Review: ‘Salem’s Lot

KING, Stephen, ‘Salem’s Lot, New English Library/Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., London, 1976.

Reprint: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 439 pp. Mild wear; some spotting to the text block edges and top edge dusted; mild spotting to the preliminaries. Dustwrapper lightly rubbed and edgeworn. Very Good.

Do I think Stephen King is a good writer or a bad one? I’m not sure. It seems to me that he has claimed the horror genre as blue-collar territory, an anti-intellectual property, and I’m not happy with that. I don’t like to pigeon-hole writing sight-unseen: it’s either entertaining or it’s not. Some fairly ordinary writing survives because people are amused and distracted by it; some very worthy writing falls by the wayside because, while its literary qualities are undoubted, it’s just boring. There are many people out there who have read War and Peace because they felt they “ought to”, who might well have had a better time with The da Vinci Code. There are people who enjoyed reading Fifty Shades of Grey; there are people who are stup-, er, “non-discerning”: they don’t necessarily occupy the same intersecting sweet spot in a Venn diagram, but it’s certainly a way of reading the terrain.

In English-speaking countries, novels get separated into genre fiction and literary fiction and heaven help you if your work falls into the former category. King champions this underdog relegation and yet his output seems increasingly to be trying to squirm his way out of the box (Spookily, his new book - Sleeping Beauties - written with his son Owen, is the same book that his other son, Joe Hill, has just published, The Fireman – am I wrong to think that the premises of both these novels are eerily similar?). My personal theory is that King’s work survives because people feel that it’s entertaining and, as long as people continue to be entertained, it will hang around.

Stephen King’s writing moves through two fairly distinct phases – the early horror writing and the vague, go-nowhere meanderings of his dark-fantasy influenced later oeuvre. Enjoyment of his body of work seems to depend on when you first picked up one of his books: those who enjoyed Carrie probably don’t quite ‘get’ "The Langoliers", and those who like Pet Sematary probably don’t think much of Thinner. To my mind, there are diminishing returns on investment with King as his career has progressed: his later works are not as good as his early ones.

It’s not as if King’s works are homogeneous. There’s variety – which is a good thing – and he accommodates readers who are into dark fantasy (The Dark Tower) as well as those who prefer short stories (Night Shift). In fact, with efforts like 11-22-63 he seems to be moving further away from straight horror writing and into something more like science fiction. It seems as if, whilst championing the genre fiction camp, King is trying to work away from the notion of being a single-genre writer.

As a personal preference, I stick to Stephen King’s straight horror material, the stuff that allowed him to first hit the big-time in terms of sales, like this vehicle, ‘Salem’s Lot. This book came out in 1975 – the year in which it is set – and was King’s second successful novel after Carrie. I like to think that it sprang from King accepting some kind of dare: “no-one wants to read about vampires – that stuff’s dumber than dirt”. Challenge accepted! Yes, if you didn’t already know it, this is a vampire story – take that, Bella and Edward!

As with much of King’s material, the setting is a bucolic New England struggle-town, with colourful characters and a homey, Yankee neighbourliness. The town of Jerusalem’s Lot (‘Salem’s Lot for short) is a sleepy little place on the way from Somewhere to Somewhere Else, a sleepy flyspeck on a well-worn road map of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it forgetability. Our protagonist, Ben Mears, a moderately successful novelist, comes home to the ‘Lot to face his childhood fears concerning an abandoned house which overlooks the township. As a child, on a dare, he entered the house and saw the hanging corpse of the previous tenant, and the nasty image has stayed with him into adulthood. Taking up residence among the quirky types in a local guesthouse, he embarks upon a new novel and an affair with a wholesome local girl. Unfortunately, his period of occupancy coincides with the arrival of a vampire, summoned to the old Marston mansion by the devil-worshipping activities of its past owners.

