Spooky Synopsis: Across the face of the wide, wide land, a youth named Iranon roams, and always he seeks the same thing, a distant city called Aira. This dwelling, which he remembers but dimly, is a place of golden domes and marble houses, of citizens radiant as the luminescent moon and soft song floating down the silvered streets. Yet try as he might, Iranon has not yet found his beloved city, though in stoic Teloth -- where the gods demand all men labor and no one yearns for the beauty so dear to Iranon -- he discovered a boy named Romnod who seeks the same sort of transcendence. Together they vow to find what their hearts desire even if the journey lasts a lifetime ...
Lovecraftian Language:"'O Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are they beauties! How loved I the warm and fragrant groves across the hyaline Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra that flowed through the verdant valley! In those groves and in that vale the children wove wreaths for one another, and at dusk I dreamed strange dreams under the yath-trees on the mountain as I saw below me the lights of the city, and the curving Nithra reflecting a ribbon of stars.'"
Eerie Evaluation: "The Quest of Iranon" follows in much the same fantastic mold as "The White Ship," with lots of lush language describing newly imagined locations. Had Lovecraft given in to his usual over-expansive diction, the story would've quickly become interminable. However, he kept the pacing relatively brisk, and if Iranon gets a little wordy here and there, he's soon off to another adventure. He has to be: The tale clocks in at six pages in my edition. But it falls flat on its face -- and I mean slip-on-a-banana-peel-then-plunge-headfirst-into-rush-hour-traffic flat -- with the ending. Yes, sad conclusions are all well and good, and "The White Ship" managed one full of feeling and poignancy. "The Quest of Iranon" doesn't. Lovecraft attempts it, but he remains too committed to his nihilism to make Iranon's end feel like inevitable foolishness, a plunge into the void, seeking everything and finding nothing.
Number of Sanity-Shredding Shoggoths (out of five):
To visit the story index for "An Eldritch Education" (my year spent reading H.P. Lovecraft's work), please click here.
Spooky Synopsis: The last day of the life of Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, a U-29 Lieutenant-Commander in the German Navy, was August 20, 1917. How do we know this? Because a curious manuscript written in his hand washed up on the Yucatan coast, a manuscript that detailed the doom of Heinrich's ship after it sank a British freighter and slaughtered the remnants of its lifeboat-bound crew. Confounded by a mechanical malfunction, the German sailors fell into a panic as the U-boat drifted inexorably deeper and deeper toward the ocean floor. Only Heinrich lived long enough to record what lay there -- the remnants of an ancient society unknown by mankind.
Lovecraftian Language:"I cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with its beauty and mystery. Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity was consuming; and I threw the searchlight's beam about in eager quest. The shaft of light permitted me to learn many details, but refused to shew anything within the gaping door of the rock-hewn temple; and after a time I turned off the current, conscious of the need of conserving power. The rays were now perceptibly dimmer than they had been during the weeks of drifting. And as if sharpened by the coming deprivation of light, my desire to explore the watery secrets grew. I, a German, should be the first to read those aeon-forgotten ways!"
Eerie Evaluation: Think of the "The Temple" as a pale imitation of "Dagon." Yes, yes, it was written years later, but it shares so many of the same characteristics that comparison becomes inevitable. A World War I time period. A nautical milieu. A doomed protagonist who finds evidence of a (mostly) dead civilization beneath the waves. But where the plight of the unnamed protagonist of "Dagon" elicited pity and horror, it's hard to feel anything but contempt for Heinrich. He makes Full Metal Jacket's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman look like a man of breeding and refinement. One doesn't need clairvoyance to realize that Lovecraft singularly disliked Germany's politicals. His disgust finds focus in the person of Heinrich, a character he makes both cartoonishly cruel and stupidly predictable. Heinrich dismisses a fellow sailor who has an inkling of the supernatural terrors to come as "a superstitious Alsatian swine." He decries "the unjust war of aggression which the English pig-dogs are waging upon the Fatherland." He summarily executes two men stricken with insanity, giving the event about as much weight in his narrative as a record of their latitude and longitude. He never misses an opportunity to praise Germany's excellencies and his own impeccable breeding. Yeah, not exactly someone you'd want for your roommate. I half expected him to start twirling his moustache in maniacal glee. The plotting, pacing and payoff of "The Temple" are all quite good, but Lovecraft would've done well to realize that you can't expect readers to care about a caricature.
Number of Sanity-Shredding Shoggoths (out of five):
To visit the story index for "An Eldritch Education" (my year spent reading H.P. Lovecraft's work), please click here.
