2018? More of less Part 1

  Over on my Jagged Orbit blog I did a 2018 Year End Review which included purchases, posts and reading for 2018. As I noted there I do not keep a reading diary so my recollection of what I read in a given year can be vague.  What I have decided to do here is list ten titles I have read from 2017/2018 and just provide a brief note on what attracted me to them. I will do this in two parts because I do go on a bit. The stories are numbered for clarity, this is not my ranking of best to least. If I have posted on a specific title previously I will provide a link.

http://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2019/01/2018-year-end-review.html

Some titles I enjoyed recently:

 1. "The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon
Okay, this is probably my favourite HPL inspired story, period. You can find it online. I prefer the version in The Weird ed. by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. The story is narrated by Edward D. Satterlee the district attorney of Yuggoghey County, and a more world weary (mythos weary) narrator you would be hard pressed to find, include a clown worthy of Thomas Ligotti and the pathos of the primate and Chabon shows why he is a master story teller, and a big fan of genre fiction. 

"The line went dead. He was so keen to hang up on me that he could not even wait to finish his sentence. I got up and went to the shelf where, in recent months, I had taken to keeping a bottle of whiskey tucked behind my bust of Daniel Webster. Carrying the bottle and a dusty glass back to my desk, I sat down and tried to reconcile myself to the thought that I was confronted – not, alas, for the first time in my tenure as chief law-enforcement officer of Yuggogheny County – with a crime whose explanation was going to involve not the usual amalgam of stupidity, meanness, and singularly poor judgment but the incalculable intentions of a being who was genuinely evil. What disheartened me was not that I viewed a crime committed out of the promptings of an evil nature as inherently less liable to solution than the misdeeds of the foolish, the unlucky, or the habitually cruel. On the contrary, evil often expresses itself through refreshingly discernible patterns, through schedules and syllogisms. But the presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria."


The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (p. 905). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. 

  
My full (gushing) post here
https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/search/label/Michael%20Chabon

2. Copping Squid by Michael Shea

Here it is the gatekeepers and the strange house itself that forms the setting for the cosmic encounter, that drew me in and made this story something different. 

"The houses thinned out even more, big old trees half shrouding them. Dead cars slept under drifts of leaves, and dim bedroom lights showed life just barely hanging on, here in the hungry heights. 

    As they mounted this shoulder of the hills, Ricky saw glimpses of other ridges to the right and left, rooftop-and-tree-encrusted like this one. All these crest lines converged toward the same summit, and when Ricky looked behind, it seemed that these ridges poured down like a spill of titanic tentacles."

Shea, Michael. Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea (pp. 164-165). Dark Regions Press. Kindle Edition. 

  Next Brian Hodge is to my mind one of the best writers of HPL inspired stories working today. I did a full length post on his story "The Same Deep Waters As You, which also appeared in Tor.com's The Great Lovecraft reread. 

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Same%20Deep%20Waters%20as%20You.%20Brian%20Hodge

3. It's All The Same Road in the End by Brian Hodge

In his story "The Picture in the House" Lovecraft tells us 

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.^[5]"

But even less promising seems to the setting of Hodge's story. Brothers, Clarence and Will Chambers are searching for their grandfather Willard Chambers who disappeared some 50 years ago while collecting folk songs in Kansas.

"But now they’d let the distinctions slip away. From place to place, it wasn’t that different after all. They’d seen it all before and forgotten where. Everything was the same again. This was how things hid in open daylight, beneath the vast skies, out here in the plains of western Kansas. There was no need for mountain hollows or fern-thick forests or secret caves tucked into seaside coves. The things that wanted to stay hidden would camouflage themselves as one more piece of the monotony and endless repetition." 

or

"There had never been much point to going where people were so few and far between that the land hardly seemed lived in at all. It had once, though. The rubble and residue lingered. Along roads that had crumbled mostly back to dirt, they passed the scattered, empty shells of lives long abandoned. Separated by minutes and miles, the remains of farmhouses and barns left for ruin seemed to sink into seas of prairie grass. The trees hung on, as tenacious loners or clustering into distant, ragged rows that betrayed the hidden vein of a creek." 

Guran, Paula. The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction (Kindle Locations 1227-1231). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition. 

As someone who has spent a large portion of his life, living, working and travelling on the Canadian Prairie I think Hodge has captured the scope, vastness, desolation and physical isolation of the prairie beautifully. It may seem like one of the least promising setting for a tale of Lovecraftian cosmicism. But the elements are all there and wonderfully realized. There is nothing of the pastiche here, Hodge instead has captured the essence of Lovecraft cosmic indifferentism. 

4. On These Blackened Shores of Time by Brian Hodge 

Again Hodge uses another theme that informs the best of Lovecraft's work, the vast incomprehensible scale of the earth and the universe. As Lovecraft did At The Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, Hodge brings us the to the brink of the unknowable, the inconceivable distance that stands between our current mayfly lives and the deep time beginnings of life itself and give us a peek. I also found echos of the themes of Arthur C. Clarke, throw in a subterranean setting and fungus, who could ask for more.

5. The Night is a Sea by Scott Thomas

My wife is a huge fan of the magazine Fortean Times, so our household is well aware of the work of Charles Fort in recording the weird, the uncanny and the just plain odd. Here Thomas has captured the universe spanning scale of Lovecraft with the type of news items beloved of Fort. Indeed our narrator, Emerson a collector of the strange and mystical, is also the writer of the column Emerson Bridge's Journeys to the Border for the newspaper Free Worchester, producing columns taylor made for the pages of Fort's The Book of the Damned. Emerson loves to share the stories he has uncovered like that of the Ice Sisters, 

"As for the Ice Sisters… A boy searching for his missing dog found three dead women dressed in colonial mourning gowns lying in the middle of a field in the Coddington property. They were spaced evenly apart with their heads nearly touching, though their hair and faces could not easily be seen. Each had a dark wooden box enclosing her from the neck up, and underneath, shaped to the dimensions of the boxes and further encasing the women's heads were blocks of ice.  (11)

The story wanders happy along, as we follow Emerson, researching and relating stories as well as assisting in a search for a missing senior, until all the elements come together in a outstanding climax. This story is a wonderful fusion of Lovecraft and Charles Fort and any aficionado of the weird is sure to enjoy it. 

And now before beginning part two I must ransack my library, not for the Chaat Aquadingen or the Cultes des Goules, (which are right there in the C's) but rather a story about musical skulls that I want to include in part two. 

Happy 2019