Review: Children of Lovecraft

DATLOW, Ellen (ed.), Children of Lovecraft, Dark Horse Books/Dark Horse Comics Inc., Milwaukie OR, 2016.

Octavo; paperback; 367pp. Mild wear; some mild edgewear and creasing to the covers; some scraping to the hinges. Very good.

I’ve been sitting on this for awhile. Recent Lovecraftian compilations which I’ve encountered have, frankly, left a bad taste, and I was wary about diving in to this offering. Other books have either been dubiously curated, or have wandered into areas more splatterpunk (and, necessarily, indulgent) thereby losing the point of what it actually means to be an offering along the lines of Lovecraft’s work. This collection, however, directly addresses this issue and sets the entire notion of Cthulhoid horror back on track. (And it has a cover by Mike Mignola – how can it be wrong?)

The directive to the various writers assembled here is to create fiction with a clear, but understated, connexion to Lovecraft’s work. This means that all of the tales between these covers explore ideas and tropes well-known from HPL’s canon, but in such a way that they are not bleedingly obvious: this is not fan-fiction, or pastiche explorations along the line to ‘What Happened Next?’ Each story here is a strong and resonant piece in its own right, gaining strength from its source material without ever leaning too hard upon it. In this way, they explore the concepts of Lovecraft’s Yog-sothothery without going over the same old territory.

The major benefit to be gained from such a project is to see Lovecraft’s ideas focussed through different lenses, those through which he himself would probably have been unable to project them. Lovecraft’s witch-y villains gain greater depth when written free of a sexist worldview, for example, and writers with better insights into science and history can take the material to more interesting and nuanced places; the simple fact of these stories having not been penned (or, in most cases, set) amid the restrictive and conservative sensibilities of the early years of last century, means that extra layers of depth, meaning and ramification can pervade.

*****

The first story – “Nesters” by Siobhan Carroll – conflates the 1930s Dust Bowl horror of the American Depression with “The Colour Out of Space”. Lovecraft’s take on the blighting of the land, while undoubtedly creepy and disturbing, falls sharply into the background when the subtleties of a real-world equivalent catastrophe are superimposed. By bringing in these touchstone elements, Carroll grounds the tale in a horrifying reality that reeks of truth. As expected, there is a blighted landscape with a secluded farm at the heart of things; Government investigators convince our narrator’s father to take them to this heart of darkness and she follows out of concern, only to encounter the horror that eventuates…

“Little Ease” by Gemma Files, takes chunks of HPL’s New York material – “The Horror at Red Hook”; “Cool Air” – and wraps it up in a “Shadow over Innsmouth” story by way of “Dreams in the Witch House”. This is not to say – let me be clear –that it is anything less than its own beast; however, it takes the concepts, moods and locales of those other tales and makes new, whole cloth out them. We follow a hard-bitten pest exterminator as she trudges through a septic urban scenery, a landscape of crumbling brickwork filled-to-bursting with way too many strange and desperate people, along with the vermin which the slum conditions attract. At the behest of urban developers, keen to have the area evacuated for gentrification, our exterminator agrees to help out for a cash reward. In examining the levels of infestation, she encounters crazily-dogmatic visionaries who talk in high-magical terms about creating angels and then discovers a nest of human-insect hybrids quietly gestating, from which she flees only to discover that she, herself, is one of them too.

Stephen Graham Jones’s “Eternal Troutland” is a bravura performance, a slow-burn walk through the mind of Chuck, an obsessive-compulsive trying to re-assess his life at a holiday cabin near a trout-fishing reserve. His strange hallucinations and magical-thinking get thoroughly combed through in an attempt to discover whether or not hungry cosmic beings outside of the timeline (Hounds of Tindalos, anyone?) are trying to hunt him down for food. The pay-off is just too good to spoil so all I’ll say is – find it and read it!

Next is John Langan’s “The Supplement”, a riff off the notions of bibliophily that run amok in the work of Lovecraft and his disciples. This story concerns a librarian who, through a chance encounter with a sinister Scot, comes into possession of a blank book which allows the reader to experience the road not taken in their life. In this case, the librarian gets to experience an existence wherein her daughter doesn’t die of a heroin overdose and one in which her husband doesn’t blame her for the girl’s death and then divorce her. This is an interesting thought-experiment along “what if-?” lines and the horror comes from the cost the reader has to pay to keep on reading; but is it Lovecraftian? I’m not sure…

“Mortensen’s Muse” by Orrin Grey dumps the Mythos squarely into Hollywood. This is the story – told by an ageing former Hollywood B-grade movie star – of her life with an avant-garde photographer (Mortensen) who took her from her Salt Lake City home and introduced her to the bright lights, enabling her to become an early form of scream queen for her portrayal in a horror flick entitled “A Mountain Walks” (get it?). Her photographer friend becomes obsessed with some rather abstruse theories of technical camera work, involving the summoning of otherworldly entities through the manipulation of their potentiality during photo-shoot construction (or something like that). It all goes pear-shaped – obviously – and chaos ensues. There is an engaging Hollywood Babylon feel to this piece, riffing off the Mansfield-LaVey tawdriness of 50s tinsel-town and also HPL’s “From Beyond”. Anyone who has ever played the “Devil’s Canyon” adventure from Chaosium’s “Shadows of Yog-Sothoth” will feel right at home here.

