with playing dark is that it corrupts everything, and I think that DC is learning this to their cost. If cynical government and social forces oppose Superman, Supes gets sidelined. From the opening scenes of “Man of Steel”, this was what was going to happen. In the original comics, Superman had an open-door policy with the president and could fly right in to the Oval Office without anyone batting an eyelid. It might not seem particularly realistic nowadays – not what we’d expect a US government institution to tolerate – but it made sense in a four-colour world: Superman was a good guy; he didn’t do bad things and so, no-one expected them of him. In our real world, as depicted in Zach Snyder’s films, when people see Superman, the first thought they have is “he could seriously f**k some s**t up!”

This is exactly what occurs to Bruce Wayne when he experiences the fallout from Kal El’s brouhaha with General Zod, and so in “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” he decides to take the Kryptonian out of Earth’s equation. And you can’t blame him really: those fight scenes in “Man of Steel” were an awesome taste of just what two super-people from Krypton would actually be like. Extreme collateral damage. Still, rather than donning the Bat-suit and weaponising kryptonite, he could have just sat back and let the US Congress clip the alien’s wings. Concentrate on taking out Jesse Eisenberg, Batfleck – pick the battles you can actually win. The American government will take care of Superman. Or did I miss something?

Batman is the darkest DC superhero and the last twenty years of the Twentieth Century really put him through an emotional roller-coaster. Every bad thing that could possibly happen to an orphaned billionaire playboy did happen to him, and sometimes more than once. By the year 2000, the scene of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murder had been drained of every iota of its narrative and emotional potential. Things were dark in Gotham City, but with Frank Miller in charge, they were about to get blacker. It works with Batman; it absolutely does not with the rest of the Justice League (with the possible exception of Green Arrow).

The Suicide Squad had its own book back in the day and had a creaky and somewhat tottery genesis. The idea is a direct swipe from 60s Hollywood and 50s Japanese cinema, riffing on films like “The Dirty Dozen”, “The Seven Samurai” and “The Magnificent Seven” (which – good lord! – they’re making again!). The exercise is a high-wire act, because you need to provide a rationale for keeping the group together that outweighs the self-interest of each individual within the team. This calls for some delicate character exposition and some juggling of the opposition which, if done well, really pays off. I never read the Suicide Squad comics so I couldn’t say how they handled it; all I know is that it was a pig’s breakfast on screen.

Right from the start, I should say that I’ve read some of what other critics have said about this movie and, for some of their points, I can see some merit. However: this is not a movie made for critical cinema acclaim; it’s a film for fans. Much ink has been spilled about how tortuous and confusing the plot is; all I have to say about that is: welcome to the comics! In the four-colour world, narratives are twisty and complicated; getting your head around all the ins and outs of a typical story arc requires some thinking, or at least that you pay attention. Negative comments have been penned about the endless fight sequences at the expense of characterisation; but hey! It’s comics: the fighting is the characterisation. “Form over substance!” is the cry ringing across the Internet. Well – duh! It’s a visual medium borrowing from another visual medium which shows off its stories and characters to their best advantage. Cinema critics should just leave criticism of comics vehicles to comics critics.

All that aside, there is a lot about this film which doesn’t work. A thing to know going in, is that this is a Deadshot and Harley Quinn film; they are the main characters and everyone else is incidental. Don’t let any notion of Jared Leto’s on-set stunts or the reported method-acting rigmarole of the actors get you sidelined: no-one else gets the screen time that Will Smith and Margot Robbie do. Which is fine, because Margot Robbie deserves a Best Supporting Actress nod just for putting up with that ridiculous costume and Will Smith is the only character in the ensemble who could reasonably knit the group into anything like a team. The rest are just crazy, or cannon-fodder.

Much is made of the fact that Deadshot has an eleven-year-old daughter, and she gets in his way every time he gets tempted or is about to do something dramatic (like shooting Batman). This is fine – dependent NPCs are a mainstay of superhero fiction. However, when asked by Harley if he’s ever been in love, his response is a definite no, along the lines that those who kill people ruthlessly for a living and yet still “sleep like kittens” are beyond such things. So, why the daughter? And why doesn’t Amanda ‘Leverages for a Living’ Waller make much more of this weakness? She claims to have strings on everyone but it all seems to boil down to putting a grenade in everyone’s neck. If she was as good as she says she is, she wouldn’t need the explosive implants.

