Disciples of Cthulhu...

After enjoying (enduring!) Joshi’s Black Wings, I have decided to take a step back into the past and look at another series of collected works along Mythos lines, but one that - to my mind – does a far better job. Again, serendipitously, the second volume of this Chaosium-published series came my way while sorting through the material of a bookshop in the process of closing down and I was able to include it among the volumes which the store for which I work was taking off their hands.

BERGLUND, Edward P. (Ed.), The Disciples of Cthulhu – Second Revised Edition, Chaosium Publications/Chaosium Inc., Oakland CA, 1996.

Octavo; paperback; 258pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

The Disciples of Cthulhu is a compilation edited by Edward P. Berglund and was first published in 1976. Chaosium revised the work and reissued it in 1996 under its own imprint. I first read this collection – the 1976 lineup – when I was a kid in high school living in Jakarta, long before I even knew who Lovecraft was or what Cthulhu was all about. One story in particular (which I’ll discuss shortly) stuck with me ever since and it was while trying to re-locate this tale that I stumbled upon the Chaosium version years later (I had completely forgotten what the book was called, but I knew the name of the short story). Once I had the volume back in my grubby mitts, the fact that there were other stories as well which I remembered as being great, came flooding back. For me, this is the hallmark of a good short story compilation – the assembling of quality material that sticks in your mind and which re-pays re-reading.

Of course, what makes this first volume in the series a standout success is the sheer level of talent involved. All of the big names are here: Eddy C. Bertin, Ramsey Campbell, Fritz Leiber, Brian Lumley, so – going in – you know you’re in safe hands. What builds upon this secure foundation is that the rest of the material is coherently selected and arranged, well-written and of the highest quality. Many stories in this collection are now considered mainstays of the Mythos in their own right, their concepts having been expanded and embellished by other authors and through gaming material.

Two tales are so well-known that I will deal with them in an almost off-hand manner – which should not, in any way, be taken as an indication of their quality as Mythos stories. It’s simply that, if you call yourself a Mythos fan, you’ve already read these and, probably, several times. Lumley’s “The Fairground Horror” is a quintessential Mythos set-up and follow-through, which is everything you want in a tale of Yog-Sothothery. So too, is Ramsey Campbell’s “The Tugging”, which stands out as the first of his Mythos tales which – although obviously indebted to HPL – feels like its own creature, a fresh, trans-Atlantic take on Lovecraft. If, by some miracle, you haven’t read these, do so and you’ll see from where a whole galaxy of Mythos concepts derives.

“The Silence of Erica Zann” is a pleasing and highly entertaining coda to HPL’s “The Music of Erich Zann”, replacing the Expressionist phantasmagoria of Bohemian Paris for the psychedelic haze of San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Ill-fated Erica gets caught up in counter-culture weirdness and, like her ancestor before her, struggles nightly with a demonic force, a sound which she must hold at bay by means of her voice. Inevitably, her puny human status is her undoing and her world comes tumbling down around her. Nods to Nyarlathotep abound, along with obscure references to witchcraft, but nothing is ever definitively pinned down as a cause, which gives the story a highly creepy air.

Bob van Laerhoven’s “All Eye” is a tale of the northern wilds that echoes elements of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo”: here are the vast emptiness playing tricks with the mind of the lone hunter; the ancient silence of the primordial wilds creating a paradoxical claustrophobia; the hidden menace of an ancient horror only hinted at in old legends. An anthropologist and folklorist tracking down clues in an ancient explorer’s journal, comes to the wilderness in search of an old artefact known to the local indigenes as an idol to “All Eye”. Close to his goal, a strange transformation overcomes his guide and he rushes away only to encounter a travelling doctor whose clientele are the far-flung trappers and prospectors of the region. Together they return to the site of the strange event to get to the bottom of things; but is everything truly as it seems? This is a powerful story, somewhat let down by a cheese-y twist, but quite fun nevertheless.

The story that drew me back to this collection was Walter C. DeBill Jr.’s “Where Yidhra Walks”. This is not only a fascinating tale in its own right, it also provides a whole new wing of deviltry to the Cthulhu Mythos, along with its own nightmare tomes, hideous creatures and the cracked writings of those who have fallen foul of its menacing entities. If the rest of the Cthulhu Mythos didn’t exist, there’s enough in this one tale to furnish a more than adequate replacement. The story tells of a wanderer who crosses a rickety bridge into a backwoods county to discover an ill-aspected community thriving on its lush crops and toiling at the behest of a mysterious woman named Yolanda. It transpires that this ‘woman’ is actually an avatar of the cosmic entity Yidhra, a being which embodies rampant and uncontrolled fecundity and who wishes to add our narrator’s biological and technological distinctiveness to its own (well, "Star Trek" had to get it from somewhere!). In true Lovecraftian style our hero flees screaming into the night, knowing that sweet dreams are going to be a thing of the past...

A.A. Attanasio provides stories for both volumes in this series and both of his offerings have similar stylings. In “Glimpses”, we see an agent of Nodens travelling across time and space trying to thwart the machinations of Yog-Sothoth, following in hot pursuit. The tale is related in a series of ‘jump-cut’ chapters that leap across time and space, following on from each other. The canvas of the story stretches from the late Victorian era to a time in the distant future, effectively outlining how a campaign against this particular Old One would probably pan out. The best aspect of this tale is the way in which the full sense of what is taking place only crystallizes at the very end: it’s not until all the pieces are on the table that the big picture emerges and the full stakes are revealed. That being said, some of the attempts to sketch other worlds and times are just that – sketchy. With time, the futuristic scenes have dated and the Victorian stuff doesn’t quite ring true. Small quibbles, I guess.