Spooky Synopsis: Third generation North Point lighthouse keeper Basil Elton loved the sea in all its mystery, loved how it brought boats from every corner of the world and how his ancestors would whisper to him of its ancient mysteries. Basil has experienced some of those himself, because in the past the ocean would speak with him in numinous whispers. Then one night it sent the White Ship gliding in to him from the south, and Basil decided to board it, a decision that would send him on a globe-spanning adventure to mysterious lands -- and eventually cover the sea in silence.
Lovecraftian Language:"But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and in time. Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath."
Eerie Evaluation: "The White Ship" is a bit of a head scratcher. It's not a bad story at all. Basil sails to various mythological destinations of Lovecraft's own invention, espying lands that promise pleasure but ultimately offer only pain. (For instance, Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, is home to "all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to fathom," and those who seek to inhabit it discover that therein "walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men.") Eventually, Basil finds a good and pleasant land, yet ultimately forsakes it for the promise of an undiscovered paradise that reputedly lies to the west. This leads to doom, naturally enough, and a clear moral about the great gain found in contentment. That's all well and good, I suppose, but "The White Ship" simply doesn't read like Lovecraft. Sure, it contains a few creepy nautical moments, but the ocean becomes a thing full of beauty rather than of squamous horror. Editor S.T. Joshi calls the tale a pastiche of Lord Dunsany, and despite having seen a similar tone at least once thus far in Lovecraft's oeuvre (I'm thinking about "CelephaŃ—s"), "The White Ship" hardly seems like it should've flowed from his pen.
Number of Sanity-Shredding Shoggoths (out of five):
To visit the story index for "An Eldritch Education" (my year spent reading H.P. Lovecraft's work), please click here.
Why Listen? For strong imagery; a dollop of SF; the ever-inspiring Johnny Cash.
Popular music has seen its share of strange collaborations over the years, some of which work startlingly well and others that fall spectacularly flat. But few possess the appeal of having one of the greats of country music frontline an epic British rock band, and that's exactly what Johnny Cash did with “The Wanderer,” the last track on U2's experimental Zooropa. "Experimental" being the key word. In his inimitable style, Cash drones about a wandering man who goes walking through a totalitarian state "with a Bible and gun" while looking for love and redemption. Though he contributes only scant backing vocals, U2's Bono wrote the lyrics, which draw heavily on SF imagery:
I went out walking under an atomic sky
Where the ground won't turn
And the rain it burns
Like the tears when I said goodbye.
Alas, all of the imagery never quite coheres into a proper narrative, but it will give your imagination a dystopic jolt.
Spooky Synopsis: Joe Slater didn't look like a dangerous man. No, on first (and second and third) glance, he seemed nothing more than one of the Catskill-dwelling hill folk who delighted primarily in whiskey and sleep. But sleep was where his problems started. Even compared to his sluggardly relations, Slater liked his shut-eye. Yet he often flew into violent rages upon awakening, screaming incomprehensible descriptions about light-soaked vistas of empty space, a strange and haunting music, and a great, taunting being who sought his torment. Afterward, though, Slater could hardly remember his earlier agitation. It was what happened during one of these fugues that he committed the crime that landed him in a mental institution, beating a man to death with his bare hands, striking and striking and striking until his victim was a bloody pulp.
Lovecraftian Language:"I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences -- Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism -- there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from the life by an all but impassable barrier."
Eerie Evaluation: One doesn't need a doctorate in literary studies to deduce from "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" that Lovecraft had a poor opinion of rural New Englanders. The story describes Slater as "a low-grade paranoiac" and "backwoods dullard," one of those "decadent mountain folk" with "an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity" who was "pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike." Okay, okay, we get it Howard, he wasn't one of the urbane, intelligent city dwellers you so admired. It would be easier to brush aside such snobbery if the climax didn't turn on Slater being (in the words of one character) "too much of an animal, too little a man." A lamentable state, because otherwise "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is a corker of a tale, with a cosmos-spanning cast, an epic struggle unbounded by time, and an almost optimistic tone foreign to much of Lovecraft's work.
Number of Sanity-Shredding Shoggoths (out of five):
To visit the story index for "An Eldritch Education" (my year spent reading H.P. Lovecraft's work), please click here.
