OR: The Madness of Cthulhu

A review that originally appeared on the Case Notes blog at the TTA Press website on 10/10/23: –

Published by Titan Books in 2014, The Madness of Cthulhu is edited by S. T. Joshi and comes with a foreword by Jonathan Maberry outlining the importance of Lovecraft, both to the genre and to the writer personally. It contains sixteen stories that, according to the cover blurb, were inspired by Lovecraft in general and his classic novella “At the Mountains of Madness” in particular, though I have to admit on occasion finding the connection very tenuous indeed. Two of the stories are reprints.

We kick off with one of those reprints, “At the Mountains of Murkiness” by Arthur C. Clarke, the opening words concerning the ‘recent death of Professor Nutty in the Scraggem Mental Hospital’ and the story’s subtitle “From Lovecraft to Leacock” setting the tone for what follows. It is a delightful concoction, one that never fails to acknowledge its debt to the original fiction while at the same time mercilessly satirising just about every aspect of the tale HPL committed to paper, and showing how easy it is to pick holes in the old guy’s schemata. I imagine someday, somebody will do just the same with Clarke’s work. Harry Turtledove’s “The Fillmore Shoggoth” has HPL himself as a character and is set in a San Francisco where Old Ones attend a performance by the band named after the writer, until shoggoths crash the party. It’s a frenetic, high energy work that throws up so much incidental invention that it’s only after the story is done and the grin has faded from your chops that you realise it really doesn’t go anywhere at all.

“Devil’s Bathtub” by Lois H. Gresh is set at the South Pole and details the discovery of a new form of life, the story told from the viewpoint of a bored teenager, and with the suggestion that something even more terrible is going on in the background, so that for this protagonist the climactic loss of identity is actually welcome. Gresh is superb at bringing to life the desolate and inhospitable setting, while giving her characters extra depth. John Shirley’s “The Witness in Darkness” tells the story of “Mountains” from the viewpoint of one of the alien Old Ones. Beautifully written, with each word earning its place, it’s a fascinating exercise in seeing things from a different perspective, of getting under the skin of the ‘other’. There’s a strong feel of the outré to “How the Gods Bargain” by William Browning Spencer, with a lovers’ triangle played out against the backdrop of something truly alien injected into our reality. Unsettling, not least for the way in which it casts our relationship to the Old Ones, this is a story where ambiguity and suggestion enhance the impact of the text.

Set in 1879 and presented as the journal notes of one of the participants, “A Mountain Walked” by Caitlin R. Kiernan painstakingly details the fate of a paleontological expedition in the wastes of Wyoming when a strange Indian artefact is uncovered. More than any of these stories it captures the feel of the original, even if the setting is entirely different and conveys strongly the sense of something monstrous and inhuman impinging on our world, both aware of us and entirely indifferent to anything we could do. The second reprint, Robert Silverberg’s “Diana of the Hundred Breasts” also features a scientific expedition, this time a dig in the Greek islands, and the discovery of something that compels us to re-evaluate all we think we know of history and our place in the cosmos. The central conceit seems slightly risible, but Silverberg gives us some marvellous dialogue and interplay between the members of his dramatis personae, and wisely makes the focus of the story not so much on the existence of the outré, as on its effect on those whose beliefs are set in stone.

Twin sisters in mini-subs explore beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in “Under the Shelf” by Michael Shea and encounter an alien entity to whom human lives are as those of mayflies. Shea conveys the cold and isolation, both physical and psychological, with real skill and conviction, giving us plenty of adventure courtesy of a giant crab monster, but at the same time keeping clearly in mind the matter of human hubris. “Cantata” by Melanie Tem is set on an alien world and details how humans interact with a species that has no conception of music, the story resonating but at the same time perhaps the weakest of what we have on offer, with little connection to the source material for this anthology. Heather Graham’s “Cthulhu Rising” has competing teams of scientists and psychics aboard a ship whose previous crew and passengers disappeared, and it looks like history is about to repeat itself. There’s lots to commend this story, one that with its TV crews and mysterious commercial motives seems to have its finger firmly on the media zeitgeist, Graham presenting us with a compelling mystery and a resolution that undermines nothing that has gone before.