Robert M. Price has a long track record of writing and editing in the HPL sandpit and this story shows his highly-engaging ability to take from those who have gone before and to spin something off that is quintessentially his own. In “Dope War of the Black Tong” he takes Robert E. Howard’s two-fisted investigator Steve Harrison and teams him up with the mystic Anton Zarnak to take down a tong of Tcho-tcho villains who are pushing Black Lotus derivatives on the underworld types of San Francisco. The result is a pulp delight, cops and cultists in a fiery face-off in the name of justice!

Eddie C. Bertin’s contribution to this collection is, like William C. DeBill Jr’s, a slice of mythology that fits almost seamlessly into the Cthulhu Mythos. I say “almost” because it partakes a little too much of August Derleth’s ‘elemental theory’ of the Mythos for my taste. Nevertheless, in “Darkness, My Name Is”, we have the full deal – Old One, cultists, ancient texts - in a story that is multi-layered, strange, often psychedelic, and disturbing. An investigator travels to a distant German village trying to track down an ancient temple to Cyaegha, using a range of illegally-photographed and Xeroxed tomes. What he discovers – about the town, its hidden deity and himself – fundamentally alters his very being; however, rather than draw a line under a foolish attempt to dabble in Things Better Left Alone, his actions merely open new doorways to further foolish attempts...

"The Terror from the Depths" is a great story because it attempts to weave a section of Lovecraftian tapestry out of diverse elements and lift a Mythos overview as whole cloth from disparate pieces. Fritz Leiber (‘LYE-ber’, people; not ‘LEE-ber’: he was very particular about this) introduces us to Georg Fischer a sensitive and sheltered precocious youth given to artistic pursuits, far wanderings and dubious musings (where have we heard this before?), who dreams fantastically that there are winged serpents below the ground in tunnels stretching across the landscape. He is contacted by Albert Wilmarth of Miskatonic University who – along with some other well-known faculty members – is conducting dream research into the possibility of a common dream language, among other things. Wilmarth comes to visit our narrator in California and many strange and provocative threads of Georg’s existence come bursting up out of the ground in a maddening act of revelation.

If anything, Leiber tries to stretch this piece of tapestry too far in order to cover every aspect of Lovecraft’s oeuvre and it falls a little flat by trying to do too much. There are references to “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “The Colour out of Space”, “The Dunwich Horror” – even Wilmarth gives a fairly offhand commentary on his own experiences in “The Whisperer in Darkness”. After setting itself so effectively as its own creature, the story dwindles away to become a footnote to Lovecraft’s other works. Still, it’s a lively read and in terms of the writing style which Leiber affects, it feels like an authentic piece of Lovecraftiana.

*****

That’s it then – Disciples One. There’s so much to enjoy here – added dimensions of Cthulhoid weirdness, great pastiche that is never treacly, cosmic awesomeness of a high order. Now, on to Disciples Two!

BERGLUND, Edward P. (Ed.), The Disciples of Cthulhu II – Blasphemous Tales of the Followers, Chaosium Publications/Chaosium Inc., Oakland CA, 2003.

Octavo; paperback; 219pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

The second Disciples volume roams further afield from the first gathering, looking for those writers with more tenuous links to – although no less indebted to – HPL and his original circle. These writers – some of whom return from the first collection - bring a rather more modern flavour to the Mythos, on the whole, and here again the quality is top notch.

First cab off the rank is Walter C. DeBill Jr. for a return performance, and true to form, his offering is wonderful. With “The Bookseller’s Second Wife” we travel over territory carved out by Joseph Curwen and his ilk, evil magicians all, trading in arcane tomes and paraphernalia. The Bookseller of this tale is one such villain and, when a distant nephew comes to work in his shop during the summer, he enters a world at once byzantine in the extreme and deeply sinister. Like all good bookshops, really! Key to this story is the eponymous wife, who seduces the nephew to help her free herself from the wicked machinations of her husband. The ending is edge-of-your-seat stuff, with horrors literally coming out of the walls!

One of H.G. Wells’s most moody works is unfortunately the one that the reader has the most trouble suspending disbelief for. The Island of Dr. Moreau quite simply got outstripped by science almost before the ink dried on its manuscript, meaning that it had a half-life of about six months. It’s a great morality tale about the evils of vivisection and animal experimentation but frankly, no matter how much you tinker with the architecture of a rabbit, or a goat, you’re never going to get it to talk. Thus it’s somewhat bemusing to discover why 1) anyone would want to write an extension of it, much less 2) try to bolt on Mythos elements to it. Still, this is exactly what Brad Linaweaver and Fred Olen Ray attempt to do with their story “Eldritch”. An ivory importer en route to England discovers himself cast adrift when the crew of the steamer which he’s on mutinies. He finds himself washed up on an island and lusting for the daughter of Dr. Moreau – herself a doctor and continuer of her father’s work – only to discover that she has incorporated the worship of Shub-Niggurath into her father’s process and needs new blood for her project. The story limps along by trying to straddle two ponies at once and is the worse for it, not least because the captain of the steamer is a Marsh from Innsmouth and even the most hardened crew of mutineers is going to take that on board before they turn traitor!

Gary Myers’s “The Web” is a prescient piece of modern Mythos tomfoolery, which demonstrates the sort of mayhem that Yog-Sothothery might accomplish when blended with the internet. Two pals dabbling on the fringes of Lovecraftiana find an online copy of the Necronomicon downloaded by guerrilla cultists with a taste for hacking. Interestingly, the online version of the work contains spells with ‘plug & play’ interfaces making spell-casting that much easier! After failing to summon Azathoth and several other horrors, the two finally meet the requirements to whistle up a dhole, a manifestation which they manage - barely - to shut down in the nick of time. What happens next is what we’d all expect from a bunch of meddling millennials...

