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

"The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon

 "One of the most tedious human beings I have ever known was my own mother, who, early in my childhood, fell under the spell of Madame Blavatsky and her followers and proceeded to weary my youth and deplete my patrimony with her devotion to that indigestible caseation of balderdash and lies."

from "The God of Dark Laughter" New Yorker April 9, 2001 by Michael Chabon

The rest of the quotations will be from the same source unless otherwise noted.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/the-god-of-dark-laughter

I have to say at the outset that I loved this story by Chabon, the short review is please read it. The story is narrated by Edward D. Satterlee the district attorney of Yuggoghey County and is set in the same area of Pennsylvania as the town of Plunkettsburg of "In The Black Mill" fame. As district attorney Satterlee seems to direct the investigation of any complex criminal cases handled by the county detectives. This appears to be a very reasonable arrangement as we learn almost right away.

"The dead man, as I have already mentioned, was attired in a curious suit—the trousers and jacket of threadbare purple velour, the waistcoat bright orange, the whole thing patched with outsized squares of fabric cut from a variety of loudly clashing plaids. It was on account of the patches, along with the victim's cracked and split-soled shoes and a certain undeniable shabbiness in the stuff of the suit, that the primary detective—a man not apt to see deeper than the outermost wrapper of the world (we do not attract, I must confess, the finest police talent in this doleful little corner of western Pennsylvania)—had already figured the victim for a vagrant, albeit one with extraordinarily big feet.

“Those cannot possibly be his real shoes, Ganz, you idiot,” I gently suggested."

Yes the victim is a clown. A dead clown, shot and with the skin of his head removed "Like the cupped husk of a peeled orange"

Wonderful stuff, this immediately reminded me of the many clowns that haunt the works of Thomas Ligotti but here the similarity ends. Ligotti's narrators are most commonly unnamed individuals with no back story and little future. Satterlee is more akin to the hardboiled detectives of pulp fiction, who have seen it all and not liked any of it. Now an alcoholic Satterlee has ceased to bother to hide the bottle of whiskey on his desk behind the photo of his wife and son, he has plenty of backstory all of it tragic. These events and his aversion to the mystical leanings of his mother have left him cynical with a skeptic's view of the universe.

Chabon has created a perfect mythos tale in my opinion. We have dark gods with their requisite cultists, (whose appearance and behaviour are far more, can one say lovingly realized), that the rather perfunctory treatment they normally receive even by Lovecraft himself. We have a lamentably short cameo by a baboon, for a while it seemed we also had a crow but now I think not, haunting dreams, inbreeding, a salt smell, and mysterious books,

"and a couple of odd texts, elderly and tattered: one in German called “Über das Finstere Lachen,” by a man named Friedrich von Junzt, which appeared to be religious or philosophical in nature, and one a small volume bound in black leather and printed in no alphabet known to me, the letters sinuous and furred with wild diacritical marks.

“Pretty heavy reading for a clown,” Ganz said.

“It's not all rubber chickens and hosing each other down with seltzer bottles, Jack.”

“Oh, no?”

“No, sir. Clowns have unsuspected depths.”".

And in this case they will prove to be deep indeed.

The story does not adhere to the cosmicism, of Lovecraft as the possibly of a divine presence is not ruled out but the insignificance of humanity is certainly captured. As well Chabon's language and description beautifully sets the tone of Satterlee lonely rationalist's battle against a universe that appears to be anything but,

"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." 

We are even offered hints other adventures that Satterlee and Ganz have been involved in, reference is made to the Primm case which reminded me of Robert Bloch's Ludwig Prinn, the author of De Vermis Mysteriis, or Mysteries of the Worm, but maybe it's just me.

Chabon offers an interesting take on the inspiration, genesis and marketing of his two Lovecraft pastiches and I felt it was worthwhile to quote him at some length.

Michael Chabon Attacks Prejudice Against Science Fiction

from Wired 03.07.12

https://www.wired.com/2012/03/michael-chabon-geeks-guide-galaxy/all/

Wired: "You wrote this great Lovecraftian horror story called "The God of Dark Laughter" How did that story come about, and were you surprised to see it appear in The New Yorker?"

Chabon: Well, that was actually sort of my second foray. I created this fictional character in the novel Wonder Boys of August Van Zorn, who we’re told is a writer of Lovecraftian horror fiction who had an early influence on the main character of that book, and at some point I just got the idea to try to write an August Van Zorn story.

You know, the pseudonym has always existed as a way to protect the “serious literary writer” from the taint of genre fiction, and that’s how August Van Zorn used it. In the book his real name is Albert Vetch, and he writes under the name of August Van Zorn because he’s a professor of literature, and he has to use a pseudonym for that kind of sordid fare that he’s cranking out, and that pseudonym was there for me as a kind of fig leaf too, to just imagine writing a straight piece of horror fiction that wasn’t “meta” or playing with the tropes of horror fiction in a literary way. I just wanted to write a straight-out story about awful goings-on in this small western Pennsylvania town that turned out to be rooted in some ancient cult of the Elder Ones, just straight ahead Lovecraftian Mythos kind of stuff, and I guess I felt when I did that that I had to protect myself under that pseudonym of August Van Zorn that I had created — it was a double fiction at that point.

And I wrote a story that was called “In the Black Mill,” and when I finished it I thought it came out well. I believe my agent sent it to The New Yorker, who wouldn’t even — I mean, it spent a very brief period of time on the editorial desk there before re-emerging with its dignity somewhat in tatters, and then she sent it to Playboy, to a great fiction editor who used to be at Playboy named Alice Turner, who was a great champion of all kinds of genre writing in the literary context, and she took it and wanted to publish it, but she insisted that I publish it under my own name. And god bless her, because that was right.

I wrote that story, and if I want to write a piece of Lovecraftian horror fiction, I not only have the freedom to do so, but I also ought to be proud of it, and put my name on it, and let it just go out there along with everything else that I’ve written. So that was published in Playboy, and it got a little bit of attention from the horror fiction crowd, and it got included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the Datlow anthology, and that encouraged me.

And so at some point a little idea popped into my head about clowns, and what if clowns really looked that way, and it wasn’t make-up at all. And there’s something really horrifying to me in that thought. I mean, “coulrophobia” has a name because a lot of people think clowns are terrifying and creepy, it’s not just John Wayne Gacy’s fault. There’s something about a clown in the abstract, with the white skin and the red mouth and all that. It’s bizarre anybody could have ever thought it was anything but horrifying, in my opinion.

But in any case, just trying to get at that, and wonder about clowns, and why they look the way they do, and in trying to answer that question, the answer occurred to me in the form of a horror story, and this time I just wrote it without any monkey business about it being by August Van Zorn or any of that, but I set it in the same fictional Van Zornian universe of Plunkettsburg, which is the western Pennsylvania town that he set all his fiction in, as we’re told in Wonder Boys. That was more for my own pleasure, it had nothing to do with wanting to wear a fig leaf of respectability anymore. That time, and maybe it’s proof that something had changed, because my agent sent that one first to The New Yorker, and they took it, and maybe part of the reason for that is because it was a little more thinkable, a little less unacceptable, for them to publish a piece of straight genre fiction, and the fact that they’ve published Stephen King since then suggests that there has been a change."

Chabon is a master of the turn of phase, and I think you can see his experience in screen writing in the dialogue. Possibly (probably) my favourite mythos tale (and obviously I have read many), I have reread it a number of times in the last few weeks and like it more each time.

“In the Black Mill” by Michael Chabon

 "In The Black Mill" by Michael Chabon in Lovecraft Unbound ed. Ellen Datlow 

As I mentioned on my SF site a couple of weeks ago my wife and I attended a talk at the university by author Michael Chabon. My wife is a fan of Chabon's writing and has read a number of his novels. I have to admit that despite his reputation, among many other awards he has won a Hugo, a Nebula and something called Pulitzer Prize, I had not read anything by him. I enjoyed the talk and I found it interesting that he liked to work with the tropes of genre was well as mainstream literature. Having since read three of his short stories, the steam punk flavoured "The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" and two Lovecraft inspired tales "The God of Dark Laughter" and “In the Black Mill,” I am impressed with his writing and really enjoyed both HPL stories especially “The God of Dark Laughter” 

This the first of two posts will deal with “In the Black Mill”.

the following quotes are taken from 

Michael Chabon Attacks Prejudice Against Science Fiction 

from Wired 03.07.12

https://www.wired.com/2012/03/michael-chabon-geeks-guide-galaxy/all/

In this interview Chabon discusses the genesis of both stories. “I created this fictional character in the novel Wonder Boys of August Van Zorn, who we’re told is a writer of Lovecraftian horror fiction who had an early influence on the main character of that book, and at some point I just got the idea to try to write an August Van Zorn story.