“The Warm” by Darrell Schweitzer reads like “Pickman’s Model” told from the perspective of the model. It’s a story that holds the attention from first word to last, making us almost sympathise with the outsider viewpoint and share his concerns as to what human beings are capable of. K. M. Tonso’s “Last Rites” has a relative of William Dyer and his protégé discovering the truth behind the stories, much to their personal cost. Again this is a story in which the Old Ones are far from the villains of Lovecraftian canon, and the final rapprochement with human beings brings a tear to the eye, or at least it would if I was at all lachrymose. We’re into the weird western with “Little Lady” by J. C. Koch, as a gang of outlaws are led to their doom by a beautiful femme fatale. There’s a delicious moral ambiguity to this story, as we ask who the real monsters are, and see the vicious killers reaping what they have sown, even as their fate is such that we can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy or perhaps pity.

“White Fire” is the first person account of a man dying in the Antarctic hell, his personal history and the events that led him to such a moment remembered even as the skein of his life unravels. It is written in the vivid, impressionistic style that Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. made his own, not so much a story, though the bones of a plot can be sensed beneath the skin of the narrative, as it is a picture drawn with language, a heady brew, a phantasmagorical avalanche of words and imagery, with breathless delivery that conveys the urgency and extremity of the situation. In “A Quirk of the Mistral” by Jonathan Thomas an academic is summoned to the remote home of his mentor to bear witness to the discovery of a new form of life, but things don’t quite go to plan. There’s an almost mundane sensibility to this story, with the tone entirely matter of fact even as we step off the chart and into terra incognito, the whole thing gloriously understated and all the more effective for that.

Finally we have Donald Tyson’s “The Dog Handler’s Tale” which is, as the title suggests, an account of the Dyer expedition to the Mountains of Madness told from the viewpoint of the man in charge of their sled dogs. It’s another fascinating variation on a theme, highlighting scientific rivalries and academic chicanery, all seen from the viewpoint of an ordinary working joe, with enough by way of excitement and plot development to keep the reader going, while in its final passages we see the relationship between Old Ones and shoggoths mirrored in that between man and dog, much to the latter pairings credit. It’s a good image on which to close this assemblage of strange stories.

Trailer Trash – The Strangers: Chapter 1

Latest franchise entry, and from the title I’m guessing it’s a prequel.

OR: This Isn’t Anywhere You Know

A review that originally appeared in Black Static #82/83:-

Gary McMahon has appeared in Black Static seven times and TTA Press published his novelette The Harm in 2010. McMahon’s latest collection comes in a signed and numbered edition limited to 50 copies. THIS ISN’T ANYWHERE YOU KNOW (Black Shuck Books hc, 218pp, £25) contains sixteen stories, two of which previously appeared in Black Static and four that are previously unpublished. Five of the stories – ‘The Old Church’, ‘Silent Waters, Running Deep’, ‘Dull Fire’, ‘Dirty Story’ and ‘There’s a Bluebird in My Heart’ – I’ve reviewed before and I’ll post my comments to the Case Notes blog at ttapress.com rather than reiterate here.

In a “from the heart” ‘Preface’ we are introduced to a writer who has hit rock bottom in his life, and then Gary McMahon himself takes the mic to talk about the problems he experienced during lockdown and the circumstances in which this book was written, his hopes for the book and his writing. After that we get the first of three sections, this one titled ‘Sorrows’ and opening with ‘The Old Church’, followed by ‘Remains’, in which Rob finds a skeleton in the park, but this only relates to his own problems and sense of loss, exposed by McMahon in a bitter but heartfelt story, one where our sympathy lies entirely with Rob and his inability to come to terms with what has happened in his life. ‘She Who Waits’ skilfully blends the traditional ghost story with a more personal tale of loss, adding on the end a twist that puts in perspective much that preceded it. Along the way McMahon perfectly evinces feelings of grief and the bleakness of seaside towns when out of season, and giving us a terrible vision of spectral horror. ‘Lifelike’ relates the details of a birthday party in a retirement home and the visit of an unwelcome puppeteer and his mannequin, the story wonderfully paced and truly sinister, reminiscent in many ways of something Ligotti might have produced.