Which brings me to Harley Quinn. There’s a lot to like about Margot Robbie’s portrayal – it’s as loopy as you’d ever want. However, the basic premise of this character is dark and twisted and the movie is not helped by scenes of intimacy between her and her obsession. Robbie milks ever second of her screen time throwing everything into her portrayal, and it’s both cute and alarming in equal measure. This is probably not where Paul Dini thought his creation would go, however (or maybe he did? Who can say?). In the animated Batman series of the 90s, Harley was just goofily obsessed with her “Puddin’” and “Mr. J.” seemed merely tolerant of her association. Here, it’s a full-on broken romance with all of the co-dependency and multiply-layered violence that you’d expect. But that’s problematic: the Joker isn’t in love with Harley Quinn. Along with the fact that Batman doesn’t shoot people dead, this is one of the mainstays of the DC universe that those in charge seem happy to toss out with the bathwater.

The other characters are all over the shop. El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) is given some material to work with: he’s ashamed of the deaths and violence which he’s caused and which have cost him his family; having renounced the use of his powers he has to be coerced into manifesting them when the chips are down. This is fine but – can someone please explain the Mayan deity freak-out that happens in the third act?! Katana (Karen Fukuhara) is completely wasted and, if you blink, you’ll miss Slipknot (Adam Beach), who is only there to prove that Rick Flag will push the button if anyone breaks ranks (c’mon, you know someone had to be the object lesson!). Killer Croc suffers from technical issues mainly due to the fact that his dialogue is all badly overdubbed and mostly unintelligible and also due to the fact that, once he takes his shirt off, he looks like a weedy guy with an oversized head. Killer Croc is supposed to be huge; not, in this instance. I’m not sure what was going on with Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney): we get told that he has robbed “all the banks in Australia” and has headed Stateside to widen his field of operations. Excuse me? Australia isn’t a one-horse town on the arse-end of nowhere: we have a lot of banks, thank you very much, enough so that the thought of robbing them all is a ludicrous notion. And, along with this insult, the character is woefully under-utilised in the humour-provision stakes, which is clearly what he’s there for.

One character that piqued my interest was the Enchantress. Everything about the way this character was portrayed was very cool. The spooky eyes; the floating fiery motes in her vicinity; the ashy aura around her – there was nothing to dislike. Everything about this character said ‘Mythos nemesis’ to me, in a big way. Creepy, creepy, creepy. The June Moone aspect of the role was a dead loss, along with the under-cooked romantic entanglement with the eminently-useless Rick Flag; but the mayhem that she and her brother Incubus unleashed had me wondering how to turn that into a “Call of Cthulhu” adventure. I may just do that...

I have to ask at this point: is it just me, or is the footage that we’ve been seeing in the trailers different from that which was in the film? Trailers notoriously show off all of the good stuff before the release of the film but I’m sure that some of the movie’s gags were not the same as what we see in the film; certainly some of the trailer footage from the bar scene didn’t make it to the movie. Take the moment when Deadshot pushes El Diablo to unleash his powers. After the resultant pyrotechnic display, Deadshot tries to avoid retributive immolation by saying “I was just tryin’ to get you there. We cool, right?” But in the movie it falls flat. Because it’s different footage from what was in the trailer. I re-watched the trailers before and after going to the cinema and all of the joke moments I enjoyed were demonstrably different in the film. Maybe it’s just the different editing; maybe the trailers move faster than the film; I don’t know. It was just different; and not in a good way. Jokes, so sorely lacking in all of DC’s efforts so far, cannot be massaged to the point of predictability. If there had been a laugh-track on this film, I think the audience would still have kept quiet.

This film suffers because it takes a tried and true formula as a premise and then doesn’t follow it. Large ensemble casts can work and there is a way to do it – they’re re-making “Magnificent Seven” for gods’ sake! From a writing perspective, each character has a purpose – leader; wounded hero; jester; bruiser – but here, none of that is allowed to crystallise. It’s ill-defined and sketchy, and it serves the movie badly.

I began this review with a look at Harry S. Truman and there’s a reason for that: none of these “villains” in this film could give anyone “The Treatment”. There’s no gravitas in any of them – with the possible exception of Harley Quinn. Even Amanda Waller gets her balls chopped off by Batman in the post-credit sequence. It’s for this reason I agree with the cinema critics saying that it’s all style over substance. Heath Ledger had me looking over my shoulder with his work in “The Dark Knight”; none of these bad boys even made me flinch. A funky costume does not a villain make.

I’m giving this two Tentacled Horrors.

Oh. And Jared Leto? Worst. Joker. Ever.