Anyone versed in vampiric lore will see what happens next coming, but that’s exactly how this book works. The leeches invade under cover of night and blend in; they then start to pick off the town’s residents one by one, in a slaking of bloodlust that snowballs rapidly out of control. The impact of this novel comes not from the blood-letting monsters, but from the townsfolk and their reaction to the creatures. The juxtaposition of modern individuals with the vampire legend of ancient times is what makes the work tick along.

That’s not to say that it all falls neatly into place: there are some clunky moments. Our small band of heroes, assembled about our hero Ben, mirrors a bit too neatly the heroes of Stoker’s work, gathered about the driven Abraham van Helsing. It’s a bit too pat; too neat a call back to the classic vampire novel. Also, the willingness, or not, of the characters to accept the presence of vampires in their community is not totally convincing. There’s a lot of talk along the lines of “this can’t be so – not in a modern society such as ours - there must be some rational explanation”, but it’s a bit limp and liable to be swept aside once the bloodsuckers emerge. Once you’ve seen a vampire, you can’t really pretend you didn’t, can you? These characters spend a lot of time trying to do just that.

As well, there’s a bit of Hollywood morality going on with this book and it’s not good. Ben starts going out with Susan Norton (against her mother’s wishes) and – inevitably – they have sex. It’s noteworthy that Susan insists that it takes place, against Ben’s notion that maybe they should wait in deference to her mother, and that it happens in a covert and sneaky kind of way. Later, after Ben tells her that vampires have infested the town, the first thing she does is to go up to the mansion to confront the villains and get to the bottom of things. Bam! Instant vampire on a one-way trip to a stake-out. There’s no way to avoid reading this trajectory as that of the “bad girl” in a slasher flick who goes down on her boyfriend in the first scene. Yes, it hearkens back to Dracula again, and the notion of the Fallen Woman and her cabal of Rescuers a la Mina Harker; but, as with the van Helsing mimicry mentioned above, it’s just too neat.

The strength of this novel is when it collides the old and the new and comes up with fresh variations. There are scenes of incredible tension, such as when the removalist guys pick up the vampire’s crate and ship it to ‘Salem’s Lot from the waterside warehouse where it was stowed. The fright that these guys get in doing this is palpable. So, too, is the scene where Susan enters the Marston mansion in search of a rational explanation. There are many scenes where the tawdry lives of the townspeople shatter under the vampiric cruelty and these are moments of breath-catching scariness.

In summation, this is worth a read, especially if you’re about to go and see the latest incarnation of King’s It onscreen. The comfortable community background of King’s New England territory is a hallmark of both novels, although the premise of It suffers from King’s tendency to be obscure and abstruse rather than springing from a coherent catalyst like this (it exists on the King timeline right at the point where my eyes start to glaze over). Where it partakes too much of Stoker it suffers; but where it focuses on the things King knows how to write about, it’s pure genius.

Four Tentacled Horrors.

Review: Child of God

McCARTHY, Cormac, Child Of God, Picador/Pan Macmillan, London, 2011.

Octavo; paperback; 186pp. Minor wear; a small surface tear to the back cover. Very good.

I would like to introduce you to Lester Ballard. Some of you might have met him already, but for those who haven’t, he will come like a revelation to you. Be warned: he’s not a particularly nice fellow. In fact, having met him, you might well wish you hadn’t. I wouldn’t blame you.

This novel by Cormac MacCarthy is all about Lester and his personal woes. Lester went into gaol for a short spell and, when he emerged, he discovered that he’d been dispossessed. The county resumed ownership of his family land and home and put it up for auction. Despite showing up at the sale, armed and ready to defend his ancestral territory, Lester gets run off by the Sherriff. This is the start of his trouble…

What can I say about McCarthy’s writing that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? It’s shockingly good. There’s not a word out of place. He conjures the East Tennessee hill country with an effortless beauty and economy. During the course of the tale, the seasons swing around in their stated course and you can actually feel the world shifting about you in the prose. The wildlife; the trees and plants; the muggy heat of summer and the bitter bite of winter – it surrounds you as you navigate the text. It’s like stepping into another world, and one that the author knows intimately.