The second section is titled ‘Eulogies’ and opens with ‘That Night at the Grief’ in which two young boys go fishing and make a terrible discovery, with the subtle ending suggesting far more than is apparent from the text. It’s fair to say though that the story is really about the nature of family relationships, of how they can pull us down if we allow them to, so that we too end up dragged off in the middle of the night by a zombie father/husband/lover. In ‘Sometimes Everything Gets So Strange It Starts To Make Sense’ Ben acquires a strange puppet that he believes will help him overcome all the problems in his life, but things don’t go to plan. At heart the story is about being the odd one out, the one who doesn’t fit in, and how all pathways to the normal life you desire are taken away from you for no reason at all, or at least no reason more substantial than the way in which they are given, with the universe a random mechanism to crush the soul. ‘In the Darkest Room in the Darkest House on the Darkest Part of the Street’ takes the familiar trope of visiting a house with a bad reputation, in this case the site of several murders, and turns it on its head. The story has about it a traditional feel, but McMahon brings the setting to disturbing life and reverses the polarity of the whole with commendable vigour, Mark’s fate and Brenda’s identity surprising the reader as much as they do Mark himself. Living on her own for the first time, Connie finds herself at home with the denizens of ‘The Chute’ in an unsettling story that builds gradually, offering us a disturbingly different monster, but at the same time showing that sometimes the monsters are the ones who welcome us home.

Third section ‘Laments’ begins with ‘The Kites’ in which a couple’s child is snatched from a beach by the titular kites. There’s a conflict here between the surreal nature of what takes place, which is both horrific and at the same time so off kilter that it almost amuses, and the depth of suffering that the father feels at the loss of his son. Ken is haunted by guilt over the drowning of his eight year old son in ‘Everybody floats’, not capable of the closure he needs to move on with his life. There are elements of the supernatural here, with visions of dead people floating in the sea, or perhaps they are simply outward manifestations of his guilt, but the end of the story seems to imply that, as with other stories in this collection, there are some losses you simply can’t get past. With ‘The Yellow Film’ as bait a documentary maker falls victim to a rogue director who is trying to break through to the world of Carcosa. This is a beautifully constructed exercise in madness, one where each step leads to the next and the monster is not deterred by the futility of his efforts, the story compelling and throwing light on Chambers’ masterpiece. Last story ‘After the Reading’ has an author lured off the beaten track and forced to write for an audience, with his only hope to provide his own happy ending. It’s a clever piece, one in which the reader suspects what is happening but with enough elbow room for the author to surprise us, and some rather gleeful decadents and macabre imagery to gratify our appetite for horror.

In an ‘Afterword’ we return to the figure of the writer from the introduction and a celebration of sorts of the way in which fiction can bring us comfort and is a tool to help make sense of our reality, at least insofar as such a thing is possible. Finally there are story notes that throw light on the inspiration for each story and the circumstances in which they were written, a fascinating insight into the writer’s life when taken in conjunction with the two “confessionals” that bookend the body of the book. This might well be McMahon’s best collection yet and certainly, of those I’ve read, it is his most personal, as the writer himself acknowledges.

Sealion

Last track on the first side of Jethro Tull’s War Child.

OR: Acolytes of Cthulhu

A review that originally appeared on the Case Notes blog at the TTA Press website on 4/10/23: –

This month I intend to clear my backlog of all things HPL and we’ll start with the reprint anthology Acolytes of Cthulhu, edited by Robert M. Price and released by Titan Books back in 2014. This bumper volume contains twenty eight stories and comes with the tag line ‘Short Stories Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’. The material ranges far and wide across the genre landscape, though personally I feel the Lovecraftian connection is tenuous in many cases. In his introduction, editor Price sets out his stall, outlining the importance and longevity of Lovecraft’s oeuvre and referencing the work of the various creators involved here.

