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

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. 

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