Not only this, McCarthy infuses the narrative with the vernacular of the local tribes. Each character comes alive off the page, a living and breathing representative of the community. The local patois literally twangs in your ears as you read it. There’s not a bum note in any of it. As many have said so often before me, the language is tough, and lean, and incredibly beautiful.

And then, there’s the horror.

Lester, having lost everything, goes Bush (as we say here in Australia). He finds a deserted farmhouse in a back wood and settles in to establish himself. He scrounges food and supplies, scraping together enough cash and tradeable material to keep himself in ammunition – his only notable achievement in life is that he is a dead shot. He makes friends with the local junkyard overseer, whose bevy of girl children are all named after afflictions drawn from an old medical dictionary, and he keeps a weather-eye out for the Sherriff, who has Lester firmly in his sights as a potential bad egg. A good judge of character is the Sherriff.

One cold evening, Lester discovers a parked car on a side road near one of his trails and, inside it, two dead people, killed by exhaust fumes while embroiled in youthful passion. Lester steals their cash and anything else of use to him and then carries off the dead girl to his ruined clapboard hideaway. There, he alleviates his own thwarted passions, and stores her corpse in the attic for later.

Yes. Lester Ballard is a young man of strange lusts.

It would be easy to simply dismiss Lester as a twisted sum’bitch and be done with it. However, in McCarthy’s masterful hands, we are simultaneously shocked by Lester’s actions, and brought to a clear knowledge of why he is this way. Throughout the book we come to understand Lester and the things he does; not to accept, or agree with them – that would be horrible – but a steady empathy emerges from the text. We can see exactly where he’s coming from.

Unfortunately, Lester suffers a set-back and loses his new girlfriend and his rickety home. With a dire winter approaching, he re-locates to a new home in a series of limestone caves and settles in. Then he goes and shoots himself a couple of new girlfriends.

The whole story rolls onwards to a remarkable, but inevitable, conclusion. Lester is no Hannibal Lecter; he’s not very smart – cunning, definitely, but not smart – and he has no control over his temper. He eludes capture; gets caught and escapes; and keeps on doing the same things over and over again. When the final reckoning happens, even he is resigned to it, and goes to his fate, not willingly, but with the knowledge that there is no alternative.

In the final analysis, we see Lester as not an aberration of his community, but as a somehow natural consequence of it: the ignorance, poverty and prejudice of the East Tennessee townships created Lester Ballard, as surely as the rain created the limestone caves beneath the forested hills.

What has been read cannot be un-read; this is a bell that can’t be un-rung. Once you finish this book it will stay with you forever. That’s not only because of the terrible, terrible things which take place between its covers, but because it’s also wrapped up in some of the most beautiful writing you will ever come across. There’s awfulness and laugh-out-loud humour, along with an incredibly wonderful scene in a blacksmith’s workshop where Lester gets his axe sharpened. Amazingly, and because it’s McCarthy’s point, none of it is out of place or wrong – it’s an incredible, complex and daunting piece of work, complete and whole, in and of itself.

Five Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: The Silence of the Lambs

HARRIS, Thomas, The Silence of the Lambs, Guild Publishing Ltd./William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1989.

Octavo; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine titles; 295pp. Moderate wear; rolled; text block and page edges toned. Dustwrapper well-rubbed. Good.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m no fan of the ‘serial-killer chic’ that preponderated during the 80s and 90s. Having been raised on a steady diet of Agatha Christie, I expect my fictional murderers to be a coherent and well-reasoned bunch, with clearly stated motives; psycho killers fly right in the face of all that (they’re mad, don’t you know?). This trend set Patricia Cornwall and her ilk onto a money-spinning path and made every televisual FBI agent a profiling savant and world-class plumber of the depths of the human psyche. In short, every facet of serial-killing mayhem became a well-worn trope which, in time, as these things do, began to voraciously feed off itself, as various writers started to pull at the fabric of the notion and break it down into different shades and nuances. It was a literary and filmic Heraclitan fire that eventually reached its point of zero entropy.

