Rip It & Run! Ripples & Aftershocks...

In the late 1930s in the US, several incidents occurred across the country, which were linked by peculiar circumstance. In a number of large urban centres, sightings of strange creatures were reported, along with attacks upon people after dark, leading to several instances where vigilante groups were formed to unearth and put paid to the offending menace. After diligent investigation by the authorities, most of these cases turned out to have no basis in fact, or were night-time sightings of ordinary events which were blown out of proportion.

In Mobile, Alabama, where the first of these incidents took place, the panic was started by a district judge who warned a repeat-offender appearing before him in court that “if he did anything like this again, they would have to unleash the Mobile Monster on him”. After issuing from the mouth of the white judge, the poor populations of Mobile took him at his word and the Monster of Mobile was born.

Crazed reports of shadowy figures ensued, followed by reports of savage attacks; packs of terrified and armed men roamed the districts, prepared to gun down anything that moved. Eventually, the “Monster” turned out to be an unusually large otter which had wandered into the district for the easy pickings which overflowing garbage bins presented.

And that would probably have been the end of things, except for the involvement of the Press. After the first sightings, the local reporters spilt much ink over the phenomenon and soon, similar reports were coming out of Miami in Florida. Once the blue touch-paper had been lit, the explosions just kept on coming.

How is this of interest to the Keeper of a “Call of Cthulhu” campaign? These kinds of panic situations are food and drink for a Keeper wishing to keep their party on its toes. Rumour, suspicion and paranoia, can all get in the way of a well-oiled investigation; just imagine if a vigilante pack spots our team of heroes at yet another reported attack site – soon they may well be blamed for the outbreaks themselves!

The Keeper tries to provide a narrative adventure set within a believable background; occasionally, that background can get a bit sketchy and dependable. Players tend to make plans without realising that the world makes plans of its own and sometimes those plans are counter-productive to the party’s goals.

Let’s assume that our players have tracked some Dimensional Shambler activity to a factory on the outskirts of town. A nightwatchman saw an ominous shape and ran screaming from the facility; he was picked up by the police and questioned and then turned loose to go home. Our heroes – for whatever reason – are summoned to investigate. So far, so good. Our party gets on with things – dowsing for mysterious energy levels, researching library books, examining the crime scene. Only now, however, after our skittish nightwatchman has blurted his story to the Press and jabbered to his associates, there’s a background of hysteria brewing.

Suddenly, reporters are dogging our players. Perhaps, the factory owner wants the mystery cleared up with no fuss and now, it’s on the front page of the local newspapers. Can our party effectively conduct a midnight stake-out when a posse with guns, or a reporter accompanied by a photographer, are following them? Suddenly a simple investigation has turned into a massive headache.

NPCs behaving irresponsibly can present the Keeper with endless possibilities for moral questions and insights: should they protect these unwanted intruders? Or leave them to their own devices? Should the party be pro-active with the Press, in an attempt to minimise community fall-out? Or should they just cry “havoc!” and let slip the Hounds of Tindalos?

Anyone who’s read up on any kind of Fortean incident, looking for inspiration, will see this kind of thing at work repeated endlessly. Take for instance, the case of Spring-Heeled Jack. This London bogey-man was reported attacking individuals around the capitol for over 60 years and the descriptions of him and his modus operandi alter dramatically across this period. Initially, he appears as a man in a tight-fitting oilskin suit with a leather mask, obscured by a theatrical cape. His eyes glow fiery red, he belches fire and his hands are equipped with metal talons with which he would scratch and rake his victims. There are only two attacks which contain this description and they are the earliest ones; later sightings report ‘Jack as a flitting shadow, a pantomime devil figure, even a giant bear. Finally, his last manifestation is as a clattering of footsteps across tenement rooftops.

What’s clear is that Spring-Heeled Jack started out as something concrete, but soon vanished into the stuff of legend. The Press played up the presence of this villain enormously and soon, ‘Jack had his own penny-dreadful title and was generally illustrated as a Mephistophelean baddy, bouncing away from imminent capture and laughing all the while. What “Call of Cthulhu” party of investigators could make anything of this mess?

Try, as well, the strange case of the Devil of Devon. In the unusually cold winter of 1854-5, many people awoke to discover a trail of hoofprints which wandered through five parishes, into and out of buildings, along rooftops and through gardens – a journey of almost 100 miles. The prints were of cloven hoofs, 4 inches long by almost 3 inches, with a pace of about 8 inches. In places – most notably while crossing in front of a church – the prints seemed to have burst into flame. The people of Devon were convinced that their part of the world had been visited by the Devil.

Newspaper articles appeared almost immediately and the incident became the sensation of the day. Bishops and Archbishops stood up in pulpits to deride the notion of Satanic visitation, claiming that foxes, or donkeys, even an escaped kangaroo, were to blame. Finally, Sir Richard Owen, naturalist and ‘go-to guy’ for anything to do with animal anatomy, declared that they were the prints of a badger woken early from hibernation, and that badgers were known to place their hind feet into the tracks made by their fore-feet. Thereafter, a posse of unconvinced villagers armed with pitchforks and flaming brands began regularly scouring the countryside for the Beast Among Us!

The case is unsolved, but what if it were a Mythos event? How would the Investigators deal with all this hoo-hah? Not only is the Church involved, but an eminent scientist has stuck in his oar as well – if the Powers That Be are saying this much, how much more is there to know that they’re not saying? And again, the last thing a party of Investigators needs while searching for clues, is an angry mob bearing down on them with fire and farm implements.

In summing up therefore, it pays to think about how the world around the Investigators will react to the (often bizarre) things that they get up to. Don’t let your party operate in a vacuum; let the Universe gang up on them a little!