Spooky Synopsis: Jervas Dudley knows he might be insane. Even as a dreamy youth, he had a perspective on the world that might've called his mental state into doubt. Yet despite his supposed cerebral deficiencies, he's convinced that the authorities of sanitarium where he now resides are wrong when it comes to the tomb. He discovered the crypt as a child, drawn to it like iron to a lodestone by a desperate desire to explore its charnel depths. Yet breach its entrance he did, and the things he discovered within broadened his mind immeasurably -- or perhaps destroyed it.
Lovecraftian Language:"I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death. It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogenous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need not name."
Eerie Evaluation: See that last sentence above? Perhaps it doesn't strike you as particularly odd, but by the time you reach the end of "The Tomb" -- a scant ten pages long in my edition -- you'll have heard Jervas repeat similar sentiments over and over again. He won't detail this, he needn't explain that, and such demurrals seem less like demonstrations of madness than compositional shortcuts for Lovecraft, who apparently couldn't be bothered to fill in the details. It's irritating, as is the adjective-studded prose and aimless pacing. And the worst part? A far-superior story peeks out near the end, glimmering like a diamond in sawdust. While the blame for Jervas' fascination with the titular tomb falls on his supposedly weak mind, it really owes to a malign presence reaching out from beyond the grave. Unfortunately, Lovecraft kept too many details muddy for the short to really seize the imagination.
Number of Sanity-Shredding Shoggoths (out of five):
To visit the story index for "An Eldritch Education" (my year spent reading H.P. Lovecraft's work), please click here.
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I love noir. I hate noir. Let me explain.
Last week, I found myself stuck in a small regional airport, the inevitable result of an urgent business trip that connected through Hartsfield-Jackson International, which I prefer to avoid like the proverbial plague. While waiting, I scrolled through the Kindle app on my phone, looking for any noteworthy purchases that might've escaped my earlier attention. I found one in Dan O'Shea's short-story collection Old School.
How I managed to download Old School and not consume it immediately is beyond me. O'Shea has writing chops to make even the most seasoned author wince with envy. Whether framing a quest for vengeance with a biblical narrative ("Absalom"), detailing a bitter husband's murderous schemes ("Pink Cadillac"), or reimagining Shakespeare as a manipulative lecher (the supremely titled "The Bard's Confession on the Matter of the Despoilment of the Fishmonger's Daughter"), O'Shea packs maximum punch into minimal space. Think of these stories like a good single malt, each sip rich and potent and heady.
But like hard drink, O'Shea's stories can also turn your stomach a little. They virtually all end badly, which is just what you have to expect from noir. But what bothered me was that so many of the shorts wallowed in existential bleakness, imagining the world as (to quote thriller author Stephen Hunter) "a stainless steel rat trap with a 4,000 pound spring." Suicide becomes a grim heroic act after a cancer diagnosis in "Shackleton's Hooch." For a career hitman, the "Circle of Life" ends with him watching roaches crawl from the walls as he perishes on hotel carpet. And "Sheepshank" sees an elderly policeman's bad heart fell him moments before he can exact vigilante justice on a child murderer. It's this perspective that makes me want to dislike the genre, the idea that we subsist in a universe devoid of any ethical calculus, an indifferent cosmos that cares nothing for righteousness or recompensing wrongs.
I hate that.
There's another side to noir, though, one where that rat trip snaps shut on malefactors rather than the innocent. Interestingly, O'Shea includes a couple of stories from this viewpoint in Old School, namely "Hilary's Scars" and the amazing "Thin Mints." However, the 2010 Danish thriller Terribly Happy (a recent treadmill watch of mine) provides a more consistent example. Policeman Robert Hansen has been temporarily reassigned to the tiny town of Skarrild after an undisclosed professional impropriety. To keep from spoiling things, let's just say it involves the misuse of his firearm. Robert's superior urges him to stick to the book, avoid alcohol, and keep his pistol holstered. If he does all that, he'll get out of this rain-soaked, muddy purgatory in no time. But after meeting the comely wife of a local drunk who gets violent when in his cups, Robert finds his professional control starting to slip. That's bad enough in and of itself, but the residents of Skarrild have their own ways of dealing with the town's problems ...
As I mentioned before, noir doesn't traffic in happy conclusions. It doesn't take long for Robert to start bending rules and throwing back a glass or two. Each seemingly minor infraction leads to another marginally worse until he's behaving little better than the criminals he thinks he's fighting. Note the difference, though: Every malignant bloom sprouts from the stalk of Robert's diseased character. Things go wrong because he has gone wrong. In this sort of noir, the universe is anything but indifferent, chronicling every infraction and insuring the guilty don't go unpunished.
I love that.