Interestingly, as I’ve also said before, the notion was not entirely new. Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock set up the trend with Psycho, written in 1959 and filmed in 1960. Back then, FBI agents were simply the drone-like servants of a faceless government agency - constantly eschewing personal glory for the collective good of the whole - while private eyes and detectives were the Cool Kids. It would take another almost thirty years before the likes of Kay Scarpetta and Fox Mulder would show up to tread the boards.

I’ve read Patricia Cornwall’s books. Well, I’ve read most of them: there was a point where I realised that life is too short. That point was where Scarpetta’s nemesis was revealed to have been subtly influencing other serial-killers, without their awareness of him doing it, and sending them after Scarpetta, her partners and her offspring. Given the “long game” orchestrations necessary for establishing these plans, it became increasingly obvious that Scarpetta’s frenemy was not only psychic (as well as psycho) but also able to travel through time. At that point I gave up. It’s interesting to note that James Herbert did the same thing with his series of ghost novels with Ash the psychic investigator as their main protagonist – the ghosts were mainly haunting other phantoms, not the people living in the houses they occupied. Tropes feeding off themselves…

In the history of the Academy Awards and the ranking of cinema by vestedly interested parties, only five horror films have won Oscars: “The Exorcist” (1973), “Jaws” (1975), “The Sixth Sense” (1999), “Black Swan” (2010) and “Silence of the Lambs” (1991), which, incidentally, is one of only three films to make a clean sweep of the awards in its year. I was already heartily sick of serial-killers by the time the movie came out, so it was some time before I saw the film. When I did finally see it, I thought it was okay, although I kind of felt that Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling came off as a sort of cut-rate Dana Scully – obviously, I was watching quite a bit of “X-Files” by this point. There was just one question that I came away with – what was all the guff about lambs being quiet? I didn’t catch any particular reference to it in the film - and that may well give some indication of my level of concentration during the process – but it’s the sole enigma that I took away from the movie. Accordingly, I snaffled a copy of the book when it showed up at work and decided to give it a whirl: perhaps the literary source of the tale would be a little more forthcoming.

Upon diving into this book, one thing became immediately obvious: Thomas Harris doesn’t waste any words. There are certain writers who are florid in their style and others whose writing can only be considered spare; Harris’s style is almost as spare as a haiku. In this work, paragraphs feel baggy and overstretched if they run to more than two sentences. Having just waded through Toni Morrison’s Beloved (more later), I felt as if I’d just stepped out of the Amazon Basin and into the Gobi Desert. This writing is lean. If a single sentence isn’t doing the work of three, then it’s wasted space. It’s certainly refreshing. Stephen King has said that writing is tough for most writers but a torment for Thomas Harris, and this level of craftsmanship is clearly self-evident. It’s like Gustave Flaubert taking a single day to polish one sentence of Madame Bovary.

This level of focus pays off well with the characters which populate the novel. It’s often been said that living with a psychologist must be an exercise in second- and third-guessing, and of reigning-in every word or gesture for fear of it being extensively over-analysed; I’m guessing that working in the real-life FBI Behavioural Science Department must be like that, but dialled way up high. Procedure and regulations dominate the activity of Harris’s Federal Department, and everybody cites rules and guidelines as they sift the evidence mounting up around them. This sometimes makes them feel a bit like robots, but does the double-duty of revealing those procedural aspects of the FBI to the uninitiated reader. Nowadays, we’re all hip to the way the Feds work, but back in 1988, this would have been a handy primer.

The writing serves to do many things in this book; however it does make the characters seem, on the one hand, paranoid and emotionally stunted and, on the other, bland and characterless. This is really its only drawback. By the time we get to the works of Kathy Reichs, many aspects of forensic law-enforcement have become commonplace truisms; when this book was being penned, Harris was held back by the double-task of not only writing a thriller, but of educating newbs about how the FBI gets its work done.