The Innsmouth Tarot, Part 1 - The Major Arcana 1

Much speculation has arisen over the nature of Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag’s connexion to the religious inner life of the South-seas Islands, particularly of the Carolinas. As well, commentators have discussed the captain’s relationship with his “servant” Yogash. Not a lot of discussion has been entered upon concerning his grand-daughter, Beverly Hoag Adams, but perhaps the time has come to open that Pandora’s Box and to see what lies inside.

The spur for such an investigation arises from several discrete collections in the archives of the Miskatonic University English Department and of the Anthropology Faculty which – until recently – have not been placed together and examined in context. These consist, in the main, of several small chapbooks – recipes and collections of home cures for various illnesses – written in manuscript by various New England “cunning folk” who plied their remedies in lieu of a ready availability of medical personnel.

Most of these books date from the mid- to late-1700s onwards, up until the early Twentieth Century. While many of the superstitions and ritual lore contained within their pages is typical of that which proliferated along the Eastern seaboard of the United States at that time, there are undertones of a distinct tradition localised in the New England nexus, which cannot be ignored.

The main focus of this tradition lies in collections of small squares and rectangles of card which have been found throughout the region. These – often re-used – pieces of paper and cardboard are inscribed with certain descriptions and are generally illustrated, mostly in a quite crude fashion. The discovery of 17 of these cards, partially burnt and hidden beneath the floor of the Kester Library in Salem, has linked the phenomena, however tentatively, to Beverly Hoag Adams and her efforts to place the discoveries of her grandfather into the public domain.

With the correlation of these collections and an examination of the iconography and the information contained in the “cunning books”, it has become clear that a tradition of divination using cards – often called “Tarot cards” – proliferated throughout the region, probably in tandem with the surreptitious circulation of Captain Hoag’s manuscript version of The Ponape Scriptures.

Many of the card images are lost to time, as there are gaps in the available evidence. However, the intent of the authors’ can be reconstructed from written descriptions of the cards within the chapbooks and also from a set of well-used cards which were unearthed in Newburyport, where the owner had eschewed artistic depictions for simple written descriptions.

The Miskatonic University Press has proudly championed the investigation of this native folk-art tradition from its home region and, using the skills of the various faculties involved and the talents of various Arkham-based illustrators and artists, has issued its own set of these fascinating cards for the edification of folklorists and local historians. We hope you enjoy that which we have entitled,

The Innsmouth Tarot

*****

The Major Arcana:

Card 0 – The Deep

Within the extant versions of the cards which have been discovered, there are various methods of portraying the nature of this card. The Newburyport Set simply writes the name of the card, along with the Greek symbols for Alpha and Omega; the Kester Library Set uses a fairly specific hieroglyph (see below) while other cards and some of the books use a simple wavy line to indicate the surface of an ocean.

The purpose of this card is to represent the notion of a beginning, or of an emerging force or presence: the depths are unknown and unknowable and are the start of many phenomena or processes. The sense of this card is that of the Questioner being on the edge of something new; at the beginning of a new life phase. Things are uncrystallised and not yet formed, but soon all will be revealed.

Inverted: The inverse meaning of the The Deep, is unpreparedness, or folly; fear of the unknown and an unwillingness to change, or to commit. The depths are hazardous and to brave them without adequate preparation is madness. In this sense, the beginning is also, often, the end.

Card I – The Wizard, or Metaphysician

Having recognised the imminent emergence of a new force or presence, the Questioner becomes prepared. Burdened with knowledge, weapons and arcane skill, the Questioner makes ready to do battle, or to understand. There is a sense of limit to this card: the Wizard may be lord of that which he surveys, but his scope is narrow, restricted to his home ground. His knowledge is highly focussed, not wide-ranging; useful in certain engagements but not all. Good at what he knows, his skill may seem impressive to the novice; but it will not serve in the long term.

Until the connexion was made that these cards were a means of divination, one of them languished in small chapbook held in the Newburyport Historical Society and was long thought to be merely a bookmark. It depicts a man in the clothes of an Eighteenth Century judge of the Puritan type. The image was thought to be a possible likeness of Cotton Mather; however, we now know that it represents a metaphysical practitioner, or wizard, and once was part of a larger set of cards, now lost.

Inverted: When upside-down, the Wizard is a charlatan, one who preys on the innocence of others, an impostor with false knowledge. He represents insecurity and unwise counsel.

Card II – The Witch

The Witch represents a state of acceptance: whilst the Wizard merely manipulates the framework of the cosmos, the Witch realises her place within that scheme and acknowledges her part in it. In this sense, she is a greater – although still a novitiate – part of reality. Her insight is greater and her belief is stronger: she represents not only her own goals and desires, but also those of a wider community.

When upright, this card represents artistic inspiration, a positive feminine influence, or the gaining of spiritual insight. In some instances it can indicate celibacy or a state of impatience.

There are no extant cards which depict or describe the iconography of this card, although several of the grimoires make mention of it. As Cotton Mather and the other puritan judges of the Salem witch trials seem to have been an inspiration for the Wizard card, it has made sense to have this card portray one of the victims of that series of legal aberrations.

Inverted: The inverted meaning of this card is passivity; egoism, ignorance and incomprehension; an erroneous judgement. It can also indicate a change of profession or of falling under a negative feminine influence.

Card III – Mother Hydra

In the mythology of the Innsmouth tarot, Mother Hydra is represented as the unseen presence behind Father Dagon, the yin to his yang. The inspiration for this card and its partner (Father Dagon) comes directly from the Kester Library Set which shows the pair as unambiguously alien, although pelagic, beings. This image heralds the beginning of the more bizarre, alien and monstrous beings which comprise this cycle of lore.

Fundamentally, the meaning associated with this card is intelligence. In some readings it may indicate the presence of a mother, sister, or some other female figure of influence, but the association is always that of an advisor, or source of knowledge. The intention of the card is not a passive one: this is sagacity put to some purpose; an ideal, or course of action; it also suggests fecundity, or the realisation of a goal.