Opening story is “Doom of the House of Duryea” by Earl Peirce, Jr., in which a family scandal is wrapped up with the curse of vampirism, matters coming to a head with a meeting between estranged father and son. It’s a competent if uninspiring offering, one which plays well on the tropes of the vampire subgenre, but really brings nothing new to the table, albeit that may not have been true upon original publication in 1936. As far as the Lovecraft link goes, your guess is as good as mine; there is nothing in the story that requires a nod of the head in the direction of HPL, though Peirce could well have been one of those who corresponded with and looked to HPL as a mentor (you’d need to ask S. T. Joshi to know for sure). Joseph Payne Brennan’s “The Seventh Incantation” is a neat if unexceptional account of an occultist attempting to filch the power of an ancient entity only to have things go wrong for him at the last minute, with a sting in the tail that I didn’t see coming. It was all rather run of the mill, but worth reading the once, as are most of these stories.

Editor Price joins forces with genre veteran Hugh B. Cave for the portentously titled “From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy” in which an anthropologist on the make attempts to discover the secrets of a cult, with unexpected consequences. Set on the island of Haiti and with voodoo trappings, this was a story that held the attention all the way and gripped the imagination with its depiction of ancient evil trying to get a foothold in the present day, while the final twist gratifyingly upset reader expectations. “The Jewels of Charlotte” by Duane Rimmel was something of a let-down, with the old, familiar plot of crooks after cursed treasure dusted off and given another outing. While the story has some gleefully gory imagery that would have probably delighted artists working for Warren comics, the setting and backdrop failed to convince, and the plot meandered hopelessly.

Manly Wade Wellmann brings us a story of occult detective and adventurer John Thunstone in “The Letter of Cold Fire”, with our hero deftly countering the evil machinations of a rival sorcerer. Delightful as the story is, with move and counter move played out on the page, what makes it truly effective and memorable are the vistas of cosmic horror displayed and the hints of things that lurk just beyond our vision, such as the Deep School, with the power of suggestion used to telling effect. To my mind “Horror at Vecra” by Henry Hasse was the first story in the collection to feel Lovecraftian, with references to tainted soil that brought to mind “The Colour Out of Space” and cursed texts. The story builds gradually and with assurance, details accumulating that make us all the more receptive when the writer unleashes the horrors of his end game. It was a good story, though not a great one.

“Out of the Jar” by Charles R. Tanner gives us a variation on the old genie in a bottle device, and as ever there is a twist when the wishes are granted, one that proves the Lovecraftian verity that there are things people simply aren’t meant to know. It’s a nicely pitched tale, one that develops well even if events seem a little too transparent and predictable from the viewpoint of the reader. Edmond Hamilton’s “The Earth-Brain” has three Arctic explorers making a terrible discovery, one that comes to cost both them and the world dearly. The conceit at the heart of the story is an intriguing one, with its personification of Gaia, but I rather baulked at some of the almost lurid imagery and the way in which the Brain uses earthquakes to pursue its goal, with the story’s narrator entirely okay with mass destruction following in his wake providing his own existence is prolonged. Come to think of it there is something of Pynchon’s Kenosha Kid in the way in which the story develops; in such circumstances I feel that suicide is the only honourable and logical course for the protagonist, and his tardiness in reaching a similar conclusion left me nonplussed.

“Through the Alien Angle” by Elwin G. Powers is the shortest story in the anthology and also the slightest. A student of occult texts gains help from a mysterious benefactor with dire consequences for himself and possibly for the world. The setup feels contrived, while the naivety of the story’s protagonist is hard to credit, with little rhyme or reason to the plot, other than as a mechanism by which to deliver the story’s admittedly enjoyable ending. Nice destination, but the journey was lousy. A woman who is a little too eager to inherit from an occultist relative gets her deserved comeuppance in “Legacy in Crystal” by James Causey. The story has nothing to offer regarding plot surprises and is rather undercut by the decision to use as main characters a Milquetoast and a rather ghastly maiden aunt from the oeuvre of Wodehouse, thus falling between the stools of horror and comedy, and failing to satisfy on either score.