The other thing that the writing is doing though, is sketching the various locales where the investigation takes place. Harris outlines struggle-town Middle America with the deftest, lightest of touches, creating subtle – tiny - word pictures that conjure up entire vistas in no space at all. Abandoned white goods at a river’s edge; creepy rose-patterned wallpaper in a funeral home; the smell of a government vehicle’s interior – all are conveyed with a beautiful impact. Conversely, it’s what Harris chooses not to depict that lets him down: for example, there are many hints of things going on in Buffalo Bill’s basement but Harris chooses to write around them rather than about them. We are told of “tableaux” in certain rooms, but not of what (although really, we do know); there is a hand protruding from a bathtub full of solid plaster, but it’s almost a throwaway reference. Harris uses a switch from precision to casual as a way of suggesting the horrors abounding throughout the book and often this method seems coy rather than an unwillingness to fling open the doors of the grand guignol.

That being said, the scenes where Clarice Starling confronts Hannibal Lecter springboard exactly from this technique and are peerless in doing so. The moments where Lecter appears in the book dial the creepy factor up immensely. Despite being behind bars and nets, strapped to trolleys, in strait-jackets and hockey masks, we always feel that Lecter is only a tiny lapse of attention away from some hideous act of mayhem. We feel Starling’s tension every second that she’s in his company and our attention also becomes instantly laser-focussed. Harris’s precision-slash-obfuscation technique translates to the dialogue masterfully: each word is laden with hidden or extra meaning; what is not being said is almost more important that what is. Here, the coyness is part of Lecter’s character, and it works terrifically.

Lecter, predictably, is the gun-character of the book. His malevolence is right beside us every step of the way and we feel Starling’s torn emotions about whether to leave him to rot behind bars, or to use him as a resource. Remember those diagrams that show the gravimetric effects of planets on a grid of outer space? Lecter is like a black hole which funnels the gridlines of the narrative down in his wake. Reading the book for the first time, I was impressed by how well Sir Anthony Hopkins was able to capture the subtleties of the character in the movie. I think the only thing he missed was the six fingers on one hand (and maybe he did even that – I’ll have to check again).

Conversely, Clarice Starling seemed a little too much of the Everyman for my taste (and I’m using that term specifically). There were moments where her learned experience lent benefits to the investigation but there were others where her unique personality seemed to be of little consequence. To clarify: there is very little personality involved at all in this character. She bounces off the other players in the story, her observations rounding out their personae while saying nothing about her own. With her superior officers she plays the Good Soldier and bounces regulations and procedure around the court; with other characters she rationalises their behaviour with internal monologues laced with psycho-babble. There is a museum scientist – the guy who tells her about Death’s Head moths – who develops a crush on her (or maybe he just wants to make a cocoon out of her skin? It’s hard to tell) and we have no idea from Starling whether she realises this, or if it is at all reciprocated. In short, Clarice Starling is a very loosely-sketched concept, and anything which individualises her is more or less beside the point. It kind of harks back to the days of Robert Bloch, when FBI agents were the faceless automata of the Government.

Is this deliberate on Harris’s part? It’s unclear, and also uncertain as to whether it’s an exercise that has any point. Maybe he’s underscoring notions of gender equality in the FBI; maybe not. The choice to make Starling female is deliberately contrived to make her seem more vulnerable when she finally takes on Buffalo Bill in his basement of horrors, but it has very little impact on the story otherwise. The same rationale, incidentally, is the reason that Cornwell’s main character is a woman and also Kathy Reichs’s – we are programmed to feel more uneasy when a woman falls into danger than when a man does, as every slasher-flick ever made is a testament to.

In the final analysis, this is a great read - especially if you like masterful writing - only let down a little by its clunky characterisation in some instances. I did finally get to find out what the hoo-ha about the quiet lambs was all about, so I can put that to rest, and I’m interested in seeing the film once more to compare and contrast while it’s still fresh. Hannibal Lecter stands out as the sine qua non of serial killers and all the literary ones who followed in his wake are anaemic shadows to be ignored – or not – as your tastes dictate.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me, with a nice Chianti and a side of fava beans.

Review: Midnight in Peking

FRENCH, Paul, Midnight in Peking, Penguin Group (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Camberwell Vic., 2012.

