Review: Colonel Percy Fawcett

FAWCETT, Brian (Ed.), Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z, arranged from the manuscripts, letters, log-books and records of Col. Percy Fawcett, The Overlook Press/Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 2010

Trade octavo paperback, illustrated wrappers, 312pp., 16pp. of monochrome photographic plates, one photographic illustration, a map, and many line drawings by Brian Fawcett. As new.

I know that Pagan Publishing did a piece on Fawcett in The Unspeakable Oath, Number 16/17 (2001) and, to be honest that’s where I first heard about him. I read another book concerning him later (see below) and so, my interest already piqued, I fell upon this particular volume the moment I clapped eyes on it.

No offence to Brian Appleton and Co. at the ‘Oath, but the sidebar treatment they gave Colonel Fawcett was a bare scratching of the surface. If anyone needs a template or role-model for the archetypical Mythos investigator, look no further than this excellent tome. First published in 1953, Hemingway considered it inspirational reading and kept it handy; many other readers compare it favourably to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which is a completely reasonable accolade, although Fawcett’s observations are far darker and often more disturbing than anything found in Conrad’s book.

Brian Fawcett inherited his father’s papers and began reading them during the two-hour siesta that interrupted his working day as an engineer in South America. Over time, he collated them into the present volume and edited them together as a compelling narrative complete with footnote annotations to highlight various incidents and provide extra information. Pleasingly, the text is not always smoothly joined together, and topics jump between paragraphs here and there, however not in a way that interrupts the narrative too greatly; rather these shifts emphasise that the work is a compilation from several sources and underscore the admirable job that has been done in working the whole into a single entity.

The text covers Fawcett’s explorations into the Amazonian forests over the period 1907 to 1925, the year of his disappearance. His writings describe a lawless and totally inhospitable frontier territory ruled by rubber entrepreneurs who ruled their slave work-forces with whips and guns; he encounters wild animals and Indians with poison arrows; he is attacked by giant spiders, monstrous serpents and man-eating fish. Then there are hideous diseases. In fact, some of the diseases that he mentions, while trying vainly to aid the afflicted, are enough to give anyone nightmares: fungal lesions that cause faces to rot away; gastric worms that force the afflicted to swallow mouthfuls of earth; and that bugbear of Amazon travellers, the Candiru, a tiny barbed fish that lodges in the orifices of the human body and causes massive internal infections.

"I visited a Frenchman in the Riberalta jail who had murdered his employer in a fit of jealousy. While imprisoned he was fed by his woman, whom one day he seized and strangled, and he was condemned to death. He escaped and fled into Brazil, thanks to the judge who sold him a file!"

The focus of Fawcett’s travels in Brazil initially were the delimitation of the boundaries between Bolivia and Brazil, a task given to the disinterested Brits since their results would be impartial, and which would help ratify the rubber boom taking place there. Thereafter, Fawcett turns his attention to the legends of a massive lost city, remnant of an ancient, unrecorded civilisation and which was stumbled upon by gold seekers in the 1700s. H. Rider Haggard (no less!) gave Fawcett a strangely-conductive 10-inch tall basalt stone carving, supposedly taken from this lost capitol, and he took it to several psychometric readers to have it analysed: they told him sufficient to believe that he was on the trail of the survivors of lost Atlantis. If that doesn’t sound like the actions of a Mythos investigator, then I don’t know what does!

We’ll never know what he found at the “Lost City of Z” because in 1925, he and his eldest son vanished into the jungle, never to be heard of again. Some contend that natives beset them and did away with them; however, Fawcett always made sure to treat the indigenes of South America very well and had acquired a reputation for doing so. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding. Otherwise, they may have met with some terrible accident – a flash-flood, or the crumbling of a rock face. Or perhaps they discovered some hidden secret at the City, something that would not let them return to tell the tale? At the present time, no-one can say.

Five tentacled horrors.

Not that the mystery was allowed to rest there. Other adventurers determined to find out what happened to the Fawcetts and they set out to locate them.