Robert Weinberg next presents us with “Passing Through” a nasty piece of work with its roots sunk deep in HPL’s “From Beyond” and “Dreams in the Witch-House”. A feted mathematician hooks up with our narrator and together they flip through a range of forbidden tomes transcribing the arcane ravings into mathematical formulae. The maths master builds a soundless and featureless black room in his house with blackboard walls onto which he hopes the Ancient Ones will scrawl equally devastating equations with handily-provided chalk. Our narrator gets the willies at this point and begins to distance himself but, on the night of the grand experiment, he fails to receive the crowing ‘phone call of success at the pre-arranged hour, and so he goes over to the dark room only to find an awful (but not unexpected!) surprise...

Scott David Aniolowski is a well-known generator of gaming material for “Call of Cthulhu” and, not surprisingly his short stories also tend to delight and amuse. A short story in a Lovecraftian collection entitled “The Idol” might tread the well-travelled path, you’d expect; however, the idol in this case is a living one, of the type that has screaming girls rushing about after him and using him as a bull’s eye for their knickers. The narrator of the tale is his long-suffering manager, trying to keep his golden goose on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, our superstar has biological links to Innsmouth and insists on a weekend visit to the old town...

A.A. Attanasio appears again this time with “Time in the Old House”. Unlike his previous effort, this story is much more dreamlike and poetic. The narrative is simple enough: the narrator wanders into a subtle dreamscape and enters an ancient building wherein he confronts the Old Ones in all their horror before fleeing out into the night. It’s made clear to us that the imagery of the dream is merely a cloak to hide the true nature of the revelations and, to this end, the writing style is full of highly descriptive and lyrical turns of phrase, reinforcing the sensuous nature of this otherworld. Fundamentally however, this is a mood piece: colourful; powerful; but relatively slight.

“Special Order” harks back to De Bill Jr’s opening salvo, dealing with the trade in rare old tomes. 'Henry Lee Forrest' (an amalgamated pseudonym) describes for us an antique bookselling operation set in a typical American mall. A customer sends an e-mail asking the narrator to track down and purchase a copy of the Necronomicon on his behalf, something which she finds faintly ludicrous but which she undertakes anyway. Unexpectedly, the special order arrives and its presence in the store causes mayhem amongst the staff, a creeping effect that begins to pervade the entire shopping mall. To begin with, the head of the bookselling concern becomes obsessed with the tome and unwilling to part with it; another employee has an outbreak of debilitating allergies; rats begin to move freely through the service entrances of the building. When the book’s new owner turns up to claim his purchase, it leads to a crushing confrontation that almost levels the block.

Only two things bugged me about this story. One, no antique bookseller in their right mind would set up an operation in a shopping mall – it just doesn’t work given the type of customer that such businesses attract. No serious book collector is going to waste time with an operation that’s ‘up on Level 2, just past the Krispy-Kreme outlet’. The second issue was that the Necronomicon cost a measly $20,000. That’s the price for a moderately worn copy of Captain Cook’s Journals, not even a very good first edition copy. A copy of the real Necronomicon is going to be a lot more expensive than that. A lot more. I realise it’s my own background talking here and I don’t mean to downgrade an otherwise entertaining story, but it just didn’t ring true.

“Lujan’s Trunk” was a story which I anticipated as the weak link in this collection. It’s written by Donald R. Burleson who, along with his wife, contributed two tales to Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, both of which stank. I expected to be less than edified, instead it wasn’t too bad. The story involves a writer who moves to New Mexico looking for peace and quiet in order to finish his novel. While driving into town from his remote home, he notices a decrepit farm with an old man sitting on the porch. Making enquiries, he learns that old man Lujan sits there every day and night, parked next to his weird-looking trunk and minds his own business. Our novelist decides to say 'hello' and this leads him inevitably to an encounter with the trunk and its nightmarish contents. As I said, surprisingly good.

C.J. Henderson’s “San Francisco Treat” is a strange call-back to “The Music of Eric Zann”. A young man discovers that recurrent bouts of annoying ear worms cause him to see beyond his immediate surroundings to a strange dimension which becomes ever more aware of his presence with each re-occurrence. We meet him in the final stages of this bizarre debilitation, locked in a room with no visual or aural distractions which might cause some irritating jingle or trite melody to go romping through his thoughts. Unfortunately, while about his ablutions in the bathroom, the smell of a neighbour’s instant rice meal – the “Treat” of the title – awakens the advertising jingle he and his mother used to sing while eating it, and, when the police show up to investigate his subsequent disappearance, there’s nothing but the faint smell of cooking to serve as a clue.

“Acute Spiritual Fear” is Robert M. Price’s contribution to this volume. To be honest, it’s not as good as “Dope War of the Black Tong”; entertaining enough but a bit half-baked. The story involves a young seminary student who switches to Miskatonic University to continue his education into Christian theology (as you do!). He wanders about on orientation day and discovers a theological debating group which seems like just his cup of tea in terms of socialising. Little does he realise that these evangelical undergrads are splicing their Christianity with elements of local history and have come to the conclusion that the Second Coming already came and Wilbur Whateley was the One Foretold.

This tale grinds slowly, bogged down with a bunch of theological meanderings in trying to get its point across. Robert Price’s background is in theology so he knows whereof he speaks, but it gets pretty deathless at certain points. Also, the wide-eyed and affected naiveté of the students, discussing their level of faith and willingness to believe, all sounded a bit hokey to me. In the end though, there were cloaked figures at midnight, an abducted girl and a sacrifice to be made to an Old One, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Will Murray is a fan of Mike Mignola’s "B.P.R.D." comics, unless I miss my guess. “The Eldridge Collection” tells the covert travails of a pair of shady Government operatives, whose task is to prevent the madness of the Old Ones spilling out across the planet. One of the operatives is a straight-up Man In Black, all fists and pistols and no nonsense; his partner for this tale is a cartomancer, equally no-nonsense and able to sling the pasteboards of various tarot decks in order to further the investigation. Together they track down a shifty art dealer amassing the proscribed artistic output of a mad artist who designed a Lovecraftian card deck, with the intention of unleashing mayhem. This is very amusing, kinda goofy, but an excellent spin of the "Hell-Boy" variety.

What if Arkham was a bucolic little town like Lake Wobegon and HPL wrote his material in the style of Garrison Keilor? The result would probably be a lot like Brad Strickland’s “An Arkham Home Companion”. This is pastiche piled on pastiche, with the events of “The Dunwich Horror” ranking of less import to the Arkham denizens than the terrible win-rate of the local football team, the ‘Miskatonic Mystics'. This is a tongue-in-cheek fun-ride that is a joy to read and revelatory as to the real reason why Professor Armitage’s dog, Rameses, was in the Orne Library on the night of Whateley’s break-in...

The final offering in this collection is “The Last Temptation of Ricky Perez” by Benjamin Adams. Ricky, a city boy with a crippled foot, is challenged by members of his brother’s old street gang to break into the house of a scary old lady in order to ensure his place in their fraternity. Ricky, seeking revenge on a rival gang for shooting his brother and keen to bring home cash to help support himself and his mother, tries to overcome his physical limitations to pass this rite of passage. However, the scary old lady is scary for a very good reason: she reveals to him the level of treachery at work in the gang he seeks to join and shows him that Fate – in the form of the heredity bequeathed upon him by his absent “dark” father – has a hidden hand to play with his existence. These revelations show Ricky that he’s bound for much grander things than a trivial street gang...

*****

That’s all of it. On balance, I found the first volume in this series the most satisfying, in the sense that it stayed on track with HPL’s kind of storytelling – the second volume contains stories of a more internal, psychological type, along with some light-hearted pastiche. The focus in both books is on horror of a cosmic nature, not the simple blood and gore offerings that abound in other collections laying claim to Mythos turf. If you’re looking for gaming inspiration, Volume One is where you need to be; if you want some genuine Lovecraftian thrills both volumes will delight and entertain. Seek out and enjoy!

*****

Chapter Listing – Disciples I

Preface to the Revised Edition – Edward P. Berglund

Preface to the Original Edition – Edward P. Berglund

Introduction – Robert Bloch

“The Fairground Horror” – Brian Lumley

“The Silence of Erica Zann” – James Wade

“All-Eye” – Bob van Laerhoven

“The Tugging” – Ramsey Campbell

“Where Yidhra Walks” – Walter C. DeBill Jr.

“Glimpses” – A.A. Attanasio

“Dope War of the Black Tong” – Robert M. Price

“Darkness, My Name Is” – Eddy C. Bertin

“The Terror from the Depths” – Fritz Leiber

Chapter Listing – Disciples II

Editor’s Preface – Edward P. Berglund

“The Bookseller’s Second Wife” – Walter C. DeBill Jr.

“Eldritch” – Brad Linaweaver and Fred Olen Ray

“The Web” – Gary Myers

“Passing Through” – Robert Weinberg

“The Idol” – Scott David Aniolowski

“Time in the Hourless House” – A.A. Attanasio

“Special Order” – Henry Lee Forrest

“Lujan’s Trunk” – Donald R. Burleson

“The San Francisco Treat” – C.J. Henderson

“Acute Spiritual Fear” – Robert M. Price

“The Eldridge Collection” – Will Murray

“An Arkham Home Companion” – Brad Strickland

“The Last Temptation of Ricky Perez” – Benjamin Adams

The Pornography of Violence...

It’s probably because I’ve just finished reading Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, but I have some things which I think I need to put out there. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have little time for material which prides itself upon being categorised as splatterpunk. This category of horror, which explicitly describes visceral incidents of death and dismemberment, is very hard to achieve as a writing style, but is incredibly easy to do badly. To date, I have read perhaps five splatterpunk stories which have been worthwhile; the rest is dross.

Splatterpunk – or what regularly passes itself off as splatterpunk nowadays - has its roots deep in Freudian psychology and smacks of arrested development. It’s small children pushing shit out of their back ends and thinking that they’re clever in some way for having created such an interesting, malleable substance. Well, we adults grow out of that phase. Shit is recognised for what it is: it’s not clever; it’s just what it is - a function, with expected after effects. You eat; you digest; you excrete. Everyone does it; it’s nothing special. If you’ve left high school and you still think this is interesting, then you’re in trouble. Or, a splatterpunk author.

Splatterpunk is all about the body and what happens to it under duress. It’s not body horror - which is something different - it’s about what happens when you take a chainsaw to a human body: we all get it; it’s nothing special. Death, dismemberment, destruction. The products of splatterpunk are easily anticipated. Predictable. No matter how you carve this sandwich, you still find the sand.

There’s little to differentiate splatterpunk from sexual pornography. It’s simply the exposure of a clandestine activity to reveal its full extent. Porn is the revelation of sexual physicality; splatterpunk is the revelation of corporeal destruction. Like all forms of pornography, splatterpunk entices because it promises the revelation of illicit activity. And, like all forms of pornography, it suffers from a generalist streamlining into various “tastes”. You know who you are...

Think of practically any moment of violence you’ve seen in a movie. Most of them - the most visceral ones you can remember - will most likely have been about the anticipation of the violence and not the violence itself. Think of the scene in the latest version of “Casino Royale” where Mads Mikkelsen’s le Chiffre is confronted by the African rebel (Isaach De Bankolé) wanting his money back; he threatens to take a machete to le Chiffre’s girlfriend (Ivana Milicevic) in order to get his way. The machete is drawn and the girl’s arm is presented for chopping... It doesn’t happen, but then it doesn’t need to: the scene is about the lengths that those involved are prepared to go to in order to have their way. The various characters’ reactions to the incident are, if anything, more chilling than the implied violence, and it’s exactly what the entire scene is designed to do – reveal the characters’ motivations. If the machete had been used, this would have been an entirely different film altogether; a B-grade one; straight to DVD.

The splatterpunk option is always an obvious train ride to an inevitable conclusion; it only goes to the one place. You can rinse and repeat only so many times before the colours just run into a bloody blur.

(On a side note, I often wonder if splatterpunk’s main difficulty is that it begs the question – how does the author know this experience enough to be able to write about it? For most splatterpunk stories I just decide that the writer is extrapolating from various visits to their local butcher, or from playing around with a Kentucky Fried chicken. I fully agree that it is the writer’s imagination and the way that they convey these imaginings that allows them to cover the distance between fantasy and fact. Most splatterpunk offerings fail to impress because the skills are wanting; however, remember that I said I’d read about five such stories that I thought were effective? The skills were definitely there and the stories were genuinely disturbing; but they also left me wondering about the authors themselves and what they got up to in their spare time...)

My main objection to splatterpunk is that it has wandered into Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothery and now seems likely to take it over. This is wrong. This is not what HPL intended. It certainly is nothing like his writings. So why – I ask, without expecting a reply – do people think that splatterpunk is what HPL was going for? Okay, I’ll almost concede “Howard West: Re-animator” – it’s gruesome and gory – it’s still not splatterpunk. Think about HPL’s “The Picture in the House”: the narrator walks into a house owned by a cannibalistic psychopath and, only due to sheer luck (and a lightning strike), does he manage to get out of the place alive. And are we treated to flensing knives, masks made of human skin, or heads in the refrigerator? No: all we get is an old book and a weird stain on the ceiling of a living room. It’s one of Lovecraft’s most powerful non-Mythos stories and all it takes is a bike, a potential victim, a house, a psycho, a book and a funky stain. The rest is window-dressing and a fantastic story. What Tobe Hooper would make of this, I shudder to think; although, on reflection, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a fairly safe approximation...

What I think is happening is that people are making an assumption about Lovecraft and his material that isn’t exactly valid. Lovecraft needs to be read in context; you need to look at what was going on around him when he was writing. The universe was expanding rapidly, thanks to Einstein, and things were moving from a static, known state, into something different. Clyde Tombaugh had just discovered another planet(oid) and the old order was being shaken up. Lovecraft’s response was to write about how our expectations and assumptions were all null and void because the goal posts were suddenly being moved. Where does the blood and gore come from? It’s incidental. Modern Lovecraftian writers respond to what they’re experiencing, and since they’re writing HPL pastiche, they fuse their own misgivings onto Lovecraft’s format. Whatever this stuff is, it’s not Lovecraftian. It’s Ligottian; It’s Pulverian; it’s a Pugmire. But it’s not Lovecraftian. It’s something new, grafted on the texts of HPL, but focussing on 21^st Century anxieties the which –thank the gods – Lovecraft was never privy to.

So write Lovecraftian horror; write Cthulhoid fiction. Go for it: write your arses off, but be clear about what it is that you’re doing. Don’t write splatterpunk – the general run of splatterpunk anyway - and think that you’re doing anything special. An axe to the head of some fictional body is as endlessly dull as it is repetitive. Regardless of the horror element in HPL’s stories, he still made a point; if you don’t have a point to make, if your writing doesn’t have a message to impart, then perhaps it’s best not to write at all.

Matterhorn Redux...

There was just so much good stuff left over after my last post about Edward Whymper and his celebrated Guide that I thought I would throw some other interesting stuff up here for everybody's edification. Equipment is always good to know about, so here are some adverts:

For the most part, the Guide advertises the stock of London publishers, particularly those offering material of interest to travelers and mountaineers. For those back in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, books of this kind were almost always the first port of call in getting ready to ship out.

"Mrs Bishop" is, of course, the intrepid Isabella Bird, who lived in China with her missionary husband and who was instrumental in ending the practice of foot-binding among Chinese women. 

And finally, there's this: apparently Whymper traveled about the world's volcanoes collecting "volcanic dust" which he flogged off to the eager in glass bottles. I'm not sure what this material was actually used for, but intrepid Keepers might decide that Andean volcano-dust is an essential ingredient for making the Powder of ibn-Ghazi. Good, therefore, to know it's on the market!

Because you never know when something like this might happen...!

Happy Mountaineering!

Review: Black Wings of Cthulhu 3

JOSHI, S.T. (Ed.), Black Wings of Cthulhu 3 – Seventeen Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Titan Books/Titan Publishing Group Ltd., London, 2015.

Octavo; paperback; 400pp. New.

A colleague tossed this my way recently and thought I should take a look at it. I must confess that I didn’t know anything about this series before this, but I’m keen now to see if I can scare up the other titles. S.T. Joshi is a name to conjure with as far as HPL fandom is concerned and, going in, this felt like a project that was in safe hands. A couple of things gave me pause - the presence of Willum Hopfrog and one of the Pulvers – but I put my faith in Joshi and jumped in.

My experience of modern Lovecraftian fiction is a hit-and-miss one. Like most things – comedy; movies; literature – personal preference plays a part: I like my Lovecraft skewed in a certain direction; I don’t take it all onboard, willy-nilly, and exult that it’s all good because it drops the C-word every now and then (that’s “Cthulhu” people; simmer down). I particularly dislike any Mythos pastiche which borders on the splatterpunk, paddling around in the entrails just for its own sake. Like small children playing with their own faeces, it says more about the writers’ stage of mental development than anything to do with Lovecraft or his Yog-Sothothery. Harsh? Maybe; but also fair.

For my money, a Mythos story has to expound upon the ideas behind Lovecraft’s work and extend those notions into new and interesting areas. It’s not sufficient to simply establish a character, rip its head off and then hold it up for all to see. Without some theme pushing the drama, then what’s the point? Too many of these collections often become a contest between writers – any gore you can chuck, I can chuck further. Shock value for its own sake; certainly not art; and certainly not what Lovecraft – arguably – was all about.

So, having clarified my own thoughts about such matters, I waded on in to this particular effort. The first story – Jonathan Thomas’s “Houdini Fish” – riffs energetically off Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, one of several stories in this collection which does so, as Joshi points out in his Introduction. An archaeologist at a university in a town not unlike a modern Arkham, discovers a weird device beneath the quadrangle and decides to try and piece it back together, despite all the fragments glowing with a strange purple light. From the moment of its unearthing, strange creatures appear in the vicinity, most notably the “Houdini fish” of the title, icthyoid creatures that dwell in the hand soap containers of the university washrooms. The narrator muses as to whether these beings have newly arrived, or if they were always here and now human perception has developed enough to recognise them, thus harking back to the ideas in Lovecraft’s seminal tale. As the machine becomes more complete, these strange appearances coincide with unsettling disappearances among the student body and the police begin to circle our protagonist.

This is a nicely orchestrated piece which combines and extends Lovecraft’s original work into a pleasing whole. The main character’s mental disintegration and the unsettling manifestations of things from Beyond as the long arm of the Law reaches inexorably towards him are well handled, as is the creepy pay-off at the end. Joshi notes that this is one of two authors who actually live in Providence and feels that this familiarity grounds the tale; I’m not sure that this is the case myself, but then I’ve not been to Rhode Island. A jarring note: the writer is fond of dropping the articles throughout his work and this lends the work an annoying, crippled aspect. Maybe this is a speech trait of people in Providence, who perhaps feel a certain brevity is gained by dropping every “a” and “the” from their vocabulary; again, I don’t know, and the fact that I still don’t know is also a fault of this work.

The next offering is Donald R. Burleson’s “Dimply Dolly Doofy”. Here we are firmly in splatterpunk territory. This piece involves a terminal methamphetamine addict who abandons her baby by slipping it into the packaging of a lifelike eponymous doll. The baby then crawls forth to commit atrocities at the behest of a poorly-referenced Mythos rationale. The plight of the teenaged mother is unsympathetically treated and gleefully ghoulish in its approach, the Mythos elements are tritely and unbelievably handled, and...Ray Bradbury did it better. Moving on.

Richard Gavin takes us once more “From Beyond”, taking on the Lovecraftian idea of ‘things outside’ and blending it subtly with material echoing elements of “Dreams in the Witch House”. A young couple meet at a late night rave and unearth a stone with a hole in it. The young woman, Pamela, a student of archaeology, recounts superstitious lore about such objects and later, decides to sleep with it under her pillow after hearing at a lecture that HPL did so with a piece of stone chipped from a grave marker and wrote “The Hound” as a direct result. Pamela has a terrifying nightmare in which she perceives an entity watching her and her dream from some point outside of this reality. This perception leads to her complete mental breakdown which her partner, Mason, is unable to forestall. The horribly chilling ending is a logical conclusion to the many unsettling questions and effects that the hovering entity engenders.

Next we have the contribution which initially gave me pause – the Pugmire offering. “Underneath an Arkham Moon” is a collaboration between him and Jessica Amanda Salmonson, author of the Tomoe Gozen series of Japanese fantasy novels (although, given the content, I’m assuming the Hopfrog took the lead on this exercise). This story too, springboards off a Lovecraft canon piece, specifically “The Unnameable” and attempts to update that tale for a modern audience. The original story is fairly straightforward: two friends with tastes tending towards the macabre sit in a cemetery and watch for moonrise, their conversation turning to the crumbling house overlooking the grim scene and stories of what awaits within. This story does little to change the narrative apart from cracking open a case of grand guignol to spray across the proceedings. The protagonists in this version are two horribly-deformed descendants of the witch-y community of Arkham – the armless Ambrose and his cousin Allune, who carries her malformed conjoined twin on her back. Goaded by Ambrose’s taunts, Allune enters the witch-house and her twin gets raped by the horror lurking within. This is pure Pugmire: body-horror and lashings of incest tied up with the inappropriate descriptor “Bohemian”. Perhaps someone should lend him a dictionary...

With Darrell Schweitzer’s “Spiderwebs in the Dark” we really start to get somewhere. This story is a monologue uttered by the narrator – a bookseller – to an unidentified second party. We are not told where this conversation is taking place, but it slowly becomes obvious that the speaker is in a loony bin. He relates his meeting with a strange character who teaches him that the world is a steganographic puzzle spread across creation and that it only requires the right combination of elements to effect dramatic changes in the nature of reality. Specifically, he instructs him how to manipulate the webs that bind existence together. The narrator talks of fantastic journeys and shocking experiments in dimensional manipulation before revealing that the strands which hold the cosmos together are clogged with parasitic creatures which pursue those that swing upon the spiderwebs in the dark (Hounds of Tindalos, anyone?). The final revelations – about how the duo escaped from the parasites and what happened to the speaker’s friend – are chilling indeed. The best story so far.

Of the names presented in the contents list which I recognised only a couple didn’t fill me with apprehension. One of those was that of Caitlin R. Kiernan. Her story – “One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)” – is not so much the tale of a Mythos encounter, but the story of its after-effects. A freelance science journalist goes to a New Hampshire town to investigate a freak lightning strike, which blasted the top of a hill, killing a family of three and destroying their home. The local townsfolk are unhappy about his presence and the more he digs, the more unhelpful they become. He reads the local newspaper account of the incident and decides it covers up more information than it reveals, not least the identities of those killed in the accident. Strangest of all, is the female presence which follows him up the eponymous hill every time he climbs it and of whom he is too terrified to turn and face. Speaking to her over his shoulder he insists that the more that he is denied information, the more intrigued he becomes. Finally, she confronts him in the squalid hotel which he is using as a headquarters and he finally decides to drop the matter and flee. This is a dreamlike and hypnotic piece, drenched in the narrator’s own existential despair. Whatever did happen on One Tree Hill, it’s of no consequence to this story; this is the cover-up, with the Mythos entities ensuring that all loose ends are tidied away. It’s a nicely off-kilter creepy tale.

Jason V. Brock’s “The Man with the Horn” is the story of an elderly woman who becomes more intrigued than she should with her unusual neighbour. Mr. Trinity leaves each evening in his hat and large coat and carrying his instrument in its case; he returns each evening at 11 o’clock and practices his instrument for another three hours. She has slowly become inured to the noise just as her life has faded into a solitary stasis – her husband and all her relatives dead and herself confined to her apartment by an automobile accident which hurt her neck. A postal error (or is it?) sees one of Mr. Trinity’s letters wind up in her letter-box and, intrigued, she opens it to discover a document of strange and incomprehensible garble. Later, she passes by her strange neighbour’s door and sees that it’s standing ajar; she lets herself in and... Well, let’s just say that she shouldn’t have been so nosey. Brock’s delineation of this sympathetic but flawed character is streets away from the callous disregard of Donald Burleson’s treatment of his main protagonist, in that we feel for the victim even though her own weakness is what draws her to her doom. Certainly, the ending of this piece is no surprise, but the journey is a very satisfying one.

Mollie Burleson’s “Hotel del Lago” is a very strange inclusion. It’s the tale of a driver who chooses to spend a night in the hotel of a one-horse desert town rather than risk falling asleep at the wheel. The set up is pure Innsmouth with strange locals, a boozey barfly who seems about to reveal the town’s secrets, then the revelation that the townsfolk are all engaged upon strange rites by a magical lake in the moonlight. Our protagonist drives screaming away into the night stopping only to tell his story to the police of the next town he comes to (they don’t believe him), before driving back to the haunted town. There he finds a gold object in the basin of a dried-up lake which proves...something? The reason that this is a strange inclusion is that 1) it reads like it hasn’t been proof-read – poor word choice and strange sentence construction mar the delivery - and 2) it reads like the author has a stereotypical and surface grasp of Lovecraftian tropes but no real feeling for the material. There are people out there who think that writing a novel set in Ireland requires only alcoholism, poverty, lashings of tuberculosis and a few potatoes to accomplish the deed; those people don’t sell their work. So I’m wondering how this got to be included?

Donald Tyson’s “Waller” is a step back in the right direction. Much Mythos fiction doesn’t bother with rationales and reasons – the unknown is terrifying simply because it is unknown. Tyson tells a story set in a world of his own devising. Our “real world” is simply an illusion, which superior beings sprinkle with “life seeds”. These grow inside our bodies, attaching themselves to our livers. They cause us to die and we call them “cancers”. However, people carrying these seeds are able to step through the walls separating the three different realms. The “real world” is like our own but at an earlier stage of technological development and slightly off-kilter; the people there call the carriers of the life seeds “wallers” and attack them on sight, gutting them in the streets and taking the seeds to their priests who bestow fantastic wealth upon them. We follow the trials of one such waller who manages to turn the tables on the murderous real worlders and their god in the final act. It’s a well-written story that grips and entertains. Apart from some tentacles though, is it really a Mythos tale? I’m not sure.

Don Webb’s wacky “The Megalith Plague” comes next and, for me, it was like reading a Darin Morgan episode of “The X-Files”. The story concerns a second-rate doctor of medicine who moves back to Texas to take over his grandfather’s medical practice. His best patient is a crazy-violent artist with a trust fund to back his lifestyle, and who is also distantly related. A discovery by one of the local farmers of an ancient text describing the true way to worship God – that is, by building stone circles – starts everyone in the district constructing miniature versions of Stonehenge out of anything that comes to hand. Our medical man tries to ignore it, then he tries to run away from it, but the locals are determined to make him stay. And what of his cracked distant cousin? Is he help or hindrance? Or is there method in his madness? Oh, and there are cockroaches...

The Pulvers – Jnr. and Snr. – represent for me the worst of current Mythos writing. I read, and abandoned, Ripples from Carcosa, edited by Pulver Jnr. because it was a splatterpunk dog’s breakfast. Writing, editing and proofreading are all disciplines that require honing, skill, and a modicum of talent; it’s possible to bend, or even break, the rules for effect, but if it’s your raison d’etre, your one constant performance, it becomes meaningless. Joseph Pulver Snr.’s “Down Black Staircases” started with an edgy quick-cut vibe, but ramped this up so much that, by the middle, I just said “life’s too short” and jumped to the next story. From what I could grasp through the garble, there was a guy driving to Providence to get laid; a car accident; some redneck yokels...Joyce Carol Oates did it better. Moving on.

Peter Cannon’s “China Holiday” was the story I was looking forward to, given my proclivities; however, it was less than edifying. The whole tale reads like a thumbnail sketch of a couple’s trip to the Peoples’ Republic, with added whingeing. The Mythos element – namely that Deep Ones are behind the damming of certain rivers and that the Chinese children being sent to America for adoption are the scions of these fishy villains – is cursory and tacked on. And obvious. Moving on.

The next two tales bear a striking similarity and I’m going to go out on a limb here and offer my theory about why that is the case: neither story started off as a Lovecraftian vehicle. It’s as if these tales had run out of energy and had fallen by the wayside until someone contacted the author to say “have you got anything for ‘Black Wings of Cthulhu 3’?” Not having anything explicitly Cthulhoid to hand, various tentacled and batrachian tropes were rapidly bolted-on to the unfinished works and – less than stellar results eventuated. Lois Gresh gives us a story about two aged women, one of whom is dying of cancer. There is a lot to like in this piece but then the Mythos stumbles in and makes it 1) incomprehensible, and 2) pointless. Mark Howard-Jones relates a story about an uncle and his nephew and the desultory affair both men are undertaking with the same young woman on a beachside holiday. The set-up and the character interactions are steadily engrossing until the girl transforms (offstage) and heads out to sea never to be heard of again. These are shining examples of how some people set out to write a non-Mythos tale and then jury-rig it into an awful Mythos story as an afterthought, by running out of steam.

The last three stories are where things really start to hit their stride and reveal that Joshi was saving the best until last.

In “Weltschmerz”, Sam Gafford takes on a journey into the dull workaday existence of his narrator who crunches numbers at a Providence RI bank. His routine is mind-numbingly tedious extending also to his relationship with his wife, his colleagues and even his own understanding of himself. This is a man who awakens each morning angry that he didn’t die during the night – heavy stuff. Then one day he meets a young woman from the mailroom who encourages him to do some research on H.P. Lovecraft, in whom our wage-slave perceives a sympathetic worldview. Taking up an offer to visit the tattooed and pierced mailroom girl, they have sex and she offers him a drug which completely blows his mind... The conclusion, wherein the narrator realises the pointlessness of all human existence, borders on the splatter but, given the rationale outlined in the lead-up, Gafford manages to pull it back from the brink.

“Thistle’s Find” comes from a truly dark, nasty and deplorable place, stemming from familial dysfunction and low-grade criminal activity. Our narrator, Owen, on the run from a police enquiry of unspecified seriousness, pays a visit to the neighbour of his long-suffering parents, Dr. Thistle. Thistle is not strictly a medical man although, growing up next door and getting acquainted with him, Owen determined that he hoarded a lot of expensive equipment and so figured that he had some cash squirreled away, which might come to him if he toadied-up a little. Also, the “Dr.” met with disapproval from Owen’s parents and he enjoyed the approbation which this association engendered. Arriving at Thistle’s house, he is met by an older man than he remembered, dressed in his underwear; the doctor takes him down to the basement to reveal that he has opened a gate to another world, roamed by almost-human creatures which he calls ghouls. Then he reveals that he has one of these creatures tied up in a basement room and that he has been systematically raping it for weeks. He wonders if Owen could help him market the creature as a novel sex slave? Before things wander too far down this unsavoury track, the creature escapes, Dr Thistle gets torn to pieces and Owen shuts down the gate before more of the nasties push their way through. This is a truly dark piece and very disturbing in its amoral implications.

“Further Beyond” by Brian Stableford is, as the title suggests, another story springboarding off HPL’s “From Beyond”. Hands down, it is the best story in this collection. The narrative takes off after the events in HPL’s tale and after the narrator of that story has been released by the police for lack of evidence in the death of Crawford Tillinghast. He reveals that he has been contacted by three researchers of varying credentials and motives, to ask if he has kept any papers or items from Tillinghast’s work, to which he replies in the negative. Then, at the request of Tillinghasts’s widow Rachel, he agrees to return to the scene of the experiment and sort through what remains of his friend’s life there. Despite trepidations arising from the events which transpired at the house, and the frequent migraines which have plagued him since that time, our hero agrees to stand by his friend’s bereaved partner and help her dispose of his effects.

This story is by far the most polished of the stories presented. It borrows from its original set-up but not so slavishly as to appear as pastiche. The writer knows the period as well, filling in the narrative with many details that ring true from the time. That being said, there are one or two anachronistic turns of phrase, but these are easily overlooked. The story works with and extends the notions aired in HPL’s original story but ties these together in a very satisfying conclusion that is distinctly its own. Highly recommended!

Well that’s it. Overall, there was a lot of drek in this book – stuff that was half-arsed, ill-conceived and fed by the onanistic maunderings of the splatterpunk oeuvre. Lovecraft isn’t pornography people! When will the “current trend” of Lovecraftian fiction awaken to this fact? There is also a disturbing move – if this selection is representative in any way – towards objectifying women in these tales as merely victims to be horribly dealt with, or strange unknowable beings whose cosmic rationale cannot be fathomed. I said earlier that these works speak more to the mental stage of development of their writers; they also reveal a lot about their social development too.

In the final analysis, I don’t know. I won’t say get out there and bust a gut tracking this down; there’s not a lot within these covers that’s at all memorable, and some of it is just plain bad. I’m pretty sure that, if Lovecraft was alive today and if he was informed that this is the quality of work that his efforts have inspired, he’d snap his pen in two and vow never to write again.

Two-and-a-half tentacled horrors from me.

*****

Chapter Listing:

Introduction – S.T. Joshi

“Houdini Fish” – Jonathan Thomas

“Dimply Dolly Doofy” – Donald R. Burleson

“The Hag Stone” – Richard Gavin

“Underneath an Arkham Moon” – Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W.H. Pugmire

“Spiderwebs in the Dark” – Darrell Schweitzer

“One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)” – Caitlin R. Kiernan

“The Man with the Horn” – Jason V. Brock

“Hotel del Lago” – Mollie L. Burleson

“Waller” – Donald Tyson

“The Megalith Plague” – Don Webb

“Down Black Staircases” – Joseph S. Pulver, Snr.

“China Holiday” – Peter Cannon

“Necrotic Cove” – Lois Gresh

“The Turn of the Tide” – Mark Howard Jones

“Weltschmerz” – Sam Gafford

“Thistle’s Find” – Simon Strantzas

“Further Beyond” – Brian Stableford