“Oblivion Mode” by Laird Barron stalks the unsettling landscapes of HPL’s fantasy works, bringing a more modern sensibility – a la Gene Wolf, or Michael Moorcock, say – to the writing. There is a little bit of everything here – vampires, vengeful robots, talking animals – but it’s the writing style that drives it forward. Rather like Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel Winter’s Tale, occasionally you need an anachronism to leap out of the woodwork to prove a point – as in that book where a screaming, katana-wielding samurai appears without rationale to prove the battle-effectiveness of our hero (it’s called magical realism). Here the anachronisms are thick on the ground but it’s the lush writing and the focussed narrative which keeps it all on track. Apart from some rather oblique Dreamlands references, it’s the vampires – which are all offshoots of a main, extra-worldly sentience - that really speak of cosmic horror. Oh, and the ending is completely evil…

“Mr Doornail” by Maria Dahvana Headley continues the dream-like focus, bringing us a story which is part fairytale, party creepy-pasta product. This is the tale of a witch and her five daughters who live in a house with their ancient grandmother and the monster that she took from the ocean, the tentacular Mr. Doornail. Mr.Doornail survives on the hearts of the witch’s husbands, which she steals with her spells. Unfortunately, her last husband refused to die after this treatment and made a nuisance of himself in the local town, befriended by a herd of goats who seek to avenge him after his eventual demise. The delayed funeral of the witch’s goat-allied husband is the setting for this story, which rolls along like a homespun almanac to its gloriously Gormenghast-ly conclusion.

Richard Kadrey’s “The Secret of Insects” was a weak point in the onslaught for me, which was mildly disappointing. Having been a fan of his Metrophage from way back, I had high hopes, but this was pretty standard fare – good execution but nothing particularly groundbreaking. Two police-officers take a captured serial killer into custody and transport him from his cell to another facility; en route, he talks to them both with the result that they pull over to the kerb and allow him to leave while they kill each other quite unpleasantly. The notion of the villain calmly talking his way to freedom is a solid narrative trope (cf. “The Portage to San Christobal of A.H.” for example), but not – I think – of Lovecraftian fiction.

I also had great hopes for Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Excerpts for An Eschatology Quadrille” and I wasn’t disappointed. This story plays on the multi-part format of “The Call of Cthulhu”, telling the fractured narrative of a jade idol and its passage through the hands of many different owners and investigators. The Lovecraft story unfolds a line of inquiry established by its narrator, following clues from place to place until a horrible reality is eventually, undeniably, displayed. Here, Kiernan follows the hideous artefact itself as it passes through divers hands to the moment its destined power is revealed. We see the unfortunate and paranoid Maxie in Los Angeles 1969, refusing to look after the idol for Charlie “Six Pack”, while a meet-and-greet with a potential buyer can be set-up; then, in Atlanta 2007, a police officer takes it from the hands of a woman who’s been sewn inside a fifteen-foot Great White Shark hanging from a ceiling on the third storey of an abandoned warehouse; In 1956 just west of Denver after leaving Providence in Rhode Island, an academic writes to her colleague concerning a strange incident in a mutual (and distrusted) colleague’s domicile in that benighted town, where she was brought to examine the idol and during which meeting she is sure that a young man was horribly murdered in the room next door; finally, in a post-Apocalyptic 2151, two hard-scrabble beach-combers encounter the idol and ponder its value on the open market before the being that it is destined to summon starts to emerge offshore…

“Jules and Richard” by David Nickle devours HPL’s “Pickman’s Model” and regurgitates it out as a thing transformed. Jules, a Canadian graphic designer working in the New England area of the United States, has an accident while riding his pushbike to work and is taken in by an enigmatic woman living in a grand house nearby. Eschewing medical attention, he is captivated by the outré art which adorns the house’s walls and is soon embroiled in a sexual escapade with his saviour. Afterwards, while trying to make a discreet exit, he encounters the enigmatic Richard in the kitchen, who dissuades him from leaving. Richard, it turns out is the artist who produced all of the building’s canvases and is not, Jules is somewhat relieved to discover, the husband of the woman with whom he has just had marathon sex. The after-effects of his encounter mess with Jules’s head: he can hear kittens (meeping) everywhere; he can’t really see what Richard looks like; and he certainly can’t see what he’s been eating. Richard then takes Jules on a subterranean journey and the veils of what’s happening – in all of its ghoulish glory – begin to fall away…