Brazilian Adventure, Peter Fleming

The Reprint Society, Ltd. / Jonathan Cape, Ltd., London, 1940 (first published 1933)

Octavo; blue cloth with gilt-lettered, black morocco spine label; 376pp., photographic frontispiece, 2 maps and a monochrome diagram; top edge of the text block dyed black. Binding rolled, corners bumped and spine sunned; preliminaries embrowned and with some offsetting; edges toned. Lacks dustjacket. Else good.

Nowadays the title of this book makes it sound like the re-telling of an unfortunate proceeding at a beauty salon; however, we can move on past that barrier and once more immerse ourselves in the jungles, insect swarms and plague-infested wilderness of the Matto Grosso

In 1930, Peter Fleming answered an advertisement in the Times of London’s ‘Agony Column’, seeking for brave adventurers to engage on a voyage to Brazil, there to seek the truth about the disappearance of Col. Percy Fawcett. At that time a literary editor for The Spectator, Fleming was almost immediately hooked by the prospect and signed on.

Unlike, Fawcett’s narrative, which resounds with doom and grim determination in the face of adversity, Fleming’s tale is a completely different beast. Fleming is a product of his time; an almost Bertie Wooster-like character, self-deprecating, wryly amused and unwilling to take himself too seriously. Even through the most desperate straits of his travels there is a solid vein of dry humour colouring the re-telling, and this makes for vivid and very entertaining reading. As an indication of his puckish nature, he even imitates the classic photograph of Fawcett in the frontispiece of his own book, hands in pockets and complete with the classic pipe.

Fleming (younger brother of the far more self-important Ian Fleming and a far better writer) never did find out conclusively what happened to Fawcett, but after 3,000 miles and the discovery of a new river tributary of the Amazon, he pens a thrilling, amusing and highly entertaining narrative of his failed attempt full of interesting observations.

I give it three-and-a-half tentacled horrors

Mayan Glyphs

Mayan Glyphs

The Mayan writing form was developed from the alphabet of invading settlers from the continent of Mu after its destruction. The Muvian settlers taught their enslaved hosts to read the low form of their writing style – Naacal – and, in turn, it was used to signify the native tongue of those indigenous peoples – Mayan. (None of the preceding is, in any way, factual; what comes next however, is mostly true.)

The Mayan language is called K’iche’ by modern scholars, or more commonly by its Spanish name Quiché. It was lost as a language after the invasion of Mayan territories by the Spanish in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries and the Spanish destruction of Mayan texts. In the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, only certain numbers and some astrological phenomena were able to be identified with any certainty.

Part of the problem was that many Mayan documents were not recognised as such until midway through the Nineteenth Century. Many museums had texts, written on deerhide and rolled into scrolls, which they had acquired along with relics of seemingly greater importance, and these scrolls were generally relegated to a lesser status. As they were identified, they became objects of intense academic focus and the work of translating Mayan glyphs came to the fore. Initially, researchers believed that the Mayan glyphs worked in the same way that Egyptian glyphs did and used the same translation processes on them; this approach yielded no fruitful developments but did progress the study of the language as a whole, leading to several important breakthroughs in the 1950s and ‘60s. The 1970s saw great progress and the partial translation of many ‘codices’, as these texts became known. However, full translation did not happen until the 21^st Century and most Mayan texts are easily translated nowadays.

Investigators dealing with Mayan texts before 1973 should have no chance of interpreting the material, unless assistance is gained from supernatural sources. Those who have a familiarity with Naacal, the language of Mu, will have standard chances of translating the material, if it is within their training to do so.

Naacal

Naacal is the language of the Continent of Mu, although it is thought to have originated and been developed in Hyperborea. Two forms of the language have been identified: a standard iteration and a ‘high form’ (called ‘Hieratic Naacal’), which seems to have been restricted to priestly writings and recitations. With the sinking of Mu, various refugee groups settled in South America and established enclaves there. These survivors used a modified form of the standard Muvian language for communication with the indigenous tribes there, as the original form of the language was considered “too noble” for these minions to use. In time, these hieroglyphs began to be used by the slave races as a means of writing their own – Mayan – language, and it has been from this source that many researchers have been able to ‘backwards engineer’ the written form of Naacal.