Inverted: Upside-down, this card represents poverty in all senses – material, emotional, spiritual and intellectual. Its presence signals anxiety and hesitation, the inability to make a decision or to take a course of action. It can also indicate a coquette, or false flatterer.

Card IV – Father Dagon

The twin card to Mother Hydra is her mate, Father Dagon. Dagon is best known to the wider world from John Milton’s Paradise Lost:

“Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man

And downward fish; yet had his temple high

Reared in Azotus, dreaded through the coast

Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon,

And Accaron and Gaza's frontier bounds...”

The image of Dagon in the Kester Library Set accords strongly with this description and indicates the degree of antiquity which is associated with this lore.

Father Dagon primarily symbolises energy, or power. Mother Hydra represents the ability to channel, or direct, energy; Father Dagon embodies the power itself. Paradoxically, while this card represents earthly power and a combative force, it also stands for security and protection, the maintenance of stability. Depending upon where the card appears in a reading, it can represent the presence of a father, son, or some other masculine influence.

Inverted: When inverted within a spread, Father Dagon stands primarily for a lack of strength. However, it can also symbolise power used immaturely, or with a lack of conscience and consideration. In some instances, it represents a malicious, or cruel, man.

Card V – The High Priest

The High Priest is the flip-side of the Witch. While the Witch is intrinsically involved in the true nature of the world, the High Priest actively engages with it in an exoteric sense. Put simply, the Witch is being while the High Priest is doing.

The Kester Library Set has an image of a kneeling figure in the midst of some ritual event which provides the basis for this card’s iconography. The Newburyport Set contains a short written script, a familiar piece of doggerel found in the Invocations to Dagon and other similar sources:

“O Great Kutulu, Dreamer in Rillye

I am Thy priest and adore Thee.

This card represents the adoption of a disciplined lifestyle either religious or possibly scientific; it may represent counsel, assistance of information received from such a quarter. Either way, it betokens wise and sound advice and, above all, mercy. The High Priest also symbolises strong emotions, free of sentimentality. It can foreshadow a ritual observance or a secret revealed. It indicates that the Questioner has or is about to gain an insight into Destiny.

Inverted: When placed upside-down, the High Priest symbolises a digression from the true path, either through a sudden loss of faith or an inability to clearly see the way forward. It speaks of unwise counsel and decisions made without a full weighing of the circumstances. It reveals powerlessness and a loss of forward impetus, causing weakness and a slide into decadence. A loss of faith or vocation.

*****

To Be Continued...

Ironfest 2016

I’ve been going to this local event for a few years now and it always rewards attendance – there’s always something spectacular happening, something kooky, or something very cool. In this regard, this year’s offering – themed “The Holy Grail” – didn’t disappoint. Unfortunately, there were other reasons for my chagrin.

From the first time I wandered through this community of creativity, I’ve always thought that it would be fun to be a participant instead of just an onlooker, and this year I made definite steps towards achieving that goal. Accordingly, I convinced my boss to join forces with other bookshops up here in the ‘Mountains and stick our toes in the water in no uncertain terms. The reasons for teaming up were manifold and included many sub-headings including access to equipment and adequate insurance; but the main reason was to test the saleability of the widest range of goods, from new and commercial to secondhand and antiquarian. It turned out that stock wasn’t an issue.

We haggled to get a spot inside the pavilion, beating off an attempt to place all the booksellers into a “book ghetto” alongside the showground – our merchandise ranged from the relatively inexpensive to the wildly unaffordable, and we weren’t interested in exposing any of it to the elements. Being inside was our best option: the only other bookseller who shows up to the event sources his wares from the local charity shops and, in past years when it’s rained, I’ve seen him just shrug his shoulders as the damp penetrated his tent and turned his stock to papier maché. Of course, well-thumbed books aren’t the only things that he sells and so he prioritises the books very lowly.

The event covered three days (or rather, two-and-a-half) from Friday through to Sunday, so we figured, what with the changeable nature of Autumn in these parts, we might have days when the weather kept the punters outdoors and days when the weather drove them inside – the experiment demanded that we cover all eventualities. As it turned out we saw the results of a range of meteorology. Myself being the only driver in our crowd, I spent much of the weekend in the car driving to and from Lithgow, hauling stock about the landscape. There were early mornings (where the only coffee options were of the McDonald’s variety – shudder!) and late evenings and I’m still working off my sleep debt.

There was only one thing which we hadn’t counted on – greed.

In past years, I’ve noticed the slow incremental climb of the admission charge imposed by the organisers – last year’s entry fee almost had me baulking, but I’d dragged friends from Sydney so backing out wasn’t an option. This year my admission was free as part of our stallholder’s levy, but as the event unfolded, I soon heard much grumbling from the attendees. As it transpired, the gate charge had jumped again and there was also a surprise $5 parking fee for anyone who’d had the temerity to drive to the event. The family entry price had become regulated – no more would it cover a handful of adults with a bunch of kids in tow; now it only applied if you were two adults with two kids: dads taking their sons out for the day to see the tanks were in for a rude shock. Essentially, if you took your family to Ironfest this year, getting in the front door would be an outlay of at least $100. And that’s before you start to think about food and drinks or the petrol you spent getting there.

I talked to many people across the three days: stallholders, punters, re-enactors and event staff. Numbers were up: more people came through the gate than had ever attended previously; no-one however, was buying anything. I shifted gears into “hard-sell mode” and practically drove people into our stall to examine the books; at the end of the weekend, we covered our stall fees and very little else with a pitiful number of sales. Once every potential purchaser had had their wallet hoovered at the front gate, there was very little reason for anyone to try and sell them their merchandise.

It was crazy. I had people sighing over books I was offering for sale at prices no-one would think twice about paying and putting them back down. No-one could afford to cough up $10 for a 1910 copy of Wells’s The Invisible Man, let alone $1,000 for a limited edition luxury printing of Le Morte d’Arthur, illustrated and decorated by Aubrey Beardsley. In past years I’d seen people drop $2,500 on a whim for a suit of metal armour; nothing doing this year.

I should have predicted this: in the weeks leading up to the event I sounded out random people I encountered, checking their ideas about Ironfest and what they expected from it. The first thing I noticed was that no-one realised it was on, and – truth be told – there was very little going on in the way of advertising in the local community: a few handmade cardboard signs tacked up alongside the Great Western Highway cannot seriously be called “advertising”. More professional signs and brochures materialised in the last few days before the weekend but it all seemed to be a case of too little, too late. Some few folks I spoke to seemed keen to check it out; mostly, the response I got was “Ironfest? That’s very expensive, isn’t it?”

I assume the organisers of Ironfest live large off the annual earnings of the event and see the yearly gate charge as simply being in line with the CPI or some other theoretical economic construct. If so, then more strength to them: Lithgow is by no means an affluent part of the world and the paltry sums that they spent on advertising in the lead-up to this year’s event show just how little they’re prepared to relinquish of their hard-earned. However, they appear to have reached, and surpassed, a tipping-point beyond which things will start to go backwards for them. I’m willing to bet that next year’s numbers will be well down on this year’s.

As for our experiment, all the stores involved will necessarily look upon this as a misuse of resources and a waste of time and effort. We all agreed, going in, that it was a case of “suck it and see” but nothing we unearthed could impel us to repeat the exercise. At best, it was a weekend of free promotion, so there’s that.

On the morning of the second day, I left the pavilion before the gates opened to try and rustle up last minute coffees. I was about to take a photo of my fellow stallholders setting up when I noticed a small gathering of people on the lawn in front of me, engaged in a solemn moment. I decided not to snap them until I could work out what they were doing and I’m glad I did. It turned out that they were scattering the ashes of a friend who had found their spiritual raison d’être at Ironfest. I think it was at that point that I knew the event was doomed. I was saddened by the fact that the organisers had slaughtered their golden goose and that this community of believers - along with many others - was about to be cast into the wilderness for tawdry economic concerns. Several people mentioned that there were other “steampunk-themed artisanal events” opening up around the country in the wake of Ironfest’s success, particularly in Goulburn at an old Victorian-era water pumping station there; I assume that the recreationist community will be pushed to these ever more minute and far-flung happenings as the bigger events bog down in monetary concerns, as they always have in the past. Ironfest has become an indicator of what’s possible; mismanagement seems to have driven it right off the rails.

Review: The Cabinet of Curiosities

“PRESTON, Lincoln”, The Cabinet of Curiosities, HarperCollins Publishers Pty. Ltd., Pymble, NSW, Australia, 2003.

Octavo; paperback; 464pp. Rolled; mild wear to the covers; spine creased; text block edges toned. Good.

Whenever I want to snuggle down for a comfy evening, my movie of choice is “The Relic”. As I’ve said before, it’s a well-written flick that benefits from having a solid architecture. The performances vary considerably but I’m prepared to overlook a lot for the sake of a film that puts substance before spectacle. I’ve never been able to find a copy of the book that this film was based on but I’ve met a fellow fan and Scott has kindly lent me a copy of The Cabinet of Curiosities by Lincoln Preston and I’m now getting an insight into the very genome behind “The Relic’s” phenotype.

Let me just reveal an interesting factoid before we continue: ‘Lincoln Preston’ is not a single individual; it’s two authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child writing as one. The ability to do this has always intrigued me: a collaborative effort requires a lot of give and take and I’m not sure that I could work with someone else to successfully pull something like this off. I’ve had opportunities (which unfortunately came to nothing early on) and I’d like to think that I’m open to the creative process, but it’s never really happened. So, kudos to these two guys for making a go of it! (I’m wondering how they decided whose name would go first...?)

As is typical in transferring any printed story to celluloid, there are excesses which get trimmed. One of these is an FBI investigator called Pendergast who is just too corny to be true. The other is an annoying reporter called Smithback who is a consummate knob. My discussions with Scott inform me that they’re both in the print version of The Relic and I’m so glad they were relegated. Nevertheless, here they both are in Cabinet and I’m having to deal with them...

Pendergast is that worst type of fictional literary character – a tricked-out blank slate ready for anything to be assigned to it. On the one hand, he’s glaringly obvious – white skin, hair, and eyes, in a black suit, driving a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith in New York (!) – but we never know anything about him. Why the hell doesn’t one of the other characters call FBI headquarters and get an explanation as to what he’s doing?! Because that would be too easy and the authors don’t want us to go there. He’s just too cool for school and he grates – he has the inside track on everything and he never tells anyone anything. Frankly, if I was one of the other characters in this tale I’d tell him where to get off: people like this don’t exist, and I wonder what made the authors think he was a good idea?

In detective fiction, many authors assemble their chief sleuth from a range of tics and mannerisms which they feel their readership will find interesting: Poirot has a symmetry issue; Alleyne has a name which no-one can pronounce; Campion is a pair of spectacles in front of a myriad bizarre twitches that leave him barely human. Generally, these extremes calm down into something workable after a few turns around the block. Not so Agent Pendergast: he’s a non-albino albino in a black suit with a hatred of bureaucracy, and yet working for a Bureau, who always seems to know what’s going on while no-one else has a clue. His metatextual premise is shaky and it’s easy to see why he got the chop.

On the other hand the reporter is a complete buffoon. Each time he uses his ‘journalism powers’ he gets nowhere; whenever he climbs over, or up, something to access information he sends everything pear-shaped. While he is referenced as a major player in the novel version of “The Relic”, he’s a walking target in this story: his journalistic strivings earn him the hatred of his girlfriend, his boss, his fellow journalists, the public at large, and they finally get him (almost) killed.

What that leaves us with is a story remarkably similar to “The Relic”. It’s set in a natural history museum; there are a bunch of scientists competing for a very small pool of funding in an institution increasingly focussed upon box-office draw; there is a female scientist annoyed at the fact of her life’s work being sidelined by cash-flow issues; there is Victorian-era architecture facilitating present-day mayhem. I hate to say it, but Lincoln Preston seems to be a one-trick pony at bottom. They manifest some interesting premises but they all seem to be overlain on the same fundamental substrate.

Nevertheless, there is some fascinating research on view. The Victorian notion of ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ – private collections of natural history material amassed by gentlemen collectors without formal education (for the most part) – is quite interesting, along with the notion that these collections were all bought up by the Natural History Museum of New York after that free institution was established. The parade of freaks and curiosities lends a pleasing tone to the narrative.

However. The Relic is a story about a monster loose in a museum. The Cabinet of Curiosities is a story about a serial killer loose in a museum. There’s a pattern here - same-old, same-old - but one which the authors nevertheless utilise well.

What bothers me is that between The Relic and The Cabinet of Curiosities is another novel – The Reliquary. Surely they can’t do the same gag three times? From what I’ve been able to ascertain, I’m thinking that maybe they can. And that they did. Maybe it’s because we all live in an era where readers don’t want ‘new’ as opposed to ‘more’; ‘new’ Poirot tales are being written (despite the fact that Agatha Christie killed him off so that there would be no more Poirot). But even if the premise is engaging, to my mind it shouldn’t be used over and over again.

Perhaps this is a case of writing what you know. These guys know museums – how they’re funded, how they’re organised, what makes them tick. They also know human anatomy, since every corpse or other instance of gory revelation is buried beneath a mountain of medical jargon (in a good way!). Reading some of these descriptions, I had a flashback to the movie and the scene with the coroner giving a technical description of the mutilated security guard’s body – she’s my favourite character in the film, by the way. The minutia of technical detail in these descriptions lends a detached and chilly atmosphere to them making them somehow more terrible and thus, more effective.

The Cabinet of Curiosities involves a search for a serial killer who likes to surgically remove the lower spine of his victims while they’re still alive. It transpires that he uses part of the anatomised material to make a substance which – he feels – will indefinitely extend his lifespan with regular applications. As the evidence unfolds, it becomes a distinct possibility that the killer has been at work for about 130 years and isn’t slowing down at all. Our heroes try various methods to try and unearth the criminal – including Pendergast’s ability to ‘super-saturate’ himself with historical facts and mentally recreate in his mind an exact replica of 1890s New York wherein to unearth clues (!) – and almost all of them are successful, whereas the stalwart police force turn up squat. The final chapters are a fevered chase through an eponymous cabinet of curiosities, trying to defeat the killer while not being broken down for parts.

The execution of all this is handled deftly but unimaginatively, plodding through to the bitter conclusion. In a way, the authors shoot themselves in the foot: they want the cops out of the way at the end, and they want the reader constantly guessing who the villain will turn out to be. To this end, they make every policeman and likely candidate for Bad Guy as unpleasant as they can: in the final analysis, I was hoping they’d all die – my sympathies were with nobody. On the heroes’ side, what with the officious FBI cipher and the journalistic no-hoper, the team consists of Dr. Nora Kelly who spends her time being annoyed and cranky, and O’Shaughnessy a New York Irish cop who gets killed. Horribly. This last guy is such a lazy stereotype that it’s embarrassing: no quantity of background characters saying “who’d believe it? An actual Irish New York cop?” can take the curse off this. The irony lies in pointing out the attempt to be ironic.

(As an aside, I’ve noticed that these guys have a trick when sketching out police characters. They make these characters ‘a policeman who...’ In “The Relic”, there are the ‘coffee cops’ – ‘policemen who like lattes’; in this book, there’s O’Shaughnessey, a ‘policeman who likes opera’. See? It’s easy, and almost writes itself...!)

Anyway all of these unlikeable characters wend their tortuous way towards the finale and it’s a relief to be at the end at last. I had flashbacks to Patricia Cornwall – at some point her plots became so insanely and pointlessly byzantine and unbelievable that just turning the page to feel the mechanical effort of moving towards the end was its own reward. Like James Herbert writing ghost stories about ghosts hiring psychic investigators to help them haunt other ghosts, the whole thing just becomes too overwrought and highly-strung. I have the distinct feeling that I’ve come in at the end of a highly developed plot-line and that I’m missing the point – like jumping in to “Game of Thrones” at season six. Although I now realise that it’s going to be just an airport potboiler, I’m still keen to read The Relic; this exercise has shone a light into the inner workings of one of my favourite films but I’m less keen to track my way backwards to The Reliquary. Maybe if I have a day or two with absolutely nothing better to do...

Two Tentacled Horrors (sorry Scott!).

Review: The Perfume of Egypt...

LEADBEATER, C.W., The Perfume of Egypt, The Theosophist Office, Adyar, Madras, India, 1912.

Second edition: octavo; hardcover, with illustrated upper board; 306pp. (with 6pp. of adverts) with an illustrated half-title page. Very slightly rolled; boards rubbed with some inkstains; corners somewhat bumped; spine sunned and extremities softened; text block edges lightly spotted; flyleaf torn out; previous owner’s pencil inscription to the half-title and ink inscription to the title page; scattered light foxing throughout. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good.

It’s an interesting exercise to compare two works written by devotees of a spurious faith. In my last post it was Aleister Crowley, a pernicious little oik, who invented his own ‘belief system’ and pushed it mercilessly in order to grab all of the drugs, notoriety and ass he could wrap his slimy mitts around; today, it’s the work of Charles Webster Leadbeater, a staunch partisan of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and a fairly prolific writer of Theosophical texts. This – in order to compare it with Crowley’s ‘offering’ – is also a collection of short stories with a supernatural bent, albeit with Theosophical axes grinding in the background.

La Blavatsky – let me be clear – is no more or less a snake-oil salesman than Crowley. The codswallop that she shovelled during her lifetime stank no more or less than the crap Crowley dished out. The difference between the two of them is simply this: those around La Blavatsky took the essence of the rubbish she peddled and spun from it a belief system that simmered down to a philosophy, and then reduced further to an alternative lifestyle option. Once she was dead, the followers took a long hard look at themselves and stepped sideways, away from ridicule and condemnation. Theosophy is still practised today, but it is slowly going the way of other philosophical dodos and will most likely cease to be in a generation or so.

Rudolf Steiner enacted the biggest schism away from Theosophy. He dived into the faith headfirst in his early days and drank deep of the Kool-Aid; later, the scales fell from his eyes and he broke away, forming a splinter sect called Anthroposophy. His work – stripped of Blavatsky’s hoo-ha – lives on in Steiner Schools and other institutions across the planet.

Less lucky was Krishnamurti. This fellow probably felt fortunate at having been selected as Blavatsky’s “Chosen One”; after all, he grew up in a country where reincarnation was a given so why not? Prolonged exposure to La Blavatsky and her shenanigans must have left him feeling uneasy though: it became obvious to him that she was less a fakir than a faker, and he began to back-pedal furiously, parleying his ‘Theosophical godhead’ into something less over-the-top. His books on the meditative life and contemplative existence are worth reading – after all, he was wise enough to see where Blavatsky’s ship was headed and to jump off in time, so he must have known a thing or two.

Not so lucky were Blavatsky’s other disciples. Annie Besant clung desperately to the spurious truths of Isis Unveiled and kept the flag flying well after the hype had dwindled and the Spiritualist age had passed into a non-event. She wrote many erudite books on the nature of belief – albeit with a theosophical bent – chief amongst them Mysticism, which is still considered a cornerstone publication on the subject. Along with her was C.W. Leadbeater, whose publications for the cult at Adyar includes volumes one and two of The Inner Life and The Hidden Side of Things, among many other titles.

It’s not too much of a stretch to think that this book was probably something of a money-spinner for the Theosophists. For starters, it’s about ghosts and such-like supernaturality; in 1912, these collections were all the rage thanks to Charles Dickens and the scribblings of M.R. James. Add to the internal content, the Egyptian-style design of the front cover and this volume literally has ‘spooky’ written all over it. The coffers at Adyar must have been overflowing!

The stories in this book have a homey feel to them. Leadbeater introduces them as tales which he had heard personally and which he had gone to great lengths to obtain permission to reproduce. In some instances, he had been asked to change the names of those involved and in one, he confesses that the original teller of the story died before such permission was granted and – despite the fact that we would all certainly know the person in question and thereby accept the story’s authenticity - prefers, for honour’s sake, to retain a veil of anonymity. Some of the stories are his own experiences and one is a ghost story which he heard La Blavatsky tell one evening and which he introduces as his own poor attempt to retail her narrative. The final story is more of a novella, told in chapters and set in the back jungles of an anarchic South America: the narrator is unidentified and the verifiable details of the tale are sketchy at best; however, as an exercise in pulp fiction it has all the elements required for a rollicking yarn.

The stories run the gamut of post-death apparitions, from spooks with unfinished business  to vengeful spirits out for blood. Each one has its share of suspense and revelation and each one resolves nicely. Leadbeater takes pains to analyse each episode from a theosophic viewpoint, arguing in favour of astral projections, thought forms and karmic burdens, but this wrapping up is never intrusive or detrimental to the preceding narrative. His delivery is occasionally a little wide-eyed and ingenuous (especially when the story involves himself) but, since we’re here for the ghosts to start with, rounding out the meal with a side order of Spirituality is hardly an annoyance.

This is what Crowley loses sight of with his stories – the entertainment factor. While Leadbeater talks from a Theosophical stance, fundamentally he’s here to engage and divert us; Crowley’s every pen-scratch on a piece of paper is an exercise in self-promotion and the tearing-down of those whom he despises. Reading an extract from The Perfume of Egypt before bedtime will leave you entertained and ready for a good night’s sleep; reading an extract from The Drug & Other Stories will make you want to get up and have a hot shower with a wire brush. I know which one I’d choose!

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: The Drug & Other Stories...

CROWLEY, Aleister, The Drug & Other Stories, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Ware, Hertfordshire, UK, 2010.

Octavo; paperback; 608pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

This book has been for sale at the store for awhile, and I’ve been circling around it with some trepidation. I can’t stand Aleister Crowley; just the sight of him, glooming out of a photograph, or staring wide-eyed while wearing some kind of stupid hat makes my blood boil. He was the biggest snake-oil salesman in a crowd of snake-oil purveyors from the last century. He preyed upon the credulous for the sake of sheer, unadulterated self-promotion and didn’t care who got chopped in the cross-fire. He represents the worst kind of elitist, racist, and sexist thinking of his, or any other, day. To put it very bluntly, he was the consummate wanker.

That being said, the preamble to this volume claims that his fictional writing, distributed as it is across a range of platforms in rare compendia and forgotten journals, has been overlooked as some of the best Edwardian storytelling around. The aim of the editors is to bring together the stories from these disparate sources and allow them to be examined in toto and judged on their merit. Let me say now, so that the wise amongst you can stop here and go about your business without having to waste any more time on this idiot, that there is, in fact, little merit here and certainly nothing to get excited about.

First – some background. Crowley came from an entitled family and went to Cambridge when the time came. There, he indulged himself and fiddled about on the edges of an academic career, meeting members of the literati who - largely – saw him for what he was and stayed clear. He secured the affections of those with money and an impressionable turn of mind, whom he could persuade to idolise him. He wandered in an out of society spending his time in half-arsed educative bouts, sessions of mountain-climbing, and overseas travel. Over time his personal fortune dwindled almost to nothing due to his wastrel ways.

He married, tying some hapless woman’s fortune to his spent one, and they had a child. When this daughter was two years old he took her and her mother on a gruelling overland journey from China’s eastern coast to northern Burma, along three roughly parallel rivers, in an attempt to map them and identify portage locations which would make the waterways a useful trade route. He succeeded. His crowing about the effort was effusive, and one wonders if the deaths of his wife and child even registered with him as a downside to this great achievement.

All through his life, Crowley depended upon the money of impressionable women to get him through. Even after the death of his wife in Rangoon, soon after the burial he flew off to Shanghai to conduct a “magickal working” with an old paramour who was not averse to spending lavishly upon him.

His greatest “working” was a brutal and gruelling session of sexual “magick” in Cairo during which he claimed to have summoned a demon. His partner in the ritual – a wealthy and impressionable young man – died during the event and Crowley wriggled clear of the legal ramifications which should have stopped him in his tracks, but for the haze of lies and misdirection which he spun in his wake.

The rest of Crowley’s life was a constant parade of duplicity, sensationalism, and indulgence. He bounced his way back and forth from America, to Europe, to Britain wasting (mainly other people’s) money and preying on those who swallowed the drivel he peddled. He wrote extensively in his on-again, off-again journal “The Equinox” for which he could rarely get people to write and so, inevitably, wrote most of the articles himself, under a plethora of pseudonyms.

He occasionally set about translating various spiritual works; however, each time he did so, he inevitably perverted the content of these books in order to accord more closely to his own philosophy of “Thelema”. Each translated work which he undertook approached the effort from a position of racial superiority, as Crowley openly and viciously despised all non-Caucasian peoples, and his translations are always patronising first, and self-promoting second.

I could go on.

This notion that Crowley could be a great short story writer, somehow unrecognised by the critics of his time, intrigued me. True, his work appeared mostly in his own journals for which he charged a hefty subscription fee, so his audience was necessarily limited. Also, his ruthless self-promotion as “The Beast – 666” distanced him from all but the most fringe individuals. Arthur Machen despised him, for example, although Crowley, for his part, gushed about Machen’s work. All this aside, he spent so much time writing in order to fill in the blank pages for which others were paying, he obviously had had a huge amount of practise. To my mind it would all come down to ego – could Crowley put himself to one side in order to create a written piece that would entertain and have something of value to impart? Apparently not.

From the first story in this collection right up until the last, Crowley uses the pieces to promote himself and to deride his ‘enemies’. In “The Three Characteristics” he tells the tale of a Buddhist saint (himself) attacked by an envious mage – a thinly-veiled caricature of Allan MacGregor Bennett, one of Crowley’s nemeses from The Golden Dawn movement. The ‘hero’ of the story ingenuously slips free of all attempts to thwart his spiritual progress, with gods and circumstances – even fundamental tenets of the Buddhist faith – bending to enable his attainment. This is Crowley at his most preening and insufferable, and it only gets worse from here.

The editors claim that “The Drug” is the world’s first attempt at transcribing a drug experience; well, this is patently not the case and I’m happy to strip that laurel off Crowley’s list of so-called ‘achievements’. As it is, the title story drips with archaic word-use efflorescing the paragraphs needlessly and thinly camouflaging the homo-erotic subtext. The ‘point’ of the story is clunky, obvious and heavy-handed, delivered after pages of indulgent trip descriptions upon which no-one should have to waste their life. This is adolescent tripe; only those already convinced of Crowley’s ‘stature’ would waste their time with it.

A common feature of Crowley’s stories is a tone of condescension and the assumption that he is talking to those of a less academic, or educated, turn of mind. In one tale (“The Wake World”), he provides footnotes to make his story clear. All the references are to his own made-up philosophy which, where it doesn’t derive from obscure grimoires of earlier centuries and mad scribblers, is pointlessly obscure, in an attempt to prevent any incisive examination. Then there is the story of “T’ien Tao”. Not only is the tale about funny little yellow people, he even gives us a picture, a racially-offensive caricature of a Chinaman! Yay!

Why, I ask myself, do people keep sniffing what this guy is shovelling? With each story I kept returning to the Foreword and the Introduction to try and gauge whether there was some touch of irony in the editors’ thinking. But no: apparently David Tibet and William Breeze (not their real names?) have drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid and are not prepared to diss the ‘Master’, despite the overwhelming evidence.

There are two points about which I feel that this book is a worthy publication and I’m giving it half a Tentacled Horror for each. First, it’s part of Wordsworth’s “Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural” series, which includes – among others – Lovecraft, Hodgson and Poe, placing it emphatically in a fictional category and allowing readers to compare Crowley to actual story-tellers of value and to draw the inevitable negative conclusion. Secondly – and this is particularly pleasing – Crowleyites maintain “The Master’s” writings in an abstruse and self-indulgently complex library system according to “value”, which Crowley dictated on his death bed; this publication breaks that format and throws everything into the mix regardless of its “importance” to Thelemites. That distant rumbling you’re hearing? It’s Crowley spinning in his grave.

It’s hard for me to be impartial about Crowley, and I freely admit that I’m probably not the best person to evaluate this book; however, it has to be acknowledged that – but for Twitter and Instagram – Crowley was the Kanye West of his day (keep spinning, Aleister!). In light of the recent discovery of HPL’s “The Cancer of Superstition” manuscript, we’re hearing all over again how poisonous a racist he was and, to be frank, I’ve had a gutful. To those people out there looking for poor choices of role models in today’s society, here’s your bull’s eye; try looking at this rather than dismissing Crowley as a quirky artefact of a distant time, simply one face among many on a Beatles album. Crowley still influences people across the planet – along with rest of his snake-oil pushing crowd – and has a possibly greater influence on the young and impressionable than someone like Lovecraft whose racist tendencies barely make it to print in comparison. No-one in this world is a saint, but criticise a writer on the content of their writing first before combing through their private correspondence to draw a foregone conclusion. Crowley is a nasty, grubby little cretin with self-adoration issues. It’s right here in black and white.

