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