Reprint: octavo; paperback, with colour endpaper maps; 278pp., with 16pp. of monochrome and full-colour plates. Minor wear; text block bent. Very good to near fine.

When I started this blog (seems like ages ago now) one of my aims was to highlight the notion of the Cthulhu Mythos in China, something which seemed to me to have been studiously ignored by the roleplaying and literary agencies out there, regardless of the fact that China crops up as a reference in every other Lovecraft work, or in those of his circles. In starting my research, I was blown away by the book Shanghai – History of a Decadent City by Stella Dong, because it covered material of such outstanding ferocity that even the worst writer on the planet couldn’t help but produce a work which would make the reader sit up and take notice (I’m not saying that Dong is a poor writer; far from it – she’s a great writer and a better historian. However I suspect that, given the material, any attempt at literary fireworks would simply have fallen by the wayside in the face of the gob-smacking revelations which she was imparting, so she just rolled it all out, without the frills). Given the sheer scale of corruption and decadence that was China at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, I couldn’t think of a better place for Keepers to think about setting up their Call of Cthulhu campaigns and so I began this blog to start people thinking in that direction. Many years later, I followed a few scraps of information which led me to the awareness of this particular book. Serendipitously, it showed up at a bookshop which I was volunteering to help set up and I claimed it as the reward for my assistance. That was a day ago – I literally could not put it down once I had cracked the covers.

If Republican China is a place where it’s possible to populate the landscape with Lovecraftian horrors, it’s because it’s a place that was already teeming with monsters. Not the scabrous, squamous, tentacled abominations of HPL’s imagination, but monsters nonetheless; corrupt and soulless, walking the world in suits of human flesh. This book drags them out into the light of day.

The matter of this work is the murder of a young British woman of White Russian descent and the dumping of her body outside the walls of the Chinese (at that time) former capital. Deaths were a dime a dozen at this time, in that place, but it was her connexions which gave this crime precedence: she was the adopted daughter of E.T.C. Werner, a former diplomat and renowned sinologist, with certain beneficial links to the nascent Chinese government, the Kuomintang. Pamela Werner had gone ice-skating in the Foreign Legation section of the city – that portion which was besieged during the Boxer Rebellion almost forty years previously – and had vanished. The next morning she was found beside a defunct moat outside the old city walls, near an old watchtower of haunted reputation, and so mangled as to be almost unidentifiable. She had been brutally bashed and stabbed repeatedly all over her head and torso; she had been cut open from her neck to her pubis and her ribs had been broken, snapped outwards, the sternum ripped away; her heart, liver, bladder and one kidney had been removed and her stomach, although in situ, had been disconnected at the base of her oesophagus and the top of her small intestine. She was only identified by the distinctive colour of what remained of one eye and a platinum watch which she was wearing on an arm which someone had tried to hack off. What followed was a tortuous police investigation, hampered by a maze of diplomatic stonewalling, jurisdictional arguments, political game-playing, corruption and sheer ineptitude.

Paul French, a writer living and working in China, conjures the seedy and wicked depravity of Republican era Peking, detailing unflinchingly the sordid nature of the back-alley bars, opium dens and whorehouses, sheltering cheek-by-jowl with the high-class hotels and international clubs. This bizarre juxtaposing of the expensive and sumptuous with the tawdry and dissolute is the hallmark of China at this time and French brings it glowingly to life. As well, he deftly sketches the main players in the investigation – Colonel Han Shih-ching, the local police detective representing the Chinese authorities; DCI Richard Dennis, dragged-in from Tientsin to assist Colonel Han and to act as an intermediary with the police forces of the International Legations, led by Commissioner Thomas; and the dead girl’s father E.T.C Werner. As well as a veritable rogue’s gallery of shifty diplomats, shady underworld types and conniving thugs, French conjures the despicable world of 1937 Peking, where anything and anyone are up for grabs in the name of sick entertainment – even a 19-year-old school girl. With the looming presence of the Japanese army encircling the city in a grip of steel, French paints a sordid world of frenzied hedonism whirling faster as the inevitable hammer-blow approaches.