You know, the pseudonym has always existed as a way to protect the “serious literary writer” from the taint of genre fiction, and that’s how August Van Zorn used it. In the book his real name is Albert Vetch, and he writes under the name of August Van Zorn because he’s a professor of literature, and he has to use a pseudonym for that kind of sordid fare that he’s cranking out, and that pseudonym was there for me as a kind of fig leaf too, to just imagine writing a straight piece of horror fiction that wasn’t “meta” or playing with the tropes of horror fiction in a literary way. I just wanted to write a straight-out story about awful goings-on in this small western Pennsylvania town that turned out to be rooted in some ancient cult of the Elder Ones, just straight ahead Lovecraftian Mythos kind of stuff, and I guess I felt when I did that that I had to protect myself under that pseudonym of August Van Zorn that I had created — it was a double fiction at that point.

And I wrote a story that was called “In the Black Mill,” and when I finished it I thought it came out well. I believe my agent sent it to The New Yorker, who wouldn’t even — I mean, it spent a very brief period of time on the editorial desk there before re-emerging with its dignity somewhat in tatters, and then she sent it to Playboy, to a great fiction editor who used to be at Playboy named Alice Turner, who was a great champion of all kinds of genre writing in the literary context, and she took it and wanted to publish it, but she insisted that I publish it under my own name. And god bless her, because that was right.”

The narrator of “In the Black Mill” is an archaeology graduate student who in 1948 has come to the mill town of Plukettsburg, Pennsylvania to follow up on work done by his department chairman on Native America mound builder sites near the town. Chabon immediately tells we are in a Lovecraftian world. The mounds overlook the Miskahannok River that runs through the Yuggogheny Hills. The chancellor and chairwoman of Plunkettsburg College who is hosting our narrator is a “gaunt old girl”, does that mean witch or crone perhaps, named Carlotta Brown-Jenkin, the deceased founder of the college was Philippa Howard Murrough so we are in good if not subtle hands here. 

Two things strike the narrator right away, one is the mill itself “It stood off to the east of town, in a zone of weeds and rust-colored earth, a vast, black box, bristling with spiky chimneys, extending over some five acres or more, dwarfing everything around it. This was, I knew at once, the famous Plunkettsburg Mill. Everything was coming on, and in the half-light its windows winked and flickered with inner fire, and its towering stacks vomited smoke into the autumn twilight. I shuddered, then cried out. So intent had I been on the ghastly black apparition of the mill that I had nearly run my car off the road”(240) here is one of  “the dark Satanic Mills” of William Blake made flesh. 

The other thing he quickly notices is the number of missing limbs on the town’s male residents. ““The mill has taken a piece of half the men in Plunkettsburg,” Brown-Jenkin said, sounding almost proud.”Yes, it’s terribly dangerous work,” …. “important work.”(242). 

The mounds in question were built by the Miskahannock Indians who while they apparently left no religious artifacts, did leave evidence of human sacrifice. While the site has already been heavily excavated the narrator hopes to find artifacts that will support his contention that  the Miskahannock did worship some deity or deities and the previous contention that “The deaths had been purposeless: their justification, the cosmic purposeless of life itself.” (250) was wrong. While this archaeological work should be ample for one man the narrator has become obsessed with the mill itself. While both freight trains and trucks visit the mill everyday and most of men not just from Plunkettsburg but also from the neighbouring towns report to the gates for their regular shifts he has been unable to find out what the mill actually produces. 

What did I think? Chabon’s initial introduction of so many mythos related names seemed to indicate that this might become more spoof than tale but I was very pleasantly surprised. While I felt it slightly overlong and that some of the revelations could have threatened to be a bit ho hum, Chabon in the last few sentences weaves together all the elements to create a true sense of horror, certainly a greater one that many of the pastiches I have read by less capable writers. 

There are a number of reviews of the  “The Black Mill”

on the net. I particularly like this one at Ensuring Chapters.

https://ensuingchapters.com/2012/10/21/unsettling-chapters-in-the-black-mill/

The reviewer mentions his connection with a rusting steel town outside Pittsburgh as one reason it might resonate so much with him. I was born in Windsor, worked in factories during high school and university vacations, and worked in archaeology for some nine years so I can understand the allure of this tale as well. It also, for no really good reason I can name except possibly the factory setting, since nothing else is similar, conjured up one of my favourite Thomas Ligotti stories "The Red Tower" . Be that as it may “In the Black Mill” is one of the better additions to the HPL canon I have read in some time. My next post will look at Chabon’s “The God of Dark Laughter” which I think is even better.