Black Helicopters and The Tindalos Asset by Caitlin R. Kiernan (To Frank Belknap Long the father of the Hounds)

  Anyone who has followed my blog knows I love the works of Caitlin R. Kiernan. However, I don't love all of them. Some works are too sexualized, topical (with references to serial killers, snuff films), perhaps too modern or contemporary for me. But she writes enough works that I enjoy that I am always ready to read more. The themes I enjoy and which I think she does quite well at are science fiction, UFO conspiracy theories, Lovecraftian/mythos fiction and stories related to the work/ideas of Charles Fort. I have previously discussed the first volume in The Tinfoil Dossier series, Agents of Dreamland here 

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2017/04/agents-of-dreamland-by-caitlin-r-kiernan.html . 

I will avoid repeating myself, so if you want to read my take on Kiernan's work, I suggest you start there. In the Author's Note to The Tindalos Asset, Kiernan provides information on the genesis of the three works and I will paraphrase it here. Agents of Dreamland was written in about six weeks in the summer of 2015. and was published by Tor 2017. Tor released volume two, Black Helicopters in May 2018. A shorter version appeared in the Subterranean Press collection Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea in 2015. I originally read this version in a latter Subterranean Press collection. 

The original version of Black Helicopters, which I preferred, predated Agents of Dreamland. While some elements appear in both novels, the expanded Tor edition feels like it has shoehorned into the sequence which has become The Tinfoil Dossier. The Signalman does not appear until page 149 of the 196-page novel and even then seems perfunctory. Immacolata Sexton disappears, and instead, we have another deathless/long-lived Barbican operative called Ptolema, the Eygptian, Ancient of Days. One thing I noticed is that this story has multiple characters, primarily women, who seem to have a number of names. There are the albino twins Bete and Ivoire, their handler Dr. Twisley, and the soldier mathematical savant 66. Childhood and how it moulds identity does seem to be an important theme.

  

 I will not discuss the plot in great detail. There are two main threads one deals with an invasion of shoggoths from the seas around Deer Island, Maine. The second revolves around the history of the twins and the efforts of various groups to control or destroy them. There is a lot of interplay between various agencies with conflicting and sometimes inexplicable agendas. The action does not proceed chronologically. The narrative moves between the past, the present and even the far future. Keirnan dates the chapters, and this does help. My wife and I watched the X-Files for many years, and I tended to prefer the standalone episodes, often with supernatural plotlines. The long, complex unfolding of conspiracies turned me off. Here I think the plot might have grown too convoluted for me. It seemed to grow more and more intricate like the origami swans Bete is obsessively making until I could not follow the pattern anymore. Not a bad read but it was my least favourite in the series

The third volume, The Tindalos Asset, was begun in 2017 and completed in 2019. Some sections appeared in Ellen Datlow's Children of Lovecraft (2015) as "Excerpts from An Eschatology Quadrille." I loved The Tindalos Asset. It is a wonderful homage to Charles Fort as well as a great continuation of the story of the Signalman and his fight against the end of the world. The story begins with a visit by the Signalman to Ellison Nicodemo. (The book is dedicated to, among others, In Memory of Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) Visionary. Hero. Mentor. Friend.) Nicodemo was once one of Albany's most effective assassins. However, something went horribly wrong, and I mean horribly, during an assignment in Atlanta. Now she is an alcoholic drug addict, slowly killing herself in a filthy apartment in LA's Koreatown. The Signalman, who was once Nicodemo's handler, has been sent by Albany to recruit her for one last assignment. It seems Jehosheba Talog, Mother Hydra's current best bud and Nicodemo's Atlanta target, has come back and in a big way. We have strange deaths, even stranger births, bizarre ritual murders, weird weather, extinct animals, cryptozoology, mass hysteria in asylums incuding the Butler hospital in Providence, R.I of course, outbreaks of nightmares and stuff falling from the sky. Lots of stuff, big stuff, "Why, that's nothing. Pshaw, even. We got a goddamn sixty-five-foot sperm whale-Moby-Dick's own great-great-grandkid-stretched across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. " (85). The pace at which the incidents detailed in the dossier is terrific, one breathtaking revelation layered on atop the other, each worth of Fort himself. Why does Albany think Nicodemo can help. Well, not only was she an effective assassin in her own right but when she is in danger, a "hound" appears from a handy angle to defend her. It is all here Kiernan at her best she has summoned Fort's legions, 

“A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. (Charle Ford, The Book of the Damned. 

