The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson (2008) by William Jones: A fun bit of retro-tinged Cthulhu Mythos-infused stories that form a cycle. Set in 1920's New York, The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson pits the titular Columbia University English literature professor against a series of evils human and otherwise, but mostly otherwise.
The whole thing has a pleasingly pulpy feel, cleanly written and clever at various points. It's the sort of thing I think of as Cthulhu Mythos Comfort Food. It's not daring or revelatory or even all that frightening. But it is entertaining. Jones makes Pearson an engaging character caught up in situations that change the way he looks at the world. And at himself.
Pearson turns out to possess the Cthulhu Mythos equivalent of magical powers. This comes in pretty handy as Jones' addition to the Cthulhu Mythos, a hideous devouring being from outside our universe, may be about to break through in New York thanks to the machinations of a Blue Blood New York millionaire.
Jones throws in a stereotypical Irish cop as an ally for Pearson, along with a plucky female archaeologist. The novel makes some clever tweaks to Lovecraft's ghouls and to more traditional monsters, including mummies and ghosts. There's nothing here to make your brain hurt or to set the cosmic senses tingling -- and sometimes that's just fine. Recommended.
Tales from the Miskatonic University Library (2016): edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Jon Ashmead, containing the following stories:
Slowly Ticking Time Bomb by Don Webb
The Third Movement by Adrian Cole
To Be in Ulthar on a Summer Afternoon by Dirk Flinthart
Interlibrary Loan by Harry Turtledove
A Trillion Young by Will Murray
The Paradox Collection by A. C. Wise
The Way to a Man's Heart by Marilyn 'Mattie' Brahen
The White Door by Douglas Wynne
One Small Change by P. D. Cacek
Recall Notice by Alex Shvartsman
The Children's Collection by James Van Pelt
Not in the Card Catalog by Darrell Schweitzer
The Bonfire of the Blasphemies by Robert M. Price
Solid, enjoyable anthology of stories either related to the demon-haunted Special Collection library at Miskatonic University or fictional, forbidden tomes and their dangerous presence on this Earth or any other. Some stories are comic: "Recall Notice" by Alex Shvartsman and "The Way to a Man's Heart" by Marilyn 'Mattie' Brahen are the two most comic-satiric of these.
Some take what initially seems like a comic premise (say, what if H.P. Lovecraft's forbidden uber-tome The Necronomicon were digitized and put on-line?) and exploit it for horrifying rather than comic consequences. The sancrosanct nature of the Interlibrary Loan comes into comic, horrific play; so, too, the problems of hanging onto volumes that don't always feel like being confined to one shelf or one library. And "The Children's Collection" by James Van Pelt strikes a strikingly poignant note about the responsibilities of a librarian in Lovecraft's unusual Massachusetts coastal town of Innsmouth. In all, a lot of fun. Recommended.
That Is Not Dead: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Through the Centuries (2015): edited by Darrell Schweitzer, containing the following stories:
- Herald of Chaos by Keith Taylor
- What a Girl Needs by Esther M. Friesner [as by Esther Friesner]
- The Horn of the World's Ending by John Langan
- Monsters in the Mountains at the Edge of the World by Jay Lake
- Come, Follow Me by Darrell Schweitzer
- Ophiuchus by Don Webb
- Of Queens and Pawns by Lois H. Gresh
- Smoking Mirror by Will Murray
- Incident at Ferney by S. T. Joshi
- Anno Domini Azathoth by John R. Fultz
- Slowness by Don Webb
- The Salamanca Encounter by Richard A. Lupoff
- Old Time Entombed by W. H. Pugmire
- Nine Drowned Churches by Harry Turtledove
Fun, often grim collection of Cthulhu Mythos tales spanning about 4500 years and many continents. Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi checks in with a rare piece of fiction, one in which Voltaire must face the Great Old Ones in rural 18th-century France. John Fultz crafts a chilling tale of Azathothian cultists in the Spanish West, Will Murray one of false gods in colonial Mexico, and editor Darrell Schweitzer a disturbing tale of the Pauper's Crusade.
There isn't a lot of comedy here -- really, only Harry Turtledove, Don Webb, and Esther Friesner offer even slightly light-hearted looks at the Cthulhu Mythos. A recurring theme is the destruction of a character's personal faith in the gods of men through exposure to the Truth about who really runs the universe. Dick Lupoff does take this in a different direction than the other tales, to a place more of cosmic wonder than terror. More typical is how an encounter with Azathoth destroys a devout Catholic's faith in John Fultz's story.
John Langan's tale of Roman-era Britain and a curious magical artifact is splendid as well, recalling some of the Roman-era-set dark fantasy of David Drake. "Monsters in the Mountains at the Edge of the World" by Jay Lake pits Romans and the fringes of the Chinese empire against the abominable Mi-Go, while "Herald of Chaos" by Keith Taylor sets Taylor's recurring, dynastic-Egyptian priest of Anubis against Lovecraft's Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, with the fate of the world in the balance.
In all, a highly enjoyable anthology. I even felt like I learned something! Highly recommended.
The Dulwich Horror and Others (2015) by David Hambling, containing the following stories: "The Dulwich Horror of 1927," Two Fingers," "The Thing in the Vault," "The Monsters in the Park," "The Devils in the Deep Blue Sea," "The Norwood Builder," and "Shadows of the Witch House."
Excellent collection of innovative yet Old School tales in the Mighty H.P. Lovecraft Manner by way of August Derleth. Hambling sets many of his stories in and around Dulwich, a real suburb of London, England whose name resembles that of Lovecraft's fictional Dunwich, Massachusetts. The most Old School thing, I suppose, is Hambling's homage-oriented titling of his stories, as many play on HPL stories either specifically or in general syntax. Well, and a nod to Sherlock Holmes with "The Norwood Builder."
The stories range from the late 19th century (""The Devils in the Deep Blue Sea," a nod to William Hope Hodgson as well as HPL) to today (the bleakly satiric "Two Fingers," a story about the rich getting what they want regardless of the consequences for everyone else). Several stories share the idea of a secret society working against the Great Old Ones, while three stories form a connected narrative occurring over 11 years ("The Monsters in the Park," "The Dulwich Horror of 1927," and "Shadows of the Witch House"). The last of these also nods to Arthur Machen's seminal, pre-Lovecraftian work of cosmic horror, "The Great God Pan," incidentally one of Stephen King's favourites.
Hambling often spices up his speculations on cosmic horror with contemporary science and physics unavailable to Lovecraft in the 1920's and 1930's. Genetics, epigenetics, stem-cell therapy, quantum entanglement, and astrophysics rub shoulders with Deep Ones, shambling shoggoths, the rugose cones of the Great Race, the mysterious Others, and those lovable, space-faring, brain-collecting fungoid crustaceans the Mi-Go.
While there are deliberate invocations of specific Lovecraft stories in the titles and in the stories themselves (one story ends with a paraphrase of the ending of "The Dunwich Horror," for instance), these are very much Hambling's stories. They use the quasi-documentary narrative approach favoured by Lovecraft while expanding upon it in interesting ways, including a story which criticizes an earlier story in the volume for a lack of truthfulness at certain points.
There aren't any true misfires here. Hambling's greatest strengths lie in his creation of a malevolent, historically specific, British past. That simply means that the present-day stories ("Two Fingers" and "The Norwood Builder") are good but not as engaging as the historical tales. "The Thing In the Vault," playing with literary tropes associated with American hard-boiled detective fiction, also lacks the truthful sense of time and place of the other Britocentric historical stories, though it remains a fun piece of work.
The scientific explanations for certain events in certain stories sometimes gets in the way of the horror. The mysterious Others of HPL's "The Shadow Out of Time" are literalized into pesky sci-fi aliens in "The Monsters In the Park." The Mi-Go in "The Thing In the Vault" come across as a little too dumb to be cosmically menacing. These are minor points really, but they are more reminiscent of August Derleth's attempts to organize and codify Lovecraft's malign cosmos after HPL's death. To quote Ramsey Campbell, sometimes "explanation is the death of horror." But in all, highly recommended.
Der Farbe/ The Colour [Out Of Space] (2010): written and directed by Huan Vu; adapted from the story by H.P. Lovecraft; starring Ingo Heise (Jonathan Davis), Marco Leibnitz (Armin Pierske - young) and Michael Kausch (Armin Pierske - old): Deliberately paced, excellent German adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's pivotal 1920's tale of cosmic horror and bodily degeneration "The Colour Out Of Space."
The film-makers relocate much of the action to pre-WWII Germany, with an American prologue in and around Lovecraft's demon-haunted Arkham, Massachusetts.
This transplant is a good idea because the German actors do occasionally have problems with a convincing American accent. On the other hand, Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a much worse American accent than any of the Germans in his portrayal of Dr. Strange, so perhaps throwing brickbats at the German amateurs here is a bit wanky on the part of the cranky wankers of Internet nitpickery.
Another good idea was to film everything in black and white except for the titular colour. This makes for a creepy contrast that rises above the very limited visual effects. The film-makers also compensate for a lack of funds by suggesting and implying rather than showing. This makes the horror more horrific when it comes. Would that all horror movies took such care regardless of budget!
I really liked the increasingly haunted and hollow look of the actors in the Pre-War section. They face a contamination from Outside that no one could be prepared for. Ants in a meaningless cosmos, some of them believe they are being punished by the Judeo-Christian God. Ha ha! As if you're that lucky you poor bastards!
The DVD, procured from our friends at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS), has the most interesting (and necessary) sub-titling mode I've encountered -- English sub-titles on only when people speak German. Unless you're fluent in German, use it.
In all, this is an impressive piece of horror movie-making regardless of the budget. It's not intentionally 'retro' as the two movies actually produced by the HPLHS are, but the black and white certainly makes it feel partially retro, though the performances are pretty modern. A movie like this or the HPLHS Joints should show aspiring film-makers what can be done without a budget. Highly recommended.
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.
Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows:
Alan Moore called Providence a version of his own Watchmen for the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. I think he's wrong. It's much more like his terrific Jack the Ripper saga From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell. There's a wealth of factual material especially as related to HPL's own life here, along with an almost encyclopedic tour through all of Lovecraft's fiction. The deadly Boston molasses flood shows up in one issue. That was a real thing !!! The ghouls who got sugar-coated corpses because of it, maybe not so real. I hope.
Technically, Providence is simply named for HPL's beloved home town in Rhode Island. The title accretes other meanings as the story proceeds.
For the first ten issues, we follow the adventures of Robert Black during the year 1920. He's a closeted gay man who has left his New York reporting job after the death of his lover to research various elements of New England legends and folklore.
Black's name riffs on Lovecraft pen-pal Robert Bloch, who would create Psycho, among other things. Like Bloch, Black originally hails from Wisconsin. Black's homosexuality plays on that of several other Lovecraft 'disciples,' some of whom (all of whom?) appear at least briefly in Providence.
The graphic novel rewards multiple readings and punishes the short attention span. Like Watchmen, Providence increases the density of its narrative by including lengthy prose pieces at the back of the comic book. This is Moore's densest comic-book work since From Hell with its 100+pages of appendices.
All one really needs to know is, um, all of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, no. Indeed, it would be interesting to tackle HPL's work AFTER reading Providence. Be sure to tell me how that goes if you try it!
The world of Providence isn't meant to be ours. One of the fascinating metafictional herein is Moore's use of the work of Robert W. Chambers, one of the acknowledged precursors to HPL in American horror. In the world of Providence there is no Chambers because elements of Chambers' stories exist in the real world -- most notably, state-sanctioned suicide booths.
But Lovecraft himself exists, and is a writer. And he's about to start writing that crazy Cthulhu Mythos stuff after apprenticing with Poe-influenced horror and works inspired by the wide-ranging whimsies of Lord Dunsany (who also appears as a character).
William S. Burroughs also briefly appears. The anecdote connecting Burroughs and one of HPL's disciples? That's totally true!
Moore's approach to the story privileges psychological and bodily horrors over those of the cosmic. This is a very cloachal approach to HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. The starkest moments of horror, three of them spaced throughout the book, deal with rape as the defining sin of cosmic horror. Providence is not for the squeamish. But the rape scenes are justified, and there's nothing risible about them. They're deeply horrifying.
One of the key structural elements of Providence is the format (and the idea) of the Commonplace Book. Robert Black keeps one on his journeys, containing both things he finds along the way (including a hilarious church newsletter) and his own musings. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. And Providence combines fact, fiction, comics, written sections, and an overwhelming array of different covers to give the work some flavour of the Commonplace. Make of all of this what you will. Providence rewards patient study.
To tell much more would be to give something away. Technically, Providence is both prequel and sequel to Moore and Burrows' The Courtyard and Neonomicon. Search them out!
As to Burrows' art -- it's perfectly suited to Moore's cold, clinical eye in Providence. It's a horror equivalent of Dave Gibbons' straightforward, subtle art on Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. Burrows can draw horrible imaginings with great skill, but he's at his best throughout Providence giving the reader the creeps by being matter-of-fact and (seemingly) representational.
Oh, and the ghouls. Moore and Burrows' ghouls are unlike their forebears in HPL's own work. They're a terrific, funny, strangely lovable creation. Not that you would ever, ever want to meet them, in a subway station or a graveyard or in your own living room. In all, Providence is horrifying, sad, funny, satirical, scathing work from one of comic-book-writing's Grandmasters. Highest recommendation.
The Horror in the Museum by H.P. Lovecraft and Others (1970/1989/This edition 2007): edited by August Derleth, Stephen Jones, and S.T. Joshi:
Primary Revisions: Which is to say, stories that are almost entirely rewritten by HPL from stories or notes from other writers.
- The Green Meadow (1918) by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Lewis Theobald, Jr. and Elizabeth Neville Berkeley]: Really a Dunsanian prose-poem more than anything else.
- The Crawling Chaos (1921) by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Lewis Theobald, Jr. and Elizabeth Neville Berkeley]: Again, really a Dunsanian prose-poem more than anything else.
- The Last Test (1928) by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro [as by Adolphe de Castro] : Enjoyable, overlong novella about a scientist's descent into madness, his descent speeded by the advice of a monstrous survival from eons past. Set primarily in late-19th-century San Francisco.
- The Electric Executioner (1930) by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro [as by Adolphe de Castro]: So far as I know, the only story written or rewritten by HPL to be set primarily on a train.
- The Curse of Yig (1970) by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop [as by Zealia Bishop]: Should be moved to the HPL canon. One of Lovecraft's generally top-notch "collaborations" with Zealia Bishop that moved the Cthulhu Mythos into the Midwestern environs of Oklahoma.
- The Mound (1940) by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop [as by Zealia Bishop]: Another top-notch, almost-canonical Lovecraft-Bishop Joint. A secret land of Great Old One worshippers hides about a mile below the surface of Oklahoma. Well, that explains a lot!
- Medusa's Coil (1939) by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Zealia Bishop]: Oh, Lord. Brace yourself for the most racist ending in Lovecraft's stories and revisions, so anomalously ascendant over much more dire information that the ending almost seems like a parody.
- The Man of Stone (1932) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Minor horror stuff.
- The Horror in the Museum (1933) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Solid Mythos material set at... a wax museum?
- Winged Death (1934) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Somewhat goofy Africa-set horror story.
- Out of the Aeons (1933) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Another piece that could be considered canonical Mythos horror.
- The Horror in the Burying-Ground (1937) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Very minor horror material.
- The Diary of Alonzo Typer (1938) by H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley [as by William Lumley]: Promising beginning, somewhat muted ending to a haunted house story with shades of the Great Ones looming behind it. Bears more than a passing resemblance to Stephen King's early-career homage to HPL, "Jerusalem's Lot."
Secondary Revisions: Which can range from a lot of HPL to almost none at all.
- The Horror at Martin's Beach (1923) by H. P. Lovecraft and Sonia Greene (variant of The Invisible Monster) [as by Sonia H. Greene]: Minor horror stuff with hypnotic sea monsters.
- Ashes (1924) by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.] : Minor science-fictional horror that seems inspired by Robert W. Chambers.
- The Ghost-Eater (1924) by H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr. [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.] : Really minor lost-in-the-woods horror.
- The Loved Dead (1924) by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.] : Oh, brother. Controversial (for its time) story about a guy who, though his actions are never completely described, seems to be a necrophiliac.
- Deaf, Dumb and Blind (1925) by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.] : Minor piece of cosmic horror.
- Two Black Bottles (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft and Wilfred Blanch Talman [as by Wilfred Blanch Talman] : Droll tale of zombies and churchyards.
- The Trap (1932) by Henry S. Whitehead and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Henry S. Whitehead] : Minor piece of horror revolving around optics.
- The Tree on the Hill (1934) by Duane W. Rimel : Under-developed piece of cosmic horror.
- The Disinterment (1935) by H. P. Lovecraft and Duane W. Rimel [as by Duane W. Rimel] : Minor horror that seems mainly inspired by Poe.
- "Till A' the Seas" (1935) by H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow (variant of "Till All the Seas") [as by R. H. Barlow] : Downbeat fragment of end-of-the-world melancholy.
- The Night Ocean (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow [as by R. H. Barlow]: Probably the "weirdest" tale here in the modern sense, as atmosphere and suggestion take front place over specific, horrific occurrences. Extremely strong piece.
Overall: Essential to the Lovecraft fan and/or scholar, and with enough rewarding tales of horror and the macabre to satisfy the casual reader as well. Highly recommended.
Visions from Brichester (2015) by Ramsey Campbell; illustrations by Randy Broecker: containing the following stories and essays (dates are first publication, not composition):
- The Stone on the Island (1964): Campbell begins his transition from Lovecraftian pastiches to his own style of horror here, as he mixes an idea from M.R. James, a Lovecraftian island, and his own experiences at work.
- Before the Storm (1980): Written in the 1960's, the story again shows Campbell mixing cosmic body horror and his own Lovecraftian deities with the daily grind at an office.
- Cold Print (1969): Campbell's first truly great short story by my reckoning. A quest for a particular form of (perfectly legal, now anyway) pornography by a Physical Education teacher takes him to a bookstore he never, ever should have gone into.
- The Franklyn Paragraphs (1973): Fun, disturbing metafiction about a mysteriously vanished horror writer.
- A Madness from the Vaults (1972): Really a deft riff on the sort of stories Clark Ashton Smith used to write, set on an alien world and involving all-alien characters.
- Among the pictures are these: (1985): Campbell describes a series of sketches he made back in the 1960s. Interesting.
- The Tugging (1976): Campbell suggests that this is a too-literal interpretation of the Lovecraftian chestnut about the "stars being right" to bring back certain deities. I like it a lot -- it may be literal, but the images are grand.
- The Faces at Pine Dunes (1980): A great, great story. Its imagery climaxes in something deeply disturbing and chilling; its 20-year-old protagonist is sympathetic and carefully drawn.
- Blacked Out (1985): Fun scare is, as Campbell notes, Lovecraftian primarily because it appeared in his previous Lovecraftian collection Cold Print because the editor wanted to include at least one previously unpublished story. Rarely has a Campbellian protagonist had a more emblematic last name.
- The Voice of the Beach (1982): Maybe Campbell's crowning achievement in writing a Lovecraftian story without any recourse to all the machinery of Lovecraftian terms for 'gods' and creatures and menacing books. It most resembles Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." The imagery and situations are sinister, horrifying, vague, and often uncomