The Lighthouse (2019)

The Lighthouse (2019): Written by Max and Robert Eggers; directed by Robert Eggers: Is The Lighthouse Lovecraftian tentacle horror or a psychological study of men and madness? It's both! You know, like H.P. Lovecraft's sea-themed tale "Dagon"!!!

From the writer-director of The Witch, which also occupied both the supernatural and psychological portions of the supernatural spectrum comes this superior horror film starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson and really no one else as lighthouse keepers with a few too many secrets for a one-month tour on an island off the New England coast.

Pattinson is very, very good as an the 'kid' learning the ropes of lighthouse-keeping from suspiciously salty sea-dog, peg-legged Willem Dafoe. Reality seems to fall apart for both men in different ways as the stay lengthens and the weather worsens. 

Why won't Dafoe let Pattinson into the light-room, much less teach him how to run the light? What is up with the fresh-water supply? Why is that seagull so angry at Pattinson? What's up with the mermaid figurine in the bunk room? And will these guys EVER STOP MASTURBATING? Or is Dafoe, ulp, masturbating?

Eggers juxtaposes the wide open skies and seas of the island with the claustrophobia of the living quarters -- and of the outside closing in on Pattinson when the rain comes down. There are points at which Eggers seems to have learned some valuable lessons from David Lynch, perhaps never moreso than when he lightens the tone with the increasingly loopy arguments of Pattinson and Dafoe, during one of which Dafoe is almost reduced to tears by the possibility that Pattinson doesn't enjoy his cooking. 

Eggers is already a major directorial talent and a welcome addition to the ranks of serious, seriously creepy horror writer-directors. Highly recommended.

Dagon (1968) by Fred Chappell

Dagon (1968) by Fred Chappell: Chappell has long been a respected Southern writer with academic ties. But he's also been a periodic contributor to the vast shared universe inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Dagon is his one novel-length foray into Lovecraftiana. And boy, it is not what one expects, not hardly!

Dagon begins by looking like one of those Lovecraft homages (think Stephen King's "Jerusalem's Lot") in which a man returns to his ancestral home to discover that he has some family tie to horrifying secrets. The HPL Ur-text for this is "The Rats In the Walls." Our preacher-protagonist returns to the family farm in the American South to work on a theology text. His luminous, often sarcastic wife accompanies him.

Almost immediately, our protagonist begins to be haunted by strange dreams and visions and compulsions, all tied to the tenant family also living on the rural property. They're vaguely fishy looking. Literally. 

Someone familiar with HPL's universe will almost immediately think, "Oh oh. They've got the Innsmouth Look!" Yes. Yes they do. And this will indeed prefigure what comes, though not in any 'normal' way when it comes to stories that nod to HPL's Deep Ones.

About a third of the way through this short novel, things make a dramatic and unexpected shift into something startling and horrible. I did not see it coming. Probably, neither will you. What follows is something that still seems radical for a Cthulhu Mythos text, if a Cthulhu Mythos text this is. Certainly the eponymous Lovecraftian water god, borrowed from the Babylonians by HPL, is involved, as are mentions of Lovecraftian texts and deities. And an early HPL tale bears the same title.

What occupies Chappell in the last two-thirds of Dagon is an exploration of the aberrant psychology of someone trapped by an ancestral association with non-traditional Evil, gradually stripped of all free will and agency, gradually broken down into a sacrificial victim. But what kind of sacrifice? Telling more would be telling too much. It may not even be Objective Evil -- it may just be Subjective Evil and Objective Other.

Dagon is not for everyone. It is excruciating, depressing, and horrifying. It takes some of its inspiration from the mental transmogrifications we see in the narrator at the end of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and then goes far beyond that, beyond even the dismal mental destruction of the narrator of the aforementioned "The Rats In the Walls." 

Throughout this dark descent, we're guided by third-person narration, not the first-person narration of the above two stories. Chappell maintains a bit of narrative distance so as to allow for a more clinical observation of a mind in the midst of destruction and debasement. And when the ending comes -- well, it too is unexpected and very much both a nod to HPL and a sort of perfection of the ruthless cosmicism of some of HPL's works.

This is a brilliant, disturbing, exhausting novel. Rewarding to the extreme, but I couldn't blame anyone for throwing it into the fireplace without finishing it. This is about as dark as it gets. Highly recommended.

Shadows Over Innsmouth (1995/2012) edited by Stephen Jones

Shadows over Innsmouth: edited by Stephen Jones (1995/Rev. ed. 2012), containing the following stories: A Quarter to Three   (1988)  by Kim Newman;  Beyond the Reef   (1994)  by Basil Copper;  Dagon's Bell  (1988)  by Brian Lumley; Daoine Domhain (1992)  by Peter Tremayne; Deepnet  (1994)  by David Langford; Down to the Boots  (1989)  by D. F. Lewis; Innsmouth Gold  (1994) by David Sutton;  Only the End of the World Again (1994) by Neil Gaiman; Return to Innsmouth (1992) by Guy N. Smith; The Big Fish (1994) by Kim Newman [as by Jack Yeovil ]; The Church in High Street (1962) by Ramsey Campbell; The Crossing (1994) by Adrian Cole; The Homecoming (1994) by Nicholas Royle; The Innsmouth Heritage (1992) by Brian Stableford; The Shadow Over Innsmouth  (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft; The Tomb of Priscus (1994) by Brian Mooney; and To See the Sea (1994) by Michael Marshall Smith.

Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft's fictional Massachusetts port town, seems to have more of a claim on the imagination of writers and readers than most of Lovecraft's concepts. While mentioned in passing in an earlier story, Innsmouth didn't really come into its own until the publication of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" in a small-press chapbook in 1936. And as that publication sold very few copies, it wasn't really until the magazine publication of the story in the early 1940's that any significant readership got to visit this curious and unwelcoming New England seaside community.

This is the first in what will soon be a trilogy of Innsmouth anthologies edited by the prolific anthologist Stephen Jones (the third arrives in January 2015). Here, the writers are all British with the exception of H.P. Lovecraft and his original story. Some of the stories occur in the British Isles, some return to Innsmouth, and some are darned peculiar.

Once upon a time, Innsmouth was just another New England fishing village. But then, Captain Obed Marsh brought back something from the South Seas. Perhaps plenty of somethings. And gradually, as the years passed and new generations were born, more and more citizens developed The Innsmouth Look. To be succinct, as people aged, they looked more and more disquietingly like giant, bipedal frogs. 

Marsh and his businesses flourished. A new church set up shop in Innsmouth, dedicated to the Esoteric Order of Dagon. And out on the Devil's Reef in Innsmouth harbour, strange beings gibbered and frolicked in the waves. Normal people began to flee Innsmouth or to disappear mysteriously, never to be seen again. This is the point in the 1920's that Lovecraft's novella begins, its narrator a man with Innsmouth heritage travelling to the town for the first time and discovering horrors.

I don't think there's a real stinker among this array of first appearances and the occasional reprint. Neil Gaiman's entry is a bit too arch to be effective as horror and not really funny enough to be effective as humour. But it's not awful. Basil Copper's period piece, set in HPL's equally fictional Massachusetts city of Arkham in the 1930's, invests the bipedal amphibians (aka the Deep Ones) with just a few too many new and plot-convenient powers, but it's still a fun read.

The Ramsey Campbell piece, from his impressively early-career collection of Lovecraft pastiches, has only a peripheral connection to Innsmouth. Going further (and farther) abroad, Nicholas Royle's "The Homecoming" uses Lovecraftian terminology and imagery in the disturbing and disquieting service of a story about just-post-Ceausescu Romania. 

Recurring supernatural investigators battle ancient menaces in several of the pieces, including those by Gaiman, Newman, and Mooney. Brian Lumley contributes a nearly pitch-perfect modern-day pastiche of Lovecraft by way of August Derleth. Michael Marshall Smith's "To See the Sea," while not a stylistic homage to HPL, is nonetheless a fairly straightforward frightener that demonstrates once again that in horror fiction, you can go home again, but you really shouldn't.

Originally, this was one of the Lovecraftian anthologies that helped kick off the revival of publications that tipped their rugose caps to the Revelator from Providence. The Titan books revised edition is a nice piece of work, as have been all their Lovercraft entries over the past couple of years. And the range of fiction here demonstrates much of the range possible when dealing with Lovercraft's legacy: pastiches are but a small portion of the fictional spectrum available to those gazing upon Innsmouth. Highly recommended.

H.P. Lovecraft's "One Froggy Evening"

Weird Shadows over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones (2005; this revised edition 2013), containing the following stories: Another Fish Story by Kim Newman; Brackish Waters by Richard A. Lupoff; Discarded Draft of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft; Eggs by Steve Rasnic Tem; Fair Exchange by Michael Marshall Smith; From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6 by Caitlin R. Kiernan; Raised by the Moon by Ramsey Campbell; Take Me to the River by Paul J. McAuley; The Coming by Hugh B. Cave; The Quest for Y'ha-nthlei by John S. Glasby; The Taint by Brian Lumley; Voices in the Water by Basil Copper.

England's Titan Books seems to have gotten into the H.P. Lovecraft business. Gratifyingly, their first two releases are the long-out-of-print tribute anthologies Shadows over Innsmouth and Weird Shadows over Innsmouth, both of which riff on Lovecraft's novella "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (which was retitled "The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth" for one American collection of the 1960's). A third anthology, Weirder Shadows over Innsmouth, came out in hardcover in late 2013, though Titan hasn't yet reprinted it in paperback.

I eagerly await Completely Normal Shadows over Innsmouth.

Most of the stories were original to the volume, with a couple of exceptions. Lovecraft's early 1930's novella about a New England coastal town inhabited by human/man-sized-frog hybrids really seems to strike a chord with a lot of writers. It's not my favourite Lovecraft novella, but it is a good time. And with the sea containing an awful lot of volume to contain multitudes of sinister, intelligent servants of the malign Great Old Ones, the novella offers a lot of avenues to explore. Or canals, to keep with the aquatic theme.

The Deep Ones are Lovecraft's ancient race of sentient amphibians, worshippers of Dagon, a demi-god-like lieutenant of the Great Old One Cthulhu, one of many beings with designs on Earth that don't include leaving humanity in charge. Or alive. The Deep Ones can produce viable offspring with human beings. Which is unusual, but so it goes. They apparently want some stuff they can only get from land-dwellers, so a pact is struck with a Yankee South Seas trader named Obed Marsh. He comes home to Innsmouth in the late 18th century having struck a pact with Deep Ones.

Consequently, Innsmouth goes to the frogs.

The stories riff in a fairly wide variety of ways on Innsmouthian horror and miscegenation. Some, like "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" by Caitlin R. Kiernan, cleverly offer stories seemingly set in the same universe as Lovecraft's original novella without slavishly imitating that novella in form or content (though Kiernan's non-linear approach to the narrative seems to me a bit of a mis-step). Others offer what could be called parallel situations, or variations on an aquatic theme -- Ramsey Campbell sends an English student-teacher on an ultimately unfortunate (though bleakly comic) detour into a mysteriously deserted village by the sea, while Paul McAuley offers up a terrifically entertaining story about a Bristol music festival where the bad drugs do a lot more damage than Woodstock's brown acid.

There are a couple of questionable inclusions here, but the problems are minimal compared to a lot of Lovecraft-themed anthologies. And the delights, whether a history-twisting, metafictionally tinged outing from Kim Newman or Brian Lumley's bleak "The Taint", are many. Highly recommended.