“The Will of Claude Ashur” by C. Hall Thompson is the longest and best story in the anthology, one that is pure pleasure to read as the author lays out all the details of a horrific sibling rivalry that plays out over the years. It is a narrative that seems aware of every cliché in the genre but uses them splendidly well, so that only the most demanding of readers would object. The essential goodness of Richard and contrasting evil of Claude are fully realised on the page in a story that is beautifully paced, adding details to the plot with an almost stately aplomb, bringing place and period to vivid life, ringing its Lovecraftian changes with assuredness, so that we cannot help but be drawn into the narrative and care about the fate of these playthings of Thompson’s devising. From best to worst, and another very short story, with “The Final War” by David H. Keller M.D., which reads like a Burroughsian (Edgar, not William) War of the Worlds, with Cthulhu as the evil overlord of Saturn, intent on the conquest of Earth. It’s a story that seems to embody all the worst excesses of pulp SF and none of its vitality or virtues, a truly risible piece that I cordially detested.

Next up we have two stories by Arthur Pendragon. In “The Dunstable Horror” an academic seeks the grave of an Indian shaman at just the time when the shaman’s centuries old curse on a local family finally comes home to roost. It was an engaging read, with some lovely touches of atmosphere when the setting moves to primeval forest, but some aspects of the plot seemed rather like a matter of authorial convenience than convincing. There’s another family curse playing out in “The Crib of Hell”, which is entertaining enough for as long as it lasts, but in essence is little more than a poor man’s version of HPL original “The Dunwich Horror”.

And now we have three stories from Steffan B. Aletti. “The Last Work of Pietro De Opono” concerns the discovery of a forbidden text and its terrible author, an age old vampire whose work exerts a malign influence on whoever reads it. Similarly in “The Eye of Horus” an ambitious archaeologist makes a find he would have been better off leaving buried. Both stories are pretty much of the going through the motions variety, well executed but with nothing to distinguish them from hundreds of similar stories. Third story “The Cellar Room” has somewhat more substance to it, with a strong evocation of Victorian London and the Spiritualist fraternity, whose desire to prove the existence of an afterlife has tragic and horrific results for those involved. The story builds well, with a couple of engaging characters, a strong backdrop and some genuinely unsettling details, with the hint of something even more terrible taking place in the background, one that perhaps has echoes of Jack the Ripper and Dracula, as the author himself is happy to point out.

“Mythos” by John Glasby has an archaeological expedition taking on the mysterious statues of Easter Island in a story that hints at far more than it reveals, with copious talk of ancient civilisations and alien influence on mankind’s development, a Lovecraftian cosmos in which we are mere witnesses to the actions of other, greater beings. And yet, solid as all this is, the framework on which it rests is simply another gotcha tale, with an obnoxious academic getting his deserved comeuppance as the story’s big bang. “There Are More Things” by Jorge Luis Borges was a short piece that put me very much in mind of the work of Ambrose Bierce, with apparently unconnected details used to evoke the feeling of something very wrong. The story ends just before we are to discover exactly what is at the root of this wrongness, and what has gone before makes us perhaps grateful for such reticence on the part of the author.

Randall Garrett’s “The Horror Out of Time” builds perfectly, with seismic disturbances throwing up a sunken landmass with a mysterious building the story’s narrator feels compelled to explore. The atmosphere is done splendidly well, but what elevates the story is the final revelation, one that compels the reader to completely re-evaluate everything that has gone before. I loved it. In “The Recurring Doom” by S. T. Joshi an academic and researcher unwittingly unleashes an ancient evil, one that could destroy mankind’s supremacy over the earth. In style the story uses Lovecraft’s trick of miscellaneous details from around the world to create a vivid sense of impending global doom, but Joshi lacks Lovecraft’s skill and what results feels very much like something off the cuff and contrived, rather than convincing the reader.

Dirk W. Mosig’s “Necrotic Knowledge” takes an unusual turn with the matter of cursed books, having the underworld use one as simply another revenue stream. I’m not sure that I was completely sold on the concept, but the execution was a lot of fun, with a nice twist in the tale at the end of its journey. Donald R. Burleson creates a delicious feel of impending doom and a portentous atmosphere in the brief “Night Bus” and then delivers a chilling resolution to make this short one of the most effective and eerie pieces in the anthology.