Shocking as the details of Pamela’s desecration are, even more shocking is the willingness of the International authorities, the incumbent Chinese legal apparatus and even the invading Japanese overlords to turn their backs on the crime and bury it in red tape and obfuscation. In the end, it is only the girl’s father, spending his entire personal fortune, who gets to the bottom of the story, after detectives and policemen have been ordered away, sent home, or killed off. In the interests of “saving face” everyone abandons Pamela and any notion of justice for her murder. In fact, French reveals that he found Werner’s self-compiled investigation report in a box in London labelled “Miscellaneous Correspondence” where it had been buried by the British Government and successfully ignored for over eighty years. It contained all the pieces of the puzzle and all the answers.

The sheer travesty of humanity and governance revealed by this incident is bewildering. These individuals, supposedly representing the apex of decency and civilisation, bend over backwards to distance themselves from the crime, which exposes them to ridicule and censure; in their own way, they are no more human than the monsters in human skin-suits who perpetrated the act. French leads us through the whole series of events slowly stripping away layers of deceit and corruption until we are left with what can only – in retrospect – have been the outcome desired by all parties involved: a swift sweeping under the carpet of an ugly episode followed by a return of the status quo.

Yes, there is no justice at the end of this book. We know, ultimately, what happened to Pamela and French sifts the clues to provide clear probability where the chain of evidence falls thin. No-one walks away with clean hands here; everyone is tainted by guilt and complicity. In fact, E.T.C. Werner, at first presented to us as an insufferable academic thwarting any attempt at empathy due to his intellectual rigor, is revealed as the only person in the story largely free from blame. That French is able to squarely point his finger to where culpability lies is only due to Werner’s painstaking search to find his daughter’s killer, a quest that consumed the last years of his life.

Paul French has crafted a horrifying true tale of murder and international cupidity. It deftly catches the wildest heights of Republican China with Japanese agents provocateurs lurking in the shadows, destitute White Russians dying in the alleys, canny rickshaw drivers selling information, a Korean hermaphrodite trading underworld secrets, and even a clandestine nudist colony established by the British in the mountains west of the city. Every time I dive into this murky barrel of base humanity, I find myself shocked by some new revelation and French serves it up palpable and steaming.

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.

Deep Waters - Boothe...

After pounding the asphalt for a few minutes, it occurred to me that I didn’t know where I was going and that, perhaps, going by foot wouldn’t be the best option. I stopped running and called out to Boothe to do likewise.

He jogged back to where I stood, panting. ‘What’s up?’ he said.

Around us the night was cool and dark, fresh with salt from the sea and rustling with a mild breeze that carried with it the sound of Prudence’s car fading into the distance.

‘Where’re we headed, Boothe?’ I asked.

He turned and pointed upwards along the road, to where it gained the headland and flattened out before diving into the salt marsh beyond.

‘We need to get somewhere higher,’ he said, ‘just up there should be fine.’

‘And that’s where the Latinos are?’ I queried.

‘It doesn’t matter where they are,’ he responded rather cryptically, ‘come on.’

He took off once more and I trotted along behind him, trying to absorb this new information.

The thing which was bothering me the most at that point was the hunk of rock that I was carrying around with me. I knew that Rebekah had said that I would need it, but the image of Dagon was currently a huge pain in the ass. No pocket that I had would accommodate it so I made a rapid executive decision to stash it. Nearby was a turn-off to the Marsh gold-refinery, with a big fancy sign advertising the fact. I walked over to it and slipped the fetish behind the granite-brick base of the billboard. Making a few Temple genuflections, I hoped that I would remember what I’d done with it in time for Rebekah’s prophecy to come true and took off after Boothe.

When I caught up with him, he was kneeling on the macadam and muttering, with his fists held to either side of his head, the thumbs crooked outward like horns. As I approached, a gasp of white smoke appeared in the air before him and a hole ripped open in the middle of nothing. An oval of emptiness grew, taller than it was wide, and the air that it encompassed was darker than that around it.

‘Say Boothe,’ I said walking up behind him, ‘what the Hell is that?’

He took his hands away from his head and turned his face up towards me; disconcertingly, his eyes were blank again.

‘It’s a gate,’ he said, a note of pride in his voice, ‘and we’ll need it to get ahead of the game. C’mon.’

As he struggled to his feet, I stepped forward, raising my hand to investigate the thing which he’d called into being.

‘Careful,’ he said from behind me, ‘don’t touch the edges. It’s really thin; it’ll slice you six ways from Sunday, you’re not careful.’ He squirreled around me and jumped through with a perky hop. ‘C’mon!’ he said.

Being a Hell of a lot taller and broader than Boothe, I gingerly minced my way through the opening, being wary of the margins. Once through, the air was dank and close, heavy with rot and the smell of cold damp stone. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my Zippo.

In the blackness I could just make out a dim light, the scratching of a pencil and the tearing of paper.

‘Where are we Boothe?’ The light moved and Boothe stepped forward, waving a tiny flashlight.

‘We’re behind a big door we need opened,’ he answered, pointing a beam over my shoulder. I turned; the gate was gone and there, as promised was a large wooden barrier held together with big heavy nails. I took a step towards it and placed my hands on its damp swollen surface. I heaved but the resistance was great: it moved only a little. There didn’t seem to be any keyhole or padlock on this side of the barrier.

‘Any ideas,’ I asked Boothe.

Smirking, he reached into his denim jacket and pulled out a glittery object that looked like a big fancy key. This he tapped on the door’s surface and it sprang open instantly, groaning as it did so. Before us, stretching into the darkness, was a long ditch, adorned with the twisted wreckage of rails and rotten sleepers. I spun around, looking quickly about me.

‘Say!’ I exclaimed, ‘this is the old train tunnel! I was just here earlier on…’

‘And you still are,’ Boothe pushed me forward and swung the doors closed behind us, ‘but you don’t exactly want to meet up.’ He tapped the door with the key once more and it vanished in a mournful twinkle. ‘Where’d you park your car?’

I gestured vaguely to my left. ‘What?’ I asked, trying to keep up.

‘The gate moves through space and time,’ Boothe explained scrabbling up the ditch. I looked upwards to the crown of the domed hill, seeing the flashing beam of a torch swinging around wildly. A chill slipped down my spine. I turned to the dirt wall beside me and followed Boothe.

At the top of the rise, the salt marsh spread out before us and I gestured to Boothe indicating the location of the Firebird; he hurried off into the gloom, skipping deftly from tussock to tussock through the mire. I waded after him.

We soon came to the car, parked as I’d left it at the end of the dirt track.

‘You have a spare key?’ Boothe asked. By way of answer, I popped the right rear hubcap and pulled the spare out from where I’d taped it. I quickly unlocked the doors and we slipped inside. Gripping the steering wheel, I glanced sidelong at Boothe.

‘“The best of hands”, huh?’

He shrugged, pulling on his seatbelt, and I turned the engine over and gunned out into the night…

*****

To Be Continued…

IX - Batophobia: The Fear of Falling Objects

“This is another variation of the punishment complex. Instead of an act of nature (the delusion of the astrophobiac) punishing the sinner, it is man-made objects that here threaten the guilty soul with annihilation. A resentful power hurls at him an astonishing barrage from high buildings, scaffoldings, ceilings, walls, even from the sky itself. Crushed beneath heavy stones, he thinks to expiate nobly what he has secretly enjoyed. There is even an element of exhibitionism that enters here, and he fears death both for itself and because it will deprive him of the harrowing pleasure of his mental pantomime.

“There is a certain dream-like quality in my illustration. It is all unreal – the graphic projection of punishment by a diseased mind. Nothing is fixed, nothing stable. The world in which he has his being is in conflict and chaotic. Even the very stars are falling.”

John Vassos

New York City

May 25^th, 1931