The only place on Earth where Naacal is currently spoken (although possibly not written) is in a handful of remote lamaseries in Tibet and this knowledge is slowly being eroded as the practitioners die out.

(Source: H. P. Lovecraft & E. Hoffman Price, "Through The Gates of The Silver Key")

The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Man, aka ‘The Naacal Key’

English; James Churchward; 1926; 1/1d3 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +1 percentiles; Read/Write Naacal +10%; 12 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: None

H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price found this work whilst penning the tale, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”; they liked the sound of ‘Naacal’ and were happy to call it the language of their own lost continent of Mu.

Churchward was the quintessential over-achieving British eccentric spending his early years growing tea in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), writing about game-fishing, and inventing new types of steel armour-plating to protect ships in World War One. He retired to Connecticut at the age of 75 and began writing books about Mu, whose existence he had learnt of whilst in India. He claimed to have been taught Naacal by an Indian priest who had several carved tablets in his possession and which instructed the reader in the use of the alphabet. Churchward reproduced this ‘Naacal Key’ from memory in his book. In the world of the Mythos, this handy guide is available to researchers bogged down in translating the language of the Sunken Continent.

Megalith

Megalith

Before Megalith, there was only a pair of rave tech-heads who performed under the name of “DJ Savaged”, a New England outfit that seemed to be just a ‘flash in the pan’; however, their sound was picked up in Europe and they went viral before the term was even coined: their gig – “Ms. Be-Raved” - with Germany’s “dj ms-rule” was recorded and sold online in the tens of millions during their tour of mainland Europe and set their title as kings of the rave set.

Sadly for their fans, it was to be their last: the duo split and went their separate ways shortly after landing in England at the end of their tour, when the fact of how much money they’d made hadn’t yet settled in. Graham Pennick went home to the US and settled in Los Angeles where he became a successful soundtrack producer in Hollywood; meanwhile, his band mate ‘Herb Dingo’ went on an extended tour of Scandinavia, before returning to a reclusive lifestyle as an electronica hermit in Washington State. During that holiday he claims to have perceived a connexion with the ancient standing stones of the Viking cultures and henceforward produced his music under the band name “Megalith”.

As any Megalith fan can tell you, this performer has no lack of genetic talent to draw from, but his music came strictly from the cutting edge of technology and rode the wave of synthetic music and electronica throughout the ‘Nineties.

The first album to be released with critical acclaim was “Times to Come” which, given the artist’s recent marriage was replete with all of the innuendo that such an album required. Two more albums passed before the chart-topping “In Out of the Ages” appeared and reinforced the power that Megalith commanded from its audience: very few dance parties in 2003 failed to sample from this colossal source. After two more albums 2005 saw the release of “Pure Ritual” with the artist’s first Top Ten hit – “Let it Bleed” sold 50 million copies as a single on the dance charts in that year. After that, Megalith went into hiatus.

When Megalith returned it was in the form of a soundtrack to 2007’s little-known animated short “Rock Fall” which won a Golden Globe for sound design, a component with which Megalith assisted. In 2008 he was approached to do the score for a high-budget art film called “Subterrania” and this was the culmination of Megalith’s work as a soundscape artist: the soundtrack borrowed from such sources as the re-constituted radio emissions of various stellar bodies combined with the sounds of panicked prey animals. The result, put before three different editors (who incidentally, killed each other with their bare hands afterwards), was a deeply disturbing soundtrack which waited two years before being released – after Graham Pennick’s substantial edits.

Subterrania is a strange melange of sounds which only tangentially resolves itself as the narrative music behind the filmic input. The soundscape is brutal in its delivery and unrelenting in its drive, hearkening back to its originator’s days as a rave artiste. The base-line is built up from the pulsing radiation of stars - reduced to a point where it is discernible by the human ear – covered by a sonic attack composed of the shrilling of various species of bats and other predators, and the ‘dead sound’ of various unoccupied empty spaces recorded under the Pyrenees. The combined sub/extra/inaudible sound-mix, beneath the composed audible input, had sonic investigators from MIT falling over themselves shortly after its aborted release. Only two living people have heard the soundtrack in its unadulterated form; both are now certifiably insane.