“The Pewter Ring” by Peter Cannon sees the descendant of an occultist travelling through time to meet his ancestor, but not everything is as it seems in this tale of chronological treachery. It’s one of the weaker pieces in the anthology, with a plot that doesn’t really convince and characters who don’t quite come alive, though there is a neat payoff if you stay with it to the very end, a stroke of poetic justice, or the nearest thing that genre will allow, at least. More backwoods horror and echoes of “Colour” in “John Lehmann Alone” by David Kaufman, with an isolated farming family becoming the victims of an alien incursion. The power of the story lies in the depth of characterisation, with mixed emotions thrown into the brew, and the mood of fearful anticipation that the author so deftly creates prior to the horrific revelation of the story’s end game.

Gustav Meyrink’s “The Purple Death” has a surprisingly modern feel in its central conceit, that of a plague conveyed through the spoken word, bringing to mind echoes of Ballard and Suzuki, though the backdrop, with explorers seeking a forgotten Tibetan tribe, and the actual form that the menace takes seem charmingly antiquated. “Mists of Death” by Richard F. Searight and Franklyn Searight sees the release of an ancient being that could bring about the end of human life on Earth, and those responsible seeking a way to correct their mistake. It’s an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable tale, albeit not one offering much in the way of originality, preferring to tread a familiar path instead of striking out into terra incognito. And finally we have Neil Gaiman’s “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” in which an American tourist visits the English Innsmouth and discovers the delights of the local ale. Beautifully characterised and with tongue firmly in cheek all the way, it’s a fabulous end to an anthology with more to like than not.

Trailer Trash – Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

More monkey business.

OR: Candescent Blooms

A review that originally appeared in Black Static #82/83:-

Like James Cooper, Andrew Hook has been published eight times in Black Static, with his latest story appearing in this double issue. CANDESCENT BLOOMS (Salt pb, 208pp, £9.99), Hook’s latest collection, is dedicated to “all those actors and actresses who paid the ultimate sacrifice in defending and protecting the arts and the cinema” and in the stories it contains he gives us details of some of the more memorable fatalities. Each story opens with a note of the year in which the subject died, as with 1932 for ‘Introduction: H is for Hollywoodland’, an impressionistic picture of the life and last moments of actress Peg Entwistle, who committed suicide by jumping from the Hollywood sign. But by way of justifying its introductory status, this section has flashbacks and flash forwards in which Peg imagines herself as the other doomed luminaries who are to be touched on in the pages that follow, immolations on the altar of fame.

Of the dozen stars commemorated in the book, some are still household names, as with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, whose tragic and untimely deaths served only to cement their iconic status in the cultural zeitgeist. Others such as Olive Thomas and Carl Switzer are pulled from the shadows, the celebrity of their heyday having been dimmed by the passage of the years. Hook’s stories are short but cover a lot of ground, taking in not only the deaths of these stars but addressing their hopes and fears, the glory and squalidness of their too brief lives. His prose is razor sharp, vivid, impressionistic, covering the ground that a potted biography could not, revealing who these people really are with a truth that transcends the mere facts. And he is not afraid to embrace different literary techniques, making the book a showcase for all that he has learned of the writerly craft over the years. ‘Memories of Olive’ is borderline stream of consciousness, the thoughts of silent movie star Olive Thomas, who accidentally swallowed poison in 1920. In ‘The Ice-Cream Blonde’ Thelma Todd’s thoughts on her life and death are intercut with the comments of other people who knew her, an ex-husband, a director, a gangster etc., thus raising questions about the way in which perspective controls a narrative. Another femme fatale, Jean Harlow, is the subject of ‘Tonight Is Today’, thinking of herself in the third person as Harlean, her given name, the story focusing on the discrepancy between reality and public image. George Reeves in ‘Oh, Superman’ regrets being typecast as the Man of Steel now that it won’t make him any more money, but in a delightful switch of perspective at the end reality embraces fiction when we learn who comes to write up his suicide. There’s a similar blurring of the lines in ‘The Girl With The Horizontal Walk’, with Marilyn Monroe’s death and the attendant conspiracy theories played out via a film she never made, with Monroe simply a character in the film who is attempting to blackmail a politician.