Brian Evenson’s “Glasses” is a short piece which plays inventively with the ideas to be found in “From Beyond”. A woman of a certain age goes astray en route to a public protest and ends up in a sleepy satellite village outlying her usual urban environment. At the local drugstore she sees that the establishment sells spectacles, so she decides to purchase a pair in order to remove the possibility of her misreading the subway signs again. She asks for “bifocals”; the drugstore owner confirms that “biofocals” are what she wants. Thinking that his mispronunciation is a Hicksville signifier and of no consequence, she says “yes” and comes away with a pair of glasses that not only allow her to see terrifying extra-dimensional entities, but which allow them to see her. Some satisfying mayhem ensues…

“When the Stitches Come Undone” takes the basic – very basic – premises of HPL’s collaborative effort “The Mound” and his “The Picture in the House” and moves them into a new place by way of Stephen King. Our protagonist returns to the village where he grew up after enduring a dead-end job and a doomed marriage elsewhere. His unease at returning centres around an old Indian mound and a shack in the woods where as children, he and his cousins encountered a strange old woman – a meeting that resulted in his young cousin, Eric, being erased from existence, leaving our hero the only person to know that he ever existed at all. With flooded quarry pits and “double-dog-daring” childhood companions, this feels a bit like “It” and something like “Stand By Me”, but it turns into a quite unnerving tale of generational cosmic horror.

Eventually, we’d have to get something that felt like “At the Mountains of Madness”. “On these Blackened Shores of Time” by Brian Hodge follows that masterwork in tone if not details. “AtMoM” is all about the preparations, the descriptions of the environment, the shattered histories of those gone before, not to mention blind, squamous, subterranean things. Hodge constructs a story of an action-mannish former FBI agent who sees his son disappear in his car down the maw of a suddenly-appearing sinkhole. Investigation fails to find either son or car, but a story of olden-days mining accidents and hasty corporate cover-ups, leads our hero and his wife down dim, abandoned and flooded tunnels to an ancient, cyclopean edifice, locked in a coal seam, that slowly mutates the world around it. When the intrepid couple find their missing son he is definitely not who – or what – they expected to find.

Livia Llewellyn’s “Bright Crown of Joy” is a whole bag of fireworks going off at once. The writing and construction of the piece are both inspired and the narrative – while tricky to fathom – is satisfying and effective. The tale is told by means of a memory implant – like a cybernetic diary – surgically-inserted in the skull of our narrator. The world she lives in is afflicted by rising tides and devastating tsunamis and her North American society is being driven higher and higher up the sides of mountain ranges. We switch back and forth between the content of the diary and the new existence in which she lives – a time known as “After” - which is strange, weirdly organic and definitely pelagean. Our heroine’s new life as the mother of all Earthly sentience is starkly contrasted with vignettes of her greedy, opportunistic life before the change. What was the catalyst which created such a bizarre alteration across the planet’s face? Well let’s just say that it was enormous and came up from out of the bottom of the ocean…

*****

This is what all Lovecraftian collections should be like – solid, powerful writing; hat tips to the source material (but not blatant, or verging on pastiche); and ideas that, for the most part, carry the concepts into strange new territory without descending to splatterpunk levels of self-indulgence. With a couple of exceptions, this collection gives HPL a generational shift and drags him and his work well into the Twenty-first Century (probably kicking and screaming). I can’t recommend it too highly. Thank-you Dark Horse; thank-you Ellen Datlow.

Four Tentacled Horrors.

*****

Chapter Listing:

Introduction by Ellen Datlow

“Nesters” by Siobhan Carroll

“Little Ease” by Gemma Files

“Eternal Troutland” by Stephen Graham Jones

“The Supplement” by John Langan

“Mortensen’s Muse” by Orrin Grey

“Oblivion Mode” by Laird Barron

“Mr. Doornail” by Maria Dahvana Headley

“The Secrets of Insects” by Richard Kadrey

“Excerpts for An Eschatology Quadrille” by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“Jules and Richard” by David Nickle

“Glasses” by Brian Evenson

“When the Stitches Come Undone” by A.C. Wise

“On These Blackened Shores of Time” by Brian Hodge

“Bright Crown of Joy” by Livia Llewellyn