Thank you, Wordsworth Editions, for allowing us to see clearly.

Review: The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies...

SMITH, Clark Ashton, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, Penguin Classics/Penguin Group (USA) LLC., New York, NY, USA, 2014.

Octavo; paperback; 370pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

I had very high hopes for this book after reading about it online. Sadly, it doesn’t quite live up to the hype.

Clark Ashton Smith wrote determinedly, if not compulsively, throughout his life and, like HPL, was driven to it by the demands of needing to make an income in order to survive. Unlike Lovecraft, Smith didn’t mince words about making a living: he not only needed to support himself but also his two aged parents. Lovecraft, could pretend that writing was his “gentleman’s pursuit”, his craft of idle moments, but Smith had three mouths to feed and loans to service.

What makes Smith so interesting is that his prolific output is so good. Sure, there are duds, but they are few and far between. He started off writing poetry and achieved a fair degree of fame for his work in this mode. Books were published and prizes were won. After his “induction” into the Lovecraft circle, he turned to the type of stories demanded by the pulps and by which he is better known to this day. Unlike Lovecraft again, Smith wrote for a wider range of magazines and journals, always looking to make a sale rather than beating a recalcitrant “Weird Tales” editor into capitulation. As a result, Smith’s work is sometimes quite bawdy, or conforms more directly to what we think of nowadays as science fiction. In short, Smith had the weird down pat – like HPL – but he also had range.

Some of that diversity is presented in this volume. Smith wrote his weird fiction in several collections: best known is probably his Averoigne stories, set in a pre-Enlightment France in a fictional province beset by the cruelty of the Church and the resurgence of pagan and Mythos beliefs. There are also his Zothique tales, set in a time long after the current era in a post-Utopian decadent future. There too, are his Hyperborean stories set upon the ancient continents of Poseidonis, Hyperborea and Lemuria, and there are tales which switch between these locales and borrow from various milieu. The online blurb concerning this book implied strongly that all the stories which made up these various canons were included; sadly, they aren’t.

William Dorman, the executor of Smith’s estate, has chosen the content of this compendium and, while it does cover all the various styles of Smith’s oeuvre, it is limited. Of the Averoigne stories only “The Holiness of Azéderac” and “Mother of Toads” are present, while the Zothique stories comprise the main bulk of the short story section. This amounts to eighteen stories, which is nothing to sneeze at; however, given that both “Ubbo Sathla” and “The Treader of the Dust” – both very good tales – are freely available at Project Gutenberg it begs the question as to why they were included. As well, “Mother of Toads” can be found reprinted in the Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft, so it’s hardly a rare treat. If the goal of this collection was to simply display the best of Clark Ashton Smith, then perhaps there’s a justification for the selection, because these are all fine stories; however, if the goal was to bring back into print those gems of his work which rarely get time in the spotlight, then the reader is poorly served. S.T. Joshi writes the Introduction to this volume but it feels as if he’s doing his best with what Dorman has given him.

The cherry-picking of tales from the various Smith canons also serves to undermine the presentation. The Hyperborean tales and the stories of Zothique, despite being set poles apart chronologically, bear marked similarities. Both sets of stories are set in fictional periods where technology is a distant dream and magic has (re)surged into the present; at base, there is very little to differentiate the two collections apart from some geography and famous names. Thrown fractionally together as they are here, they blend into each other too much and lose their distinctive flavour. The novice reader will perceive simply a random bunch of pleasingly bland narratives, which – apart from what in this context appears to be a sloppy re-using of proper names and throwaway concepts – are enjoyable-enough fantasies without any particular bite. In short, they come off like sci-fi/fantasy tofu: solid, but light and lacking piquancy.

About a quarter of the text is devoted to Smith’s Prose Poems and Poetry. The Prose Poems continue the faux pas made with the story selection: most of these, while pretty to read, say very little and feel unfinished, even pointless. Just as the sense of completeness has been lost in the story canons, the ambient noise of these pieces simply underscores that feeling. These are pretty word-pictures without weight; there is the occasional witty observation and some stylish description but not much else. In tandem with the selected stories they don’t work.

Finally there’s the poetry. Firstly, let me point out that poetry isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, although it is mine. By any standard, Smith’s poems are polished but not special. None of them will ever find its way into a Norton Anthology for example. These pieces are overly-dramatic (“Ode to the Abyss”, “The Medusa of Despair”, “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil”) and far too florid; they stand outside of the poetry tradition that abided while he was writing them and are mannered on a style that was outdated before he was even born. At best they are homage; at worst they are kitsch. Best to just draw a veil across them...

It seems that the editors’ goals in compiling this collection were unfocussed, or driven by opposing needs: on one hand there is the necessity to present a holistic view of Smith, covering all his manifold writing styles; on the other hand, there’s the possibility of bringing back into print the little-seen and rarely-reprinted gems of his opus. To my mind, it would have served the collection better to choose just one of these aims and to run with it. The result, as it stands, is a bland and sometimes queasy assemblage that will disappoint fans and which will leave newcomers scratching their heads and wondering what the fuss is all about.

Individually, the stories here are excellent; just search around before shelling out for this collection – you can find much of this material elsewhere for less, or for free. The Prose Poems might be inspirational as gaming resources; ignore the poetry - unless you really want to read sonnets using the word “Cthulhu”. Clark Ashton Smith has been poorly-served by his editors here, and that’s the sole reason I’m marking the volume down.

Disappointingly, three Tentacled Horrors.