The other moths who circled the flame are Dean, Switzer, Rudolf Valentino, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Carole Lombard, Jayne Mansfield, and Grace Kelly. By way of bonus material we have ‘Concordance’, an appendix of sorts giving details of the various members of the supporting cast and events, a fascinating compendium of facts, sometimes relayed with tongue firmly in cheek, and ‘Contributors’ which offers biographies of the main players. Collectively these stories and addenda give us a rapid fire history of “Golden Era” Hollywood, conveying the feel of a time when film stars’ lives and deaths seemed to have more significance, when their actions had an impact that today’s celebrity airheads and influencers can only dream of, and at the same time they place the nature of fame itself under a microscope. Candescent Blooms is a strikingly different book from those already in Hook’s oeuvre, but at the same time one that is foreshadowed in his previous writing, the culmination of that work rather than a diversion. It is Hook’s best book to date and I hope a signifier of his future direction.

East St. Louis Toodle-Oo

Steely Dan closed the first side of Pretzel Logic with their interpretation of a Duke Ellington standard.

OR: The Man in the Field

A review that originally appeared on the Case Notes blog at the TTA Press website on 21/7/23: –

In Black Static #82/83 I reviewed James Cooper’s Scar Tissue, a collection of “Original stories inspired by Dark Fiction’s contemporary trailblazers”. I had this to say about the second story in the collection – “‘The Man in the Field’ is a tribute to Shirley Jackson in general and ‘The Lottery’ in particular, which in a way is my problem with the story. It’s set in a religious community reminiscent of Shyamalan’s The Village with all the women Mother and all the men Father, and an act of sacrifice required that the enigmatic figure of the titular man enacts. I think if this had been pitched simply as a story by James Cooper it would have worked better, but as a Jackson tribute it’s entirely transparent – we pretty much know where the story is going, with only the details to be revealed. And by setting it in an invented community the template’s sting in the tail of modern people engaged in primitive practices is lost.”

Subsequently the story was expanded to novella length and published independently in paperback by Cemetery Dance, but my review of that title got pushed out of the final issue of Black Static owing to lack of space, and so I’m posting it here.

The Man in the Field starts by reproducing the original story, with nearly the whole community colluding in what happens. The story is told from the viewpoint of elderly widow Mother Tanner, with subsequent events further undermining her already shaky faith in the men who run this community, particularly the duplicitous and bullying Father Lynch. Exploring in the woods that border the community, she is turned back by armed guards working for the Ness Corporation and witnesses an act that further reinforces her negative opinion of Lynch, but confronting him only leaves Mother Tanner aware of how powerless she is.

I really don’t know how I feel about this novella. It’s a mix up of so many other things, Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ as already stated, but also echoes of The Crucible, The Tall Man, and The Village. The story is engrossing and with some memorable characters, showing both the camaraderie of women and then the odiousness of men, especially in the figure of Father Lynch, an oily git who seems like the embodiment of toxic masculinity and hypocrisy. There is much to horrify, as with one subsequent event that provided the shock the ending of the short story failed to deliver. And there is a lot to intrigue as with the figure of the Man and the question of what happens to those he takes, and the involvement of the Ness Corporation. At the same time though, the lack of a satisfactory resolution to any of these plot strands in a work of novella length is disappointing. Similarly the background to the story is only sketched, with not enough detail to make sense of its mechanics. What exactly do Mother Tanner and others in the community believe? There are references to God and the Turn of the Wheel, but overall it is a mystery. And how does the community interact with the rest of the world? They have electricity, as a reference to radio would seem to imply, but no television and don’t know what mobile phones are, and there is no information regarding the economics of the community. Similarly there is contact with other communities, as with Mother Glatt’s van and a reference to bus stations, but blind spots when it suits the whim of the author. To me the whole thing felt too vague, with the story intriguingly told but the world in which it is set drawn badly. Cooper is always worth reading and this novella is no exception, but at the same time it felt more like the draft for the first part of a novel, rather than a stand alone work. As is, it whets an appetite that it doesn’t satisfy.

Trailer Trash – Tarot

Your fate is in the cards.