She brings us quotes from Lewis Carroll and Tennyson. Keirnan's own background in palaeontology means her pallid data in often geological and marine-based. Her extensive knowledge of Lovecraft has us revisit the house on Benefit Street in Providence R.I., otherwise known as "The Shunned House." I have followed Kiernan's blog for years, and I know she does a great deal of research to add a level of reality to her otherwise fantastic tales. So we begin to know things about the recurring characters that bring them to life. What beer they drink, songs they listen to, movies they watch. On the plane, Nicodemo is drinking National Bohemian and smoking Chesterfields. The Signalman's mixtape includes Connie Francis and Kitty Wells, he references John Ford westerns, and his watch was "made in 1888 by the Elgin Watch Company of Elgin, Illinois. We get the scientific names of many of the critters that fall from the sky or the cutting edge materials used in the interrogation room. This level of detail is supplied to make the story live, but it is not laboured; the pace of the story is not slowed; it is just there. Without the details, the scientific names, the historical references, the quotes, the names of the songs or bands playing on the jukebox, a Kiernan story would seem incomplete or colourless. And how do all these elements fit together to make a mythos tale? Is a marriage of Charles Fort and HPL. made in heaven or hell?

“It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.” 

- Charles Fort,The Book of the Damned

"Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again." 

- H.P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon

I think they go very well together.

Cover Credits:

Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, Illustration Lee Moyer, Photograph Kathryn A. Pollnac

Black Helicopters, photograph Don Seymour, design Christine Foltzer

Agents of Dreamland, design Christine Foltzer

The Tindalos Asset, design Christine Foltzer

The Hounds of Tindalos

Arkham House, Hannes Bok

Jove/HBJ, Rowena

Belmont, Uncredited

To Charles Fort With Love, Richard Kirk

Fast fashion, H.P.L. and me

 

I was visiting, as I often do The Online Journal of Caitlín R. Kiernan.

https://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1562876.html

I noticed my heroine was wearing a really cool t-shirt, and well I had to have my own. Need you ask why? 

Once over at teepublic I had to at least see what else else they had. And my two search terms, as always were Lovecraft and Godzilla. I know but its gotten me to my mid 60's so why change now. I already have a plethoria of Godzilla, okay one HPL and four Godzilla so tempting as some of the Godzilla themed items were I went with Howard this time. One Vblogger we watch to relax does warn of the perils of fast fashion. I my own defence, my dad passed away in 2001 and I still have a couple of his shirts so I cling to clothing like a limpet. Most of my cabin clothing is from Value Village and the real gems end up in my closet here. Some stuff also heads to the charity drop boxes so I do try. But well how could I resist. This is not an endorsement, find your own road to financial ruin.

And remember when updating your investment portfolio, casting a vote or 

simply Marie Kondoing your outfits.

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” 

Why settle for the lesser of two evils?

 

New Eldritch Tomes, HPL, Caitlin R. Kieran and Ian Miller

I got a couple of new used books from Abe as well as a new purchase I wanted to share. The first is this SFBC collection with a cover by Ian Miller. I cannot understand why who ever did the layout of the back cover butchered the Miller illustration to include the ISBN box rather than rearranging the elements. May they have an unfortunate encounter with Shub-Niggurath (The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young). I had literally been eyeing this copy for years. One thing I ask myself is do I need another HPL collection, the answer is often yes. I am a sucker for art work so Miller was a huge plus but I am happy to say the editor Andrew Wheeler rewarded my purchase with a short one page dream piece "What the Moon Brings" which I do not remember reading before. 

"So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfume-conquering stench of the world's dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon." (395) 

Yes Howard really hated sea food. The tone of this story really brought to mind another moon related passage I had just read in his essay "In Defence of Dagon" 

"Romanticists are persons, who on the one hand scorn the realist who says that moonlight is only reflected wave-motion in the aether: but who on the other hand sit stolid and unmoved when a fantaisiste tells them that the moon is a hideous nightmare eye-watching ... ever watching..." (147)

I was looking for a copy of  Caitlin R. Kieran's short story, "The Daughter of the Four Pentacles". The same vender had Thrillers 2 a signed limited edition with that story and Kieran's "Houses Under the Sea. " so the die was cast.

 

When the pandemic began my wife and I purchased a couple of gift cards from a locally owned bookstore we frequent. Yesterday we ventured out masked and sanitized to see what they had. I had checked their online catalogue so I knew what I wanted. Helen got Monsters and Myths: Surrealism & War in the 1930s and 1940s, which I discussed briefly here. 

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2020/07/new-arrivals.html

I got of course, was there any doubt, The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham edited by Leslie S. Klinger. I have volume one but Klinger restricted that volume to works that mentioned Arkham, the Miskatonic river valley or Miskatonic University. This excluded some of my favourite works. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, "The Strange High House in the Mist:, "The Outsider, The Rats in the Walls", "The Lurking Fear" etc. And here they are. What no "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" I know it was cowritten with E. Hoffmann Price, but Price admits he was just nudging Lovecraft to get him to write it and that the story was Lovecraft's. 

We also have an introduction by Victor LaValle the author of the mythos related work, "The Ballard of Black Tom". I have LaValle's book on my kindle but I have not read it yet, I certainly will. So I will refer interested readers to the review of this book  at The Great Lovecraft ReRead. 

https://www.tor.com/2016/02/17/book-reviews-later-the-ballad-of-black-tom-by-victor-lavalle/

LaValle's introduction was interesting reading. He discussing finding and enjoying Lovecraft's as a ten year old only to realize at 15 that as a young black man he could not accept the racism in Lovecraft's writing. It is a perfectly understandable reaction. I did want to quote one passage from the introduction because I think it frames my experience with genre literature and why I think I still read science fiction, weird tales, Sherlock Holmes related works and the like. "Ten year old me was here for all of it: the high anxiety, waves of madness, and the terror of human insignificance. Certain writers must be encountered at a young age or else their spell will never be cast properly. Some people would say this is because an older reader has matured out of the appeal such pulp provides, but I call bullshit on that. Instead, I would say that as a child the aperture of your imagination is wide open. In adulthood we call its closure "maturity" but it hardly seems like a triumph to me. Instead, I try to embrace the bravery of such openness...," (xii) I am also trying to retain this openness since it is still the source of much of my joy, whether it is in the literature I read, my experience of the natural world or the observations we share with each other during a quiet walk or meal out with my wife. 

I have shared my own thoughts on Lovecraft's racism here.

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-real-shadow-over-innsmouth-odd.html

Now to the book itself. One; the cover illustration, Jacket design Steve Attardo, Jacket Art by Christina Mrozik, is one of the most striking covers based on one of Lovecraft;'s stories I have ever seen. Rats and cats, does it get better. Last night I read "The Outsider" and the accompanying annotations. I found Klinger's annotations helpful, the ones I liked were those that referred to other work that could be seen as related to this story, a poem by Hawthorne for example. But some of the most interesting referred me to critical interpretations of Lovecraft's story. I could see both types as rekindling my interest in new works in the canon and also items within my own collection that I want to revisit. 

Valentia by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Followers of this blog will know how much I enjoy the work of Caitlin R. Kiernan. The other day I decided to read her collection To Charles Fort with Love. I have a number of her collections on hand. But I decided on this one because both my wife and I enjoy the reality styling of Charles Fort, the author of (among other titles) The Book of the Damned. Fort collected and published accounts of "anomalous phenomena," things like rains of frogs, mysterious disappearances, lights in the sky etc. Helen has subscribed to The Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to Fortean occurrences for years. Many science fiction writers have been fans of Fort and Eric Frank Russell based several novels on ideas gleaned for Fort's books. So I was not surprised that Kiernan would assemble a collection in his memory. 

Valentia is a relatively short work. The protagonist Dr. Anne Campbell is a paleontologist working in New York. She receives a call from her supervisor(?) that a colleague Morris Whitney has been found dead in Ireland his body recovered by fisherman. She also learns that the site he was working on, the trackway of a tetrapod(s) early four-limbed vertebrates, has been damaged. Once in Ireland, Campbell means Marie, one of the two graduate students working with Whitney. Marie asks if Campbell was Whitney's lover, but Campbell says that part of their relationship ended a long time ago. Marie can offer no insights into by Whitney would have visited the site at night, or how his death may have come about, or who  would damage the fossils. The motive was not theft since nothing appears to have been removed. Instead, the fossils were smashed to pieces until nothing remains. The photographs, measurements and the data gathered on the scientific tests that were performed are still available, and Campbell begins to study them. That night Campbell has a dream in which she is standing on the step of the American Museum of Natural History. Suddenly Campbell finds herself transported back into a Devonian landscape similar to the one that would have existed when the fossil trackway was created. This dream of past landscapes is one she has experienced before, but this time it seems more disturbing, and at one point, she seemed to hear Whitney's voice. 

I enjoyed this story. Helen and I worked as archaeologists, and I have had a lifelong interest in prehistoric life. Kiernan herself has worked as a paleontologist specializing in marine life; mosasours and turtles seem to be two areas of interest. This experience allows her to bring a level of expertise to the story, including the description of Campbell's dream landscape. At the end of the story, Kiernan's notes mention that parts of this story were reworked for her novel Threshold. She also mentions that the trackway is real and that it was discovered in 1994 by Ivan Stossel. 

If you are interested in this evolutionary period, I recommend Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. It was also a program on PBS. I took a look for the book downstairs, but I probably got it from the public library. I was able to find a theropod trackway photo, which might be the one Kiernan mentioned. Given our shared interests, Kiernan's story was one I found particularly interesting. 

"So Runs the World Away" by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Much has been made of Lovecraft's cosmicism and rightly so. It is this aspect of his writing that set his work apart from that of the other Weird Tales writers of his generation and spawned countless pastiches, critical essays, polemics, stuffies and tchotchkes.

An aspect of his writing that gets less attention is his tales of a very puritanical witch-haunted New England. The doomed protagonists of his tales often find Margaret Murray'sThe Witch-Cult in Western Europe among the more eldritch tomes on the bookshelves they consult. Lovecraft himself offers us  the witch Keziah Mason and her familiar Brown Jenkin in "The Dreams in the Witch House".

"He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province." 1

The oft scorned figure of Cotton Mather stalks by the gallows hill and the graveyards holding the ancestors of still more doomed narrators.

"Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where." 2

"You call the Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I’ll wage my four-times-great-grandmother could have told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony—I wish someone had laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night!

“I can shew you a house he lived in, and I can shew you another one he was afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn’t dare put into that stupid Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World." 3

It is the modern version of this haunted New England that Caitlin R. Kiernan offers us in "So Runs the World Away" It is the story of the Dead Girl, her rival Gable, the boy Bobby, all of whom who live along the bank and in the waters of the Seekonk River. It is also the story of the strange house on Benefit Street, where the abnormally long-lived Miss Josephine holds forth on great disasters she has seen to her friends. A "rough circle of men and women that always makes the Dead Girl think of ravens gathered around carrion, blackbirds about a raccoon's corpse, jostling each other for the best bits" 4 It is also in the basement of the house on Benefit street that Madam Terpsichore instructs the younger ghouls in the correct away to dismember a corpse.

The Dead Girl and her companions move between both groups tolerated if not welcome. It is in the basement that the Dead Girl always seeking details of her past, quizzes the ghoul Barney about a strange vision of death she has had.

'I think I eat them," Dead Girl says. "But there are blackbirds then, a whole flock of blackbirds, and all I can hear are their wings. Their wings bruise the sky.' 5

But Barney refuses to tell her for fear of the reaction of the Baliff, a menacing figure who seems to exert a great deal of control over the group surrounding the Dead Girl. Later the Dead Girl takes a friend on a pilgrimage to Lovecraft's grave; a trip Kiernan must herself have made a number of times when she lived in Providence, Rhode Island.

To avoid spoilers, I will end my description of the story here. 

Having followed Kiernan's blog for years, I know she brings what seems like an encyclopedic knowledge of among other topics, Lovecraft's work, deep time, folklore, science, science fiction and horror to her tales. This knowledge includes film and music, as well as the written word. Like Lovecraft, she seems to visit a number of the sites she writes about as part of her research. And like Lovecraft, she often positions the fantastic elements of her stories within a network of real locations and events, quotations, newspapers clipping, and scientific facts. 

She also writes beautifully and evocatively.

"People have carved things," she says and strikes the lighter again, holds the flickering blueorange flame so that Adrian can see all the pocket-knife graffiti worked into the smooth, pale bark of the tree. The unpronounceable names of dark, fictitious gods and entire passages from Lovecraft, razor steel for ink to tattoo these occult wounds and lonely messages to a dead man, and she runs an index finger across a scar in the shape of a tentacle-headed fish." 6

I enjoyed the story; some may find ending is a bit ambiguous. I follow Kiernan's blog, and I seem to remember her mentioning that an editor of an anthology she was participating in complained that the conclusion of a story was ambiguous and rather than clarify it, she withdrew the story. I love that. I hate weird tales that offer too much explanation or even worse a prosaic explanation. I am mad for example, or in the case of William Hope Hodgson's worst Carnacki stories, criminals staged the entire haunting.

In their introduction to The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories,  Ann and Jeff Vandermeer quote Lovecraft on the weird tale.

"Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane – a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread’ or ‘malign and particular suspension or defeat of … fixed laws of Nature’ – through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition."

The Vandeermer's also state

"Because The Weird is as much a sensation as it is a mode of writing, the most keenly attuned amongst us will say ‘I know it when I see it,’ by which they mean ‘I know it when I feel""

They go on to say

"In either instance, subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous." 

For me, this is similar (not in content but impact) to the sense of wonder in science fiction. It is a point in which some aspect of the story transports my reading self out of the narrative into the realm of sensation or imaginative experience. And it is very much a matter of knowing it when I see it or rather experience it. The events within a weird tale are things of mood and atmosphere rather than something that can be categorized. They are very much experiences of the what (real or not).  What happened, what did I feel, what did I see, rather than how or why did something happened.

I read this in the PS Publishing collection of Kiernan's stories To Charles Fort 

With Love. It was followed by a discussion of the inspiration for the story and it's place within her body of work. I typed it while listening to the album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigates Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, because I could. 

Caitlin R. Kiernan's Online Journal is here,

https://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com

Footnotes

1 HPL, "The Dreams in the Witch House. "

2 HPL, "The Festival"

3 HPL, "Pickman's Model"

4-6 Kiernan, "So Runs the World Away"

2018? More of less Part 2 (there will be a part 3)

  6. The Firebrand Symphony by Brian Hodge

"And slowly, as the ancient skull of Homo sapiens primoris watched on, I began to decipher the music of distant stars." (411)

In part one I covered two short stories by Brian Hodge, and after finishing my post began looking for a story about a giant skull that I wanted to include in part two. At the time I could not remember the author. But yes it was Brian Hodge. 

Our narrator is an artist who mixes sounds for use in movie soundtracks in a studio in the Cascades region of Oregon. His father was a musician, an acid rocker, who overdosed in a rented farmhouse in Vermont when he was 6. His mother a groupie disappeared and he was raised by his aunt and uncle. At one point he had a band whose avowed purpose was to burn down the world with their music. But eventually the band broke up. he married a Swedish music critic and founded his current company Megalith. When the story begins he is working on tracks for a movie called Subterranean. During a visit by his uncle Terrance, a retired professor from Boston he is given a massive skull some 350,000 years old. Terrance classes it as an  erratic enigmatics, an artifact that should not exist. It was uncovered during an archaeological excavation by Miskatonic University, who had enlisted Terrance for the dig. And therein lies the tale. To often mythos tales retread the same ground, so much so, that the creators of The Great Lovecraft Reread on Tor.com start each post with checklist of certain elements. While the mere mention of Miskatonic University seems to indicate Hodge is about to tread the path too often taken, he does not. Many familiar elements are here, Pop culture tropes, Charles Fort like artifacts, MIB like conspiracies, ancient astronauts, the weird astronomical knowledge of the Dogan tribe of East Africa. But Hodge welds them into something, new, fresh and unexpected. Many of these elements  fascinate me, add the archaeological element, I worked in archaeology for close to ten years, and this story was one I was almost genetically programmed to enjoy just like…, But I will leave you here.

7. Black Ships Seen South of Heaven by Caitlin R. Kieran

While Brian Hodge is a newer inclusion in my pantheon of Mythos Gods, the ultimate ruler, the daemon sultan at the heart of it all, remains Caitlin R. Kieran. And in honour of the latest photos from Ultima Thule, I had to include one of my favourite stories by her. The tale of what happens when New Horizons returns and the stars are right.

https://www.wired.com/story/new-horizons-first-photos-ultima-thule/


Nova also has put out a great program on New Horizons,
Pluto and Beyond.

http://www.tvweeklynow.com/news-blogs/news-blogs-RicksPicks/novas-pluto-and-beyond-covers-the-new-horizons-mission-in-real-time.htm

"New Horizons returned, ignoring its programming and using Pluto for a gravitational slingshot back towards the inner Solar System, hurtling across near vacuum and cold and all those millions of miles back to earth. The probe crashed somewhere in the Sahara, or the Caspian Sea, or Scandinavia. 

No one was ever certain, as tracking stations seemed to show it coming down in multiple locations. 

But it returned with secrets, and the scientists could grasp at straws forever and never have one iota what those secrets were. New Horizons returned, and R’lyeh rose, and the one sleeping there awoke. 

And The End began. 

Or the Beginning."

S. T. Joshi. Black Wings of Cthulhu (Volume Four) 

A brilliant tale combining elements of the mythos, with a Chicago now transformed into Hodgson's, the Last Redoubt from The Night Land surrounded by his various fungal horrors and doomed by the machinations of Lovecraft's Black Pharaoh. Keirnan shows us what exactly happens when R’lyeh rises and horrors roam the world.

Cover Credits

Children of Cthulhu, Dave McKean

Black Wings of Cthulhu 4, Jason Van Hollander, Gregory Nemec

, , Alec Nevada-Lee, Caitlin R. Kieran, The Dinosaur Tourist

 Yesterday was a great reading day. I had finally began to read Astounding, Alec Nevada-Lee's book on John W. Campbell and some of the writers most associated with Astounding, Isaac Asimov,  Robert A, Heinlein, and L. Ron. Hubbard.  As I read, the dogs let me know that our postal worker had dropped by and I  got up hoping that "it" had finally come. And it had.

I am a huge Caitlin R. Kieran fan. Her work effortlessly inhabits the intersection of so many genre, horror, fantasy, mystery and science fiction that I am always interested go see where she will take me next. I also have a life long love of palaeontology especially dinosaurs so the minute I saw the Subterranean Press announcement of the collection The Dinosaur Tourist with a stunning cover by Ray Troll,  I had to order it. Then a long wait occurred. Then the announcement came, copies, including mine were shipping. Oh no, a job action by Canada Post. Mail from outside Canada has piled up to the extent that international partners are asked to hold items. The Dinosaur Tourist (trade edition) is sold out. Will my copy appear or be lost to some inter-dimensional gateway to be lovingly perused by the shades of the Whateley brothers, or shelved among the tomes at the Misatonic University Library. No, there it was right in front of me, I hugged the box.

from Subterranean Press

"Almost nothing is only what it seems to be at first glance. Appearances can be deceiving and first impressions often lead us disastrously astray. If we're not careful, assumption and expectation can betray us all the way to madness and death and damnation. In The Dinosaur Tourist, Caitlín R. Kiernan's fifteenth collection of short fiction, nineteen tales of the unexpected and the uncanny explore that treacherous gulf between what we suppose the world to be and what might actually be waiting out beyond the edges of our day-to-day experience. A mirror may be a window into another time. A cat may be our salvation. Your lover may be a fabulous being. And a hitchhiker may turn out to be anyone at all."

https://subterraneanpress.com/dinosaur-tourist

I am including this post on my Jagged Orbit blog because, while Kiernan is associated with horror, she does write very good science fiction. PS Publishing in the UK is distributing the collection A is for Alien, containing many of her science fiction stories as part of a four volume set of her work. As I mentioned in an earlier post I was also really impressed by another Subterranean Press offering, her (2004) novella entitled The Dry Salvages.

"A SF work rather than a typical mythos tale, it combines her love of palaeontology with the rather enigmatic tale of a doomed expedition investigating the remains of an extraterrestrial mining colony on the moon of the gas giant Cecrops. It has a subtle, haunting flavour I often associate with European SF and I recommend it. "

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/search/label/Caitlin%20R.%20Kieran

Cover art Richard Kirk 

https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/a-is-for-alien-trade-paperback-by-caitlin-r-kiernan-2623-p.asp

Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  

Tor, 2017 cover photo Getty Images, Design Christine Foltzer

“The Signalman lights another cigarette. At fifty-five, he remembers when it wasn’t necessary to disable the smoke alarms of hotels rooms. Too often, it occurs to him that he’s lived just long enough to have completely outlived the world that made sense to him, the world where he fit.” (38)

Agents of Dreamland a new novel by Caitlin R. Kiernan was released at the end of February 2017, a few days after receiving my preorder I sat down to read it. A few hours later after completing all 123 pages I got up. No breaks, asides, snacks etc. I may read a short story in one sitting but never a novel not even a short one. So yes, I think it is good, yes I think it is riveting, yes I think your should buy it (no borrowing), and read it. Not convinced, the long version.

It is July 9, 2015, the Signalman, whose nickname comes from the antique silver watch he carries is waiting in Winslow Arizona for a meeting with Immacolata Sexton. The Signalman is an agent for a secretive agency based in Albany, New York, Sexton an agent for a European group referred to as Barbican Estate (think Brutalist architecture). They are meeting to share information on a cult leader named Drew Standish.  He has been on both groups radar for some time but now disturbing things have been found at the Moonlight Ranch, the current quarters of his cult located on the shores of the Salton Sea. Sexton’s group wants access to the site and Albany wants everything they have on Standish. There are a number of reasons for urgency in investigating this case not the least of which is as the Signalman reminds Sexton 

“New Horizons makes its closest approach to Pluto five days from now. So you’II excuse my sense of urgency,” (19)

The story is told from the point of view of the Signalman, Sexton and a cult member called Chloe Stringfellow. Immacolata Sexton is the most interesting of the three, as her memory extends not just into the past, how long is unclear but she is adult at the time of the Vermont Floods of 1927, but into the future as well, so her character witnesses most of the events of the story. Kiernan has used this long lived incredibility competent and very dangerous female agent before, the Eygptian - Ancient of Days, El Judio Errante, Kundry, Ptolema (lots of names if you live a long time I guess) is central to Kieran's 2012 novella “Black Helicopters” but Sexton is even more developed. The Signalman, the hard drinking totally disillusioned investigator, is of course a fairly common character see my post on the district attorney Edward D. Satterlee in Chabon’s "The God of Dark Laughter” or for Kiernan’s previous use of this type of character there is the scrubber Dietrich Paine found in her brilliant 2004 short story “Riding the White Bull”. 

That Agents of Dreamland is Lovecraftian is obvious. I wonder if it could not be considered a type of prequel to her “Black Ships Seen South of Heaven”, 2015 in Black Wings of Cthulhu 4, editor S.T. Josh. Not only is the New Horizons probe central to the events of that story but the Los Angeles Sexton will encounter in the future bears striking similarities to the USA depicted in “Black Ships Seen South of Heaven”. 

However you need not read one to enjoy the other. In “Agents of Dreamland” Keirnan has a number of references that certainly led me to think of Lovecraft’s own work. Among the other items the Signalman provides Sexton with is an antique gold coin, part of Wizard Whateley’s horde from “The Dunwich Horror” perhaps. Early references to Vermont and Eli Davenport conjure up “the Whisperer in the Darkness” even before it becomes more overt. But Keirnan also goes further afield with references to Charles Mason, Area 51, the Enochian language of John Dee, Boaz and Jachin the metal pillars in the Bible, there are Beatles LPs playing and Standish refers to the cultists with names taken from the Heaven’s Gate cult. There are brief references to two of my favourite individuals Alfred Russell Wallace and Ray Harryhausen, but my favourite reference of all is to zombie ants. If you have not read about them previously read the book then look them up, I remember reading about them some years ago and it blew my mind. Keirnan has a science background and published articles in vertebrate paleontology before turning to fiction and I really enjoy the fact that she brings this scientific literacy to her stories. These references are not tossed in at random, they make sense in the context of the story, providing a depth and richness that would be lacking without them. I am sure I missed some, but I have read this novel twice and will read it again. 

After watching the movie The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) as a child I also love any reference to the Salton Sea, sorry I am more like the Signalman than I like to admit.

Keirnan is interviewed in the great documentary “Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg9VCf5einY , 

and she talks of Lovecraft’s use of the motif of “Deep Time”, basically the vast age of the earth as a theme or pivot point for stories like “At the Mountains of Madness”, and one of my favourites “The Shadow Out of Time”. As a paleontologist Kieran would obviously be interested in this concept and she has investigated it in a number of works, indeed my TBR pile contains a copy of Kiernan’s Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time, It was while thinking about Kiernan's use of this motif that I realized that much of SF or cosmic horror is linked to this concept for what is space if not a manifestation of "Deep Time" when even the light reaching us from the nearest stars reflects a period immeasurably distant from our own.

Kiernan has written a number of pastiches, tributes, riffs on, Lovecraft, but what I enjoy is that they do not need to start with a forbidden book or the inheritance of dubious goods or real estate. She realizes that a cosmic threat can be a virus, a signal or even just the focus of the attention of something that was better left undisturbed.