Spooky Synopsis: Harry Houdini has found himself in some tough scrapes over the years, but he's never confronted anything as difficult as what awaits him in Cairo. He and his wife had intended to take a relaxing trip to the land of the pharaohs, losing themselves both in exotic sights and relative anonymity. But it's hard for a professional escape artist to shed his reputation even halfway around the world. See, a few unscrupulous locals have figured out just who Houdini is, and they take it upon themselves to see if he can make his way out from the unexplored caverns beneath the pyramids while bound and gagged. Yet the famous escape artist will face something far worse than tight knots and pitch-black darkness: He'll face an evil thousands of years old.
Lovecraftian Language:"It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch flight through Stygian space. The process was infinitely painful, and coloured by fantastic dreams in which my bound and gagged condition found singular embodiment. The precise nature of these dreams was very clear while I was experiencing them, but became blurred in my recollection almost immediately afterward, and was soon reduced to the merest outline by the terrible events -- real or imaginary -- which followed. I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt."
Eerie Evaluation: As you might've surmised from the summary above, Lovecraft didn't come up with the whole Houdini-in-Egypt premise on his own. No, he was assigned to ghostwrite "Under the Pyramids." Weird Tales owner J.C. Henneberger believed that Houdini's name might help move magazines, and perhaps that pecuniary motive explains why the thing is so freaking long. Part travelogue, part history lesson, part horror story, "Under the Pyramids" keeps throwing exotic tidbits at you like an insecure zookeeper desperate to placate his wild charges. The structure's an absolute mess. It takes half of the tale's length for Houdini to even end up below the titular megaliths, and the way he gets there would make even the most credulous raise a skeptical eyebrow. The plot hiccups along, bouncing from overlong description to implausible development to Houdini boasting about his professional prowess -- until the ending. And oh my, what an ending. The distractions fall away, Lovecraft gathers to himself the myth of the sphinx along with certain unpleasant details about mummification, and then he twists the final scene like a knife. Only a truly masterful conclusion could save the story from ignominy, and Lovecraft manages it, but only just.
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 unnamed narrator of "The Music of Erich Zann" knows that Paris must contain the Rue d’Auseil somewhere among its myriad streets. While studying metaphysics at university, he himself lived on it in a decrepit, five-story boarding house. But he cannot find it, try as he might -- although he has reasons to not search too hard. When he dwelt there, he made the acquaintance of one Erich Zann, a mute German who occupied the highest, most distant room in the house so he could play his viol through the night. And the music that came from that instrument! To call it wild and weird would hardly do it justice. It was perhaps the strangest music ever heard in this world -- or any other.
Lovecraftian Language:"Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself; so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyr-like face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to shew the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, and bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation."
Eerie Evaluation: "The Music of Erich Zann" is everything that Lovecraft’s lesser tales aren’t. Spare. Focused. Realy, truly creepy. Readers realize pretty fast that there’s more to Zann’s playing than a little late-night composing or practicing some experimental piece for "a cheap theatre orchestra." Why won’t Zann let the narrator lift the curtain to the window in his room? Why can’t the old man stand to hear his strains mimicked, however inexpertly? Why does he urge the narrator to take a room on a lower floor (where he almost certainly couldn’t hear the viol) and personally defray the difference in rent? Something foul is afoot. But the story stumbles when it comes to revealing the exact nature of that disturbance. Though genuinely frightening, the climax of "The Music of Erich Zann" is almost too oblique, requiring a reading or two to discern what Lovecraft was driving at. The only flaw in an otherwise stellar tale.
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.
Note: Readers may recall that Tony Chavira is a longtime ISLF friend. Please know that I purchased a copy of this title using my own funds. I do not accept free review copies.
Genre geeks love to argue over a simple question: "What is noir?" Some say it's nothing more than a feeling, an emotional vibration that comes when you read about a trench-coat-clad gumshoe slinking through rain-slicked city streets. But that seems a bit too restrictive for me. Others argue that it's a nihilistic offshoot of hardboiled, yet I've encountered profoundly moral stories that everyone calls noir. Some say it involves a protagonist going willingly to his doom, and this seems closer to the mark if somewhat lacking in nuance. We could pick nits all day, but let's state that noir is gritty subgenre of crime fiction that always ends badly. Agreed? Great. Now how does Gary Phillips' and Tony Chavira's Beat L.A. -- a comic and prose-fiction compendium that proudly wears the noir label -- mesh with that definition?
Bicycle cop Dave Richter doesn't even know he's in it deep. He thinks he's got a nice thing going with his hot-as-a-blast-furnace squeeze Sylvia, and her position with development firm The Harkspur Corporation doesn't bother him at all. It should. Harkspur CEO Strother Moreland has about as many scruples as an obsessive-compulsive kleptomaniac, and that goes double for his inked-up female bodyguard, Rhoda Glink. Add to that the further weirdness of a rash of ritualistic murders showing all the makings of a serial killer and a gun-toting vigilante wearing a life-sized rabbit head which may -- or may not -- be part of an elaborate costume. Harkspur's planning a big project, and as it progresses, Dave's going to have to deal with an exponentially increasing body count. Meanwhile, his fellow cops Markus Brand and J.P. Reese find themselves with a situation that could prove even worse. Their unexpected discovery of a secret hobo village smack in the middle of Los Angeles doesn't turn out to be the humanitarian opportunity that local community organizers expect. Heroin addiction is running rampant throughout its population -- and almost nowhere else in the city. Could someone be targeting this particular group of unfortunates? Might it have something to do with Conglomerated Properties efforts to secure development rights for the parcel upon which they're squatting?
Remember those three defining traits of noir? Crime fiction. Gritty. Ends badly. Well, Beat L.A. certainly has the first two down pat. In some ways, it feels almost like an offshoot of the classic procedural. Phillips and Chavira keep their focus squarely on Richter, Brand and Reese, zeroing in on their public struggles and secret motivations even as a preposterous ensemble of secondary characters cavorts around them. Don't take "preposterous" as a criticism, either. In grand comic-book tradition, Beat L.A. is populated with over-the-top antagonists. The bunny-headed vigilante, who goes by Genghis Rabbit, proves the most interesting. Backed by an addled cult of street thugs, he may be nothing more than a well-armed anarchist, but he could also be a reincarnated Mayan construction worker. That's not to give short shrift to other characters, though, which include a sadomasochism-loving corporate type, a rogue black-ops agent who recalls an über-capable Norman Bates, and a fornicating urban pastor with espionage on his mind. Yeah, I think we can check off the "gritty" box, too. Beat L.A. ain't for kids, and I wasn't sure that it would be for me, either, what with a subtitle rich with ideological undertones ("Patrolling the Underside of Gentrification"). Few authors can get political while simultaneously keeping their stories on track. Yet while Beat L.A. subtly digs at Texas governor Rick Perry and lauds unionized workers, it mostly avoids becoming partisan. The overall tone seems to be frustration over the inefficiency and corruption of government, a sentiment most everyone can agree with and one that feeds into the overall pessimistic tone. Yes, the three stories in Beat L.A. share noir's antipathy to pat, happy endings, but only one main character perishes, and that doesn't quite jive with noir's typical pitch-black bleakness. Arguing over definitions, though, is for the chronically underemployed and academics. Criminal, gritty, dark and fun -- Beat L.A. is all of them.
Postscript: This post was featured on the I Saw Lightning Fall podcast. To listen, check out the widget below, visit the show's Soundcloud page, or subscribe via iTunes.
(Picture: Copyright 2013 by Gary Phillips and Tony Chavira; used under fair use)
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 "Celephaїs"), "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.
