Though I’m tempted to offer many more examples of Phillips’s superb prose, in the spirit of her writing, its understated power – never a long, intricate phrase when a few words will do – I’ll limit myself to one other descriptive passage, from ‘‘Country Mothers’ Sons’’:
The clouds blew away before midnight last night, and the moon shone so bright the birds mistook it for day. Down below, far below the height of rooftops on the hill, the harbor looked like a circle of sky, black water and moon sequins embraced by a lunar crescent of headlands. The water trembled under the wind that cleansed the air of its night smokes, and the birds confused by the brilliance of the moon lifted their wings, half aloft as the sea air flowed over and around them.
I’ll also beg off on a detailed discussion of these stories’ individual themes, or their differing ways of tackling the relationship between our world and imaginary ones. But one previously unpublished work, ‘‘Queen of the Butterflies’’, moves between the tense thoughts of a woman whose boyfriend is being held captive in the foreign land they’d thought to make their own, and meditations on the act of writing – or trying to. Phillips’s later notes admit, ‘‘This must be the single most intimate story I’ve ever written. At the heart of it lies a deep conflict I carry within me, between my very pragmatic and skeptical self… and the self who lives in and by my imagination.’’
When you want the real low-down, go to the source! So I’ll just end by giving this collection my highest possible recommendation as one of the best books from 2012.
–Faren Miller
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ
As If, Michael Saler (Oxford University Press 978-0-19-534317-5, $27.95, 304pp, tp) January 2012. [Order from Oxford University Press;
The Book of Cthulhu II, Ross Lockhart, ed. (Night Shade Books 978-1597804356, $15.99, 440pp, tp) September 2012. [Order from Night Shade Books, 1661 Tennessee St. #3H, San Francisco CA 94107;
Black Wings II, S.T. Joshi, ed. (PS Publishing 978-1848631199, $40.00, 321pp, tp) June 2012. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire HU18 1PG, England;
Vlad, Carlos Fuentes, translated by Alejandro Branger & Ethan Shaskan Bumas (Dalkey Archive 978-1564787798, $17.95, 112pp, hc) July 2012. [Order from Dalkey Archive Press, University of Illinois, 1805 S. Wright Street, MC-011, Champaign IL 61820;
Above Ker-Is and Other Stories, Evangeline Walton (Nodens Books 9780615598871, $15.00, 134pp, tp) February 2012. [Order from Nodens Books;
We think of ‘‘virtual reality’’ as a concept that came into vogue with modern computer technology, and whose imaginative potential was first explored in cyberpunk opuses such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In his fascinating scholarly study As If, however, Michael Saler dates what he refers to as ‘‘the literary prehistory of virtual reality’’ back a century earlier, when Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and other writers of what became known as the New Romance constructed worlds in their fiction so meticulously detailed and supported by maps, histories, footnotes, appendices, and other paratexts, that they invited readers to engage with them as though they were real.
As Saler presents it, the New Romance emerged as a response to a modern world that had become disenchanted through its obeisance to reason, logic, and science. Through their fictions, its writers hoped ‘‘to re-enchant modernity without rejecting its central tenets,’’ producing works of fantasy and adventure that embraced the rational and objective as part of their entertainment. Some writers were more successful at this than others. Saler singles out Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as singular works that collapsed the space separating ‘‘just so’’ from ‘‘as if.’’ These works of fiction, more than many others, invite engagement of what Saler refers to as the ‘‘ironic imagination, a double-minded consciousness that… permits an emotional immersion in, and rational reflection on, imaginary worlds, yielding a form of modern enchantment that delights without deluding.’’ Rather than coax the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, the worlds of these stories invite ‘‘the willing activation of pretense.’’
Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes were instantly and enormously popular, in a way that much of his other fiction was not. It is easy to see why. Holmes is a paragon of the deductive logic and scientific observation that we associate with disenchanted modernity. In his adventures, however, Holmes’s application of these skills has the opposite effect. They ‘‘re-enchant the world by imbuing everything with hidden import.’’ Holmes skill at reading a world of meaning into clues easily overlooked demonstrated ‘‘that profane reality could be no less mysterious or alluring than the supernatural realm; the material world was laden with occult meanings that could be revealed to those with an observant eye and logical outlook.’’ Small wonder that fans of the Sherlock Holmes adventures indulge in ‘‘playing the game’’ themselves: filling in the lacunae of the Holmes canon, speculating on the backstories of characters, and tying Holmes to real historical figures who were his contemporaries in Victorian London.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos was a virtual world almost from the start. Not only did Lovecraft conjure a mythology of extradimensional monsters, occult tomes, and accursed towns to connect the ‘‘dots’’ of his stories – he invited his pulp fiction colleagues to flesh out the Mythos with their own contributions. Saler sees what he refers to as the ‘‘public sphere of the imagination’’ that helped to shape Lovecraft’s Mythos – the letters and ideas that he exchanged with fellow writers, friends, and fans about the import of his stories – as having been crucial to help Lovecraft mature as a thinker and writer, and to temper and revise some of his biases and prejudices (a double irony, of sorts, as Lovecraft distilled those same biases and prejudices into the monsters and mongrel races that are part of the Mythos). The public sphere of the imagination is also crucial to Saler’s analysis of Tolkien’s creation of the myths and lore of Middle-earth. By seeing his tale as ‘‘a traditional epic of mighty heroes vying with supernatural foes, but also one of everyday heroes confronting existential choices,’’ readers who immerse themselves in its imaginative world can come away with different insights for interpreting the real world.
As If is a rich, densely packed cultural study that distills a remarkable amount of literary criticism and aesthetic, psychological, and sociological theory into its arguments. It is a book tailor-made for readers of Locus. The public sphere of imagination that it presents as crucial to the appreciation of the imaginary worlds that it explores encompasses fandom, and we are all fans. Regardless of whether the fandom you indulge in calls for a deeper or a shallower immersion in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction, you will find much in its pages to enjoy.
•
As might be gleaned from its title, The Book of Cthulhu II is a ‘‘sequel,’’ of sorts, to The Book of Cthulhu, Ross E. Lockhart’s 2011 anthology of contemporary Cthulhu Mythos fiction. All 24 of its selections are also ‘‘sequels,’’ of sorts, to the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, and the shared world of eldritch entities, forbidden books, and cosmic terrors that he and his contemporaries conjured from the mythology underlying much of his fiction.
Not so long ago, it seems, most of the good Cthulhu Mythos stories came from only a handful of sources that were very familiar to anyone who cared about this subgenre of horror. Not so today. As he did for his previous anthology, Lockhart has cast his net far and wide to haul in outstanding stories from publications both well-known and obscure, none sampled more than once. He has also commissioned four new stories, several so good that they are likely to be selected for reprint anthologies in the future.
The book’s two oldest stories, Karl Edward Wagner’s ‘‘S
ticks’’ and Fritz Leiber’s ‘‘The Terror from the Depths’’, date from 1974 and 1976, respectively – the period that might called the dawn of the modern mythos, which August Derleth had formally inaugurated only five years before when he concluded his largely historical survey anthology, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, with four new tales by Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Colin Wilson, and James Wade. Wagner’s and Leiber’s stories both work with a conceit that has gotten considerable usage in contemporary mythos fiction: the understanding that Lovecraft was not writing fiction so much as leaking the truth. (In Leiber’s tale, a character reveals that authorities at Miskatonic University ‘‘had never tried to suppress the stories or take legal action, for fear of even less desirable publicity – and because the project members thought the stories might be good preparation for the world if some of their more frightening hypotheses were verified.’’) In Wagner’s story, the Lovecraft figure is a writer named H. Kenneth Allard, whose fiction resonates with the weird experiences of Colin Leverett, an artist modeled on Lovecraft illustrator Lee Brown Coye. Leiber’s story is both an extension of Lovecraft’s ‘‘The Whisperer in Darkness’’, and a more ambitious attempt to do what Leiber had done in his affectionate homage ‘‘To Arkham and the Stars’’ (1966) – namely, write a story that references virtually every principal character, event, set piece, and plot point in all of Lovecraft’s own mythos fiction. Leiber’s tale stands out in the book as the only one written deliberately in Lovecraft’s pulpy storytelling style; indeed, it is one of the last such stories written that doesn’t set the reader’s teeth on edge.
Several of the stories riff on specific Lovecraft tales, the most popular being ‘‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’’, Lovecraft’s account of a decrepit New England backwater whose residents are hybrids of human beings and a froglike aquatic race. In Neil Gaiman’s ‘‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar’’, a tourist stumbles unexpectedly upon an Innsmouth presence in England. Kim Newman’s ‘‘The Big Fish’’, a splice of the Lovecraftian horror story and Chandleresque hardboiled detective tale, implicates members of the Hollywood demi-monde in Innsmouth cult activities unfolding off the coast of southern California. Whereas Gaiman’s and Newman’s stories are both written tongue-in-cheek, A. Scott Glancy’s ‘‘‘Once More, from the Top…’’’ is an earnest attempt to chronicle the aftermath suggested in Lovecraft’s tale, where the US military swept through and mopped up Innsmouth. There are many bad Mythos tales in which heroic humans grapple mano-a-mano unconvincingly with otherworldly Lovecraftian horrors, but Glancy’s tale is that rare example of a story in which the paramilitary pyrotechnics highlight the awesome enormity of the horrors in play.
A few other Lovecraft tales get nods. Christopher Reynaga’s ‘‘I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee’’ so perfectly conflates Lovecraft’s ‘‘The Call of Cthulhu’’ with Moby-Dick (albeit with a bit of Coleridge and Yeats thrown in for good measure) that it comes as a surprise that no writer had thought to do this before. Stanley Sargent’s ‘‘The Black Brat of Dunwich’’ is a clever revisionist retelling of the events in Lovecraft’s ‘‘The Dunwich Horror’’ in which the good guys and bad guys swap places. Jonathan Wood’s ‘‘The Nyarlathotep Event’’ spins a Lovecraft fragment into an action-packed narrative full of mordant humor and surprisingly incisive Lovecraftian insights (‘‘Some days I really get the vastness of the universe. I’m tiny. It’s big. I don’t matter. I get it.’’).
As interesting, if not more so, are those stories that evoke Lovecraftian horrors without specifically referencing any Lovecraft trademarks. Cody Goodfellow’s short shocker ‘‘Rapture of the Deep’’ effectively suggests a titanic horror lurking in the Marianas Trench, and Michael Chabon’s ‘‘The God of Dark Laughter’’, a power struggle between ancient occult forces waged behind the façade of otherwise banal everyday reality. In ‘‘Hand of Glory’’, Laird Barron alludes (perhaps too obliquely) to some disturbing discoveries with cosmic implications that photographer Eadweard Muybridge uncovered through his films.
Aside from bringing together a selection of commendable explorations of the Cthulhu Mythos, this anthology shows just how pervasive the tale of Lovecraftian horror has become. Sources where these stories were first published range from genre magazines and semiprozines to books, webzines, and mainstream periodicals (among them The New Yorker and Wired). Bad Lovecraft pastiches will continue to be written, but The Book of Cthulhu II reassures that very good mythos tales can be found just about everywhere.
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Long a critic of the Cthulhu Mythos as it was promulgated by August Derleth, Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has, in recent years, begun putting together anthologies of new and reprint fiction with the intention of broadening the definition of the tale of Lovecraftian horror. Black Wings II, a compilation of eighteen previously unpublished stories by diverse hands, is a follow-up to Joshi’s World Fantasy Award nominated 2010 anthology, Black Wings, and it does as good a job as its predecessor of expanding the reader’s understanding of what the tale of Lovecraftian horror can accommodate.
There is a distinction to be made between the Cthulhu Mythos tale and the Lovecraftian horror story, but for much of the twentieth century the two were considered synonymous. Lovecraftian horror was measured, and written, in terms of the most superficial aspects of the Mythos: monsters with unpronounceable names, books of occult lore, and rural towns where unspeakable activities went unnoticed by the world at large. As Joshi writes in his Introduction, though, ‘‘The days when August Derleth or Brian Lumley could invent a new god or ‘forbidden book’ and therefore declare themselves working in the ‘Lovecraftian tradition’ are long over.’’ Lovecraftian fiction, as Joshi defines it, addresses the same themes and questions that Lovecraft grappled with in his writing: ‘‘What is our place in the cosmos? Does a god or gods exist? What is the ultimate fate of the human species?’’ The so-called ‘‘cosmic sensibility’’ conveyed by Lovecraft’s fiction is one ‘‘that keenly etches humankind’s transience and fragility in a boundless universe that lacks guiding purpose or direction.’’
Some of the stories Joshi has selected are more explicit in their references to Lovecraft than others. Two authors resurrect Lovecraft himself. John Shirley, in ‘‘When Death Wakes Me to Myself’’, imagines Lovecraft’s discorporate spirit as an inextinguishable presence that occasionally finds a new vessel to inhabit. In Rick Dakan’s ‘‘Correlated Discontents’’, Lovecraft is reconstituted as a ‘‘revenant,’’ or avatar fashioned from the thinking and philosophies embedded in his digitized fiction and letters. Jason Eckhart’s ‘‘And the Sea Gave Up the Dead’’ is presented as a diary kept by a sailor on Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Sea Islands, and an encounter that makes the tale a clear prequel to ‘‘The Call of the Cthulhu.’’ Aspects of ‘‘The Call of Cthulhu’’ are also evoked in Brian Evenson’s ‘‘The Wilcox Remainder’’, which suggests that a world that can support elements from that Lovecraft tale must needs be a little off-kilter and disorienting. Caitlín Kiernan appropriates some of the more decadent elements of Lovecraft’s ‘‘The Hound’’ for ‘‘Houndwife’’, a virtual prose poem whose imagery alternates between the beautiful and the morbid, while Don Webb, in ‘‘Casting Call’’, and Chet Williamson, in ‘‘Appointed’’, imaginatively extrapolate events behind and beyond the scenes of cinematic adaptations of Lovecraft’s fiction.
More oblique approaches to Lovecraftian horrors include Jonathan Thomas’s ‘‘The King of Cat Swamp’’, Richard Gavin’s ‘‘The Abject’’, and Donald Tyson’s ‘‘The Skinless Face’’, all concerned with occult survivals from the past that are all but incomprehensible to contemporary human beings. Tom Fletcher, in ‘‘View’’, presents the kind of distortion of architecture and interior spaces that features prominently in Lovecraft’s work, and Darrell Schweitzer’s excellent ‘‘The Clockwork King, the Queen of Glass, and the Man with the Hundred Knives’’, the sense of otherworldly horrors threatening to breach the thin veil of our r
eality. Alien life forms flourish in totally inhuman ways in John Langan’s ‘‘Bloom’’, and in Melanie Tem’s ‘‘Dahlias’’ and Steve Rasnic Tem’s ‘‘Waiting at the Crossroads Hotel’’ characters confronting personal alienation see a vastly different world than most of us do.
Read outside of the context of this anthology, some of the stories seem to stretch the theme of Lovecraftian horror. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In Joshi’s words, ‘‘What is now needed is a more searching, penetrating infusion of Lovecraftian elements that can work seamlessly with the author’s own style and outlook.’’ To the extent that the writers in Black Wings II contribute stories that are more consistent with their own bodies of work than they are evocative of Lovecraft, they help to show that the themes of Lovecraft’s fiction are universal and often transcend the concerns of horror fiction.
•
If you remember Jonathan Harker’s ordeal at Castle Dracula in the first few chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, then you know that the Count is not kindly disposed towards lawyers. Dracula is up to the same old tricks in Vlad, a novella by Carlos Fuentes originally published in Spanish in 2010 and published in an English translation only two months after Fuentes’s death in May 2012.
Vlad is narrated by Yves Navarro, a rising young lawyer in a firm in Mexico City. At the behest of his employer, Navarro scouts out a house for a client newly displaced by war and political strife from his ancestral home on the Hungarian-Romanian border. That client is Count Vladimir Radu, an elderly noble whose name is sure to set off alarms for any reader of vampire fiction.
Vlad is an eccentric old coot. Reported to be about ninety years of age, he travels with a ten-year-old ward, Minea, and conducts his business by night. He has asked that the windows of his house be bricked up so that no natural light is admitted, and that a tunnel be built from this basement to the ravine out back so that he can come and go without being observed. To Navarro’s thinking, the Count looks ridiculous. He dresses entirely in black, wears sunglasses indoors, and sports a mahogany-colored toupee that hangs askew on his head. His head is overly large for his body, and his emaciated form suggests the enfeeblement of age. You couldn’t ask for a more appropriate image of nobility in messy decline.
Locus, January 2013 Page 9