Megalith nowadays resides behind bars in Oslo, Norway, in light of his wife’s hideous death and is awaiting extradition proceedings to the US on a charge of murder in the first degree. His fans are determined to see his release and the cash which has flowed to his defence is of a magnitude such as to cause various jurisprudential figures to question the power of money in the cause of justice. His trial is still pending.

(Source: Brian Hodge – “The Firebrand Symphony”, The Children of Cthulhu, 2002)

“Subterrania”: Electronic sound collage; ‘Megalith’; CD sound recording, 2008; 1d4/1d10 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +3 percentiles; 1 week to study and comprehend

Spells: None

Review: The Hounds of Tindalos...

BELKNAP-LONG, Frank, The Hounds of Tindalos, Granada Publishing, Ltd./Panther Books, Ltd., Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts., UK, 1975

Octavo; paperback, illustrated wrapper; 171pp. Very minor chipping to edges, else fine

I know that I’m on shaky ground with this one – it’s “The Hounds of Tindalos” after all! However, there’s the concept and then there’s the telling of it. Frank Belknap-Long (now there’s a name to publish beneath) has a way with the Mythos, but that’s where it ends.

The Hounds is a worthy tale; what follows is less convincing. The author has a way of implying what happens without letting the reader know what actually occurs, which is frustrating in the extreme. This happens again and again with boring regularity.

That being said, Long’s style meshes well with the tradition established by HPL: the ‘olde worlde’ charm he evokes is suitably doom-laden and his characters are nicely cut from Mythos cloth. The mysterious Visitor in “A Visitor from Egypt” is replete with Lovecraftian menace, rugged-up in shambolic clothing to hide his true nature (I was almost expecting him to be one of the Mi-go, à la “Whisperer In Darkness”). Sadly, his true nature, once revealed, was not overly explained, so I was left feeling somewhat unfulfilled.

Not, of course, that I expect complete chapter and verse on every occurrence in a horror tale – I understand completely, that some of the fear comes from not having everything explained. However, in the best of tales, enough vital information generally appears that the reader can draw their own conclusions and, finally, get the point. I find that Long doesn’t seed his material with enough clues to really round out the narrative: scared? Check. Confused? Much.

Long has a great ear for speech patterns and the rhythm of local dialect. His backwoods characters and the speech patterns of the elves and fairies that make their pesky presence felt in “The Refugees” are very convincing and give the tales satisfying weight. It’s when he tries to write ‘modern’ characters that he falls a little flat. In “Grab Bags are Dangerous” the dialogue between the hip playwright and his girlfriend is leaden and clunky, their actions are anachronistic and out-of-touch with the milieu, and the final twist is a weak joke at best. Not a high point (although it does reinforce my theory that Long has issues with dogs).

So, there’s a nice core of Mythos material here (“The Hounds of Tindalos”!) but it all just seems a little fuzzy to me in terms of execution. I’m giving it three-and-a-half tentacled horrors

What I’d like to segue into at this point is this particular format of publication. The DAW novel, the TOR paperback, the Star Horror product: these are fast becoming collectors’ editions and are being priced accordingly (I’m not even going to tell you how much my copy of this book cost). Some people buy them as much for the cover art as the contents and that’s fine – in fact, with some of these, the cover is the best part of the book. Unfortunately, they are what they are – cheap reads – and finding them in good condition is very rare and getting rarer. All I’m saying is, if you have these types of books in your library, take them out and dust them off; keep them out of direct sunlight and make sure they’re standing upright on the shelf. Who knows? If you keep them well, one day they might return the favour!

Burning Books

Burning Books

“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen”

("Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings").

-Heinrich Heine

The practice of burning books has cropped up throughout history, for at least as long as books and writing have been around. It usually appears as a symptom of obscurantism, or the urge by authorities to control or limit the spread of knowledge. Also known as biblioclasm or libricide, wherever it occurs it causes great distress as its consequences and impact on human culture and knowledge are extremely damaging and often irreplaceable. Book burning typically happens as the result of a sense of moral or ideological outrage and targets specific works that are problematic for a current regime. In modern times, many religious organisations promote book burning – especially those against which they have an often dogmatic agenda – as a rite of passage for new converts; mostly though, libricide is an act of suppression, seeking to control and moderate thought and ideas within a culture. Within the context of a Call of Cthulhu game, the act of book-burning means that copies of rare and blasphemous tomes are made all the more difficult to locate and to access.

At all times, book burning is an emotionally-charged practice. In ancient times, books were expensive to produce and considered very valuable: flagrantly burning them was an exercise in waste and a rebuff to the hours of work which had gone into their production, not to mention their writing and composing. It is also a highly visible form of conduct: it draws a line in the sand between the pro-biblioclasts and their enemies and creates a focus for public declarations of allegiance. New converts to Christianity are often enjoined to come along to burnings in order to purge themselves of their ‘evil’ rock ‘n’ roll CDs and Harry Potter books; rarely do these groups acknowledge that early translations of their own Bibles were burnt in similar fashion – along with their translators and printers, whose names they would be hard-pressed to summon forth.

The list of reprehensible purges is long and woeful, and often leaves one scratching one’s head in attempting to understand the rationale behind the destruction: why were the first books in Braille destroyed in Paris in 1842, for example? However, there are several major occurrences that have impacted heavily upon the written knowledge of the world and these are listed here:

The Burning of the Books - Qin Dynasty, China 213 BC

In 213 BC, Qin Shih Huangdi, the first Emperor of China ordered the destruction of all books throughout the Eighteen Provinces. This act was largely an attempt to rein in the literati so that they would not be able to contradict the new Emperor by citing precedent. The only books to escape the burning were texts on agriculture, medicine, construction and divination; even the writings of Confucius were not spared from the flames. Along with the texts, the writers (where they were still alive) and the contemporary scholars of the day were all buried alive so that they could not revive the texts or the thinking behind them.

The rationale behind this event was the adoption of the form of government which would prevail during the First Emperor’s reign. Huangdi had the choice of Confucianism, which taught that all people were essentially good and that they would do good – even if they only adopted the appearance of goodness - if guided correctly; Mohism, which taught that all people are equal and that in order to be good, people must be taught to actually be good; or Legalism, an inverse offshoot of Confucianism that believed all people to be inherently evil and therefore prone to undermining the Will of Heaven. In that Legalism gave Huangdi the ability to do whatever he wanted, without having to mollycoddle the populace, he chose the latter, burnt libraries and buried scholars alive.

(There is an irony about all of this: during the uprising of the Han peoples and the overthrowing of Huangdi after his incredibly harsh rule, the Royal Library at Chang’an was accidentally destroyed by fire: it transpired that copies of all the previously destroyed books had been kept there against future need.)

Chinese texts pre-dating 213 BC have been re-compiled from hidden copies which suffered as they were moved from hiding place to hiding place, or were re-written from the memories of aging scholars who had escaped persecution. Such works are liable to be flawed and their methods untrustworthy, especially when it comes to knowledge of the Mythos; in fact, during the Song Dynasty, some books, considered imperfectly restored, were again consigned to the flames. Some original fragments have survived in the form of weather-beaten scraps but, by their fragmentary nature, are probably more dangerous and obscure than their use warrants, as the Keeper desires.

At the Siege of Peking, The Hanlin (“Forest of Pencils”) Library, which abutted the Foreign Legation quarters, was torched by the Chinese attackers trying to invade the Westerners’ stronghold. This repository held the winning essays from literally thousands of years of Imperial examinations and is a shameful codicil to the history of book burning in the Chinese Imperial age.

Diocletian’s Destruction of Egyptian Alchemy Texts

In 292 AD, Diocletian removed and destroyed by fire all of the texts within the Library of Alexandria which had to do with alchemy; it seems to have been a thing with him – in 303 he burnt Christian writings as well. The motivations behind these latter conflagrations seem fairly clear as politically motivated, but alchemical texts? Maybe he was afraid of wizards undermining the value of gold...

The Burning of the Library of Alexandria

The Library of the Serapeum in Alexandria was renowned as the greatest repository of human knowledge available in its day. Amongst other priceless texts, it was supposed to hold the original Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, etched onto an enormous table-cut emerald and prised from the skeletal fingers of its author. In 392 AD at the behest of Theodosius I, the Library was looted and burned at the order of Pope Theophilus of Alexandria. Re-building took place thereafter; however, the damage had already been done: in 640, or thereabouts, the building caught fire once more and was completely destroyed.

The Destruction of the Cathar Texts

At the height of the Albigensian Crusade in the Languedoc region of southeastern France, all texts of the Cathars – deemed heretical by the Church – were consigned to the flames. A very few of these texts survived and even a translation of the Necronomicon made it through unscathed; but, for the most part, a great body of Gnostic lore was irreplaceably lost.

The Burning of the House of Wisdom Library in Baghdad

In 1258, the Mongols invaded Baghdad and imposed their usual form of welcome upon the populace. In destroying the greatest repository of Islamic lore (along with that of all the other libraries in the city) they tossed every book that they could find into the Tigris River: the waters were said to have run black for six months thereafter, from all of the ink that was washed away.

Arabic and Hebrew Books at Andalucía

In 1499, at the insistence of the Spanish Inquisition, about 5,000 books in Arabic and Hebrew were torched in the public square at Granada under the direction of Ximénez de Cisneros, then Archbishop of Toledo. The stated reason for their destruction was that the content of the works was homoerotic; however it is questionable as to whether this would apply to all of the texts.

The Sacred Texts of the Mayan People

"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”

-Diego de Landa

On July 12^th 1546, Father Diego de Landa, acting Bishop of Yucatan, burnt the sacred Mayan texts, after spending months ingratiating himself with their keepers and convincing them of his interest in preserving this knowledge. He claims to have destroyed 27 deerskin texts, although other sources claim up to 99 documents were burnt. Along with the books, around 5,000 religious idols were also immolated. De Landa was later recalled to Rome on charges of having acted illegally in regard to the texts; however, he was released after three months of investigation.

The Burnings of Communist Russia

Under Stalin, it was not just people who were ruthlessly and systematically expunged in the name of realpolitik. Many books were destroyed, particularly Jewish texts, and many more were hidden away until such time as they could be published without fear of being suppressed: a classic case is Bulgarkov’s The Master and Margarita, which waited forty years between creation and publication.

The Burning of Jewish, Anti-Nazi and ‘Degenerate’ Books by the Nazis

Since the instigation of the Nazi regime, many books were cited as being antithetical to Hitler’s cause; in particular Richard Euringer, director of the libraries of Essen, compiled a list of around 18,000 works which were deemed offensive to the National Socialists. From thence forward, sporadic eruptions of book burning took place around the country, culminating in an enormous rally in Berlin, at the Opernplatz on the 10^th of May in 1933: around 20,000 books were stripped from various institutions and consigned to the fire by members of the SA and of various Nazi youth groups.

The Cultural Revolution

In a full circle moment, the Chinese represent yet another instance in the suppression of human knowledge. During the Cultural Revolution, beginning on August 20^th 1966, many written works – especially Chinese texts on genealogy – were targeted as part of an effort to remove the Four Old Things from Chinese culture. These were “Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas”: many priceless and irreplaceable touchstones of Chinese culture were destroyed in this movement and, since the 1990s, the Chinese government has quietly gone about restoring and reversing as much of the destruction as they can.

*****

So what does this mean as far as the Cthulhu Mythos is concerned? Obviously, any attempt to target books and other works that are deemed damaging or offensive to the culture is going to include these works, as far as they are known within the culture. Some Mythos tomes are simply so rare and obscure that they never fall under the biblioclastic microscope; others definitely get caught up in the net and are purged in their turn. Given that purges occur throughout history, Keepers should try to be aware of them and factor this in to the rarity of the volumes they distribute to their players. The instances discussed here are only a few that have taken place, and represent only those where discrete volumes and bodies of thought are known to have been lost forever.

The maddening thing for the Powers That Be is that, often, where one individual has an idea, so too, another has the same thought and such instances of parallel cognition are well-documented, especially in the world of scientific publishing. For so many books lost to the fire, it can be said that they somehow, somewhere, rise again in a different form, their ideas intact.

Review: Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn

English; Lafcadio Hearn; Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, NY, USA, 1930.

Octavo; hardcover with orange-coloured stamped spine-titling and upper board decoration; 240pp., monochrome frontispiece, top edge dyed orange. Small stain to top edge; previous owner’s inscription on front free endpaper; price-clipped dustjacket sunned along the spine; chipping to the spine head and tail but with no loss of text or image; now protected by non-adhesive plastic.

Fans of horror fiction realise only far too well that there is horror and there is horror. What scares some people leaves other people cold. The same can be said of humour: what makes some people laugh, simply offends others. The reasons are multitudinous and varied: past experiences, different upbringings, all contribute to various degrees of susceptibility. One of those variables is culture.

Lafcadio Hearn was of Greek extraction, brought up in America, and rose to become one of the USA’s first ambassadorial representatives to Japan. What he found there forever changed him. He returned to pen many books, translating the literature – especially the folk- and ghost stories – of what was to become his spiritual home country. The best known of these are Kokoro and this collection of ghost stories and weird tales, Kwaidan.

Ghosts in Japanese mythology have a more distinct rationale from those found in the West. In most cases, the ghost appears to avenge a wrong done to them in their lifetime, or to expose the guilt of a criminal third party, whereas, in Europe say, a ghost may appear and scare onlookers without any definite cause or rationale, and the debate as to the reason of why they are unable to rest makes for some very pleasant ongoing fireside chats. These Japanese ‘yorei’, on the other hand, always seem to have a clear purpose in mind.

The book is in two sections – the first consists of spooky tales, while the second is entitled “Insect Studies” and recalls a number of fantastic writings about various arthropod creatures. The first tale is the story the blind musician Hoichi, who entertains, unknowingly, the spectres of the drowned clan of the Heike who slowly drain his energies as they force him to recount the epic songs of their demise on a nightly basis. Priests at the temple where Hoichi is staying try to protect him by painting his body with sutras that make him invisible to the ghosts, but they forget to paint his ears and the ghosts, while breaking their hold over the musician, cut off his ears as a punishment for his desire to be rid of them.

Thereafter, we have snow maidens, the hungry dead, reincarnated troubled wives and wandering priests in peril. Fans of Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” will discover the source of one of his best strips in “Rokuro-kubi” the tale of a nest of goblins whose heads fly off at night to forage for meaty prey. Mignola claimed that there were elements of this tale that he couldn’t bring to the graphic re-telling, so loyal fans (like me!) should check this out.

As in most Japanese literature, there is not a lot of wrapping-up after the climax has been reached: the story told, the reader is left to ponder the unspoken elements of the narrative. This is a good thing and shows a high level of trust by the author in the audience. It also catches the terse, haiku-like force of the Japanese style and in this, Hearn’s sensitivity truly catches the native origins of the work.

As a sideline, the book was the inspiration to a 1960s movie by director Masaki Kobayashi. The film covers several of the stories that Hearn translates as well as some others, equally famous. Shot over more than twelve months in a giant converted aircraft hangar, it is well worth watching for its comments on Hearn’s stories as much as its exposition of Japanese cultural motifs in regard to their ghost tradition.

I’m not a fan of Cthulhu in Japan – there’s no basis for it in HPL and yet Chaosium has two sourcebooks in print about it – but, if you’re thinking of meeting the Mythos in that country, there’s no better place to start than with this collection of stories.

I give it four tentacled horrors.

A Lovecraftian Crossword...

A Lovecraftian Crossword to Drive You Mad!

Just for fun, but be careful - there's a trick. All the answers can be found in Harms for those who're keen. Answers will be posted next month.

Across

2 Lovecraft’s story, “The ______ Out of Space” (6)

3 The original German title of Friedrich von Junzt’s “Black Book”, Die _________________ ______ (17, 6)

6 Great Old One which takes the form of a great airborne conflagration and which currently dwells within a star named “Korvaz” near Fomalhaut (7)

9 Ancient engraved monuments, the Broken Columns of ____ (4)

12 Fungal alien creatures with strange surgical capabilities (2-2)

13 Outer God known as the “Primal Chaos”, or the “Daemon Sultan”; surrounded by idiot pipers (8)

14 Lovecraft’s short story, “The ______ __ the Threshold” (6, 2)

16 Bizarre jelly-like creatures (now extinct) from Earth’s Dreamlands who formerly worshipped the Great Old One, Bokrug: the Beings (or Ghosts) of __ (2)

19 The corpse city which rose from the bottom of the sea in 1925 and which was visited by the ill-fated crew of the SS Alert (1’4)

22 The planet from which hale the semi-solid, sadistic insects sometimes known as the Shan (7)

23 Flying creatures which resemble a bird, a bat, an insect and a rotting corpse; associated with “He Who Must Not Be Named” (7)

24 “The Thing That Should Not Be” (7)

25 The name of a river in Massachusetts after which a University was named (10)

27 Lovecraft’s short story, “Dreams in the _____ House” (5)

29 “The Father of Serpents” (3)

31 One of the “Drowners”; possibly a dimensional parasite which tries to form a symbiotic relationship with the Great Old Ones; appears as a swamping black jelly covered in bulging eyes and tittering teeth (4-4)

32 The supreme Deep One (5)

33 Great Old One known as ‘Umr at-Tawil (“The Prolonged of Life”) and occasionally, “The Gate & The Key” (3-7)

36 “The Black Goat of the Woods With A Thousand Young” (4-9)

37 Gigantic, slug-like, spiny Great Old One known as “The Dweller in the Lake” (6)

41 Outer God known as “The Crawling Chaos”, amongst other names (12)

Down

1 An amorphous Great Old One which most frequently resembles an enormous, clawed, octopus-headed humanoid with great bat-like wings (7)

4 The Greek name for the al-Azif, or the Book of Dead Names, also known as the Book of the Black Earth (12)

5 A mysterious plateau known for its huge spiders and its race of sadistic goat-legged, ruby-trading men (4)

7 The Boston artist, Richard Upton Pickman, turned into one (5)

8 The last name of the author of 4 Down (8)

10 Huge, black-furred creatures from Earth’s Dreamlands with four forearms and fanged maws that run from the top to the bottom of their heads (4)

11 The true name of the Great Old One known as the Wendigo or “Wind-Walker” (7)

15 The protoplasmic entity which protects the Elder Keys and which was said to have spawned all life on Earth (10)

17 An ancient and genteel city in Massachusetts with its own university and asylum (6)

18 Manuscript texts taken from broken tablets in the Great Library of Celaeno, transcribed by Laban Shrewsbury (8, 11)

20 Lovecraft novella, “The ______ Out of Time” (6)

21 Amorphous slave race of black protoplasm created by the Elder Things during their early domination of the Earth (8)

24 Elder God who rides in a shell-chariot drawn by fantastic beasts, and who is known by the title “Lord of the Great Abyss” (6)

26 Black, faceless minions with bat-wings, who like to ‘tickle’ their prey (11)

28 A planet, once thought to be Pluto, that orbits our Sun on a plane perpendicular to the other planets in our solar system; colonised by the creatures from 12 Across (7)

30 Also known as “Xinaián”, a subterranean blue-lit world with a well-guarded entrance in Oklahoma, amongst other places (1’1-3)

32 An ill-starred old town amongst the hills off the Aylesbury Pike in Massachusetts (7)

34 Also known as the Sign of Kish, a symbol said to be efficacious when used against the Great Old Ones and their minions (5, 4)

35 Strangely-shaped rocks unearthed at the ruins of G’harne in Africa and known as the “Star Stones of ____” (4)

38 A Great One, deity of Earth’s Dreamlands, and once worshipped in Hyperborea as a protector of warriors from their enemies; depicted as a bearded youth carrying an ornate spear (5)

39 “He Who Must Not Be Named” (6)

40 Amorphous Great Old One often resembling an enormous furry toad with sleepy eyes and a toothy grin; often accompanied by its own inky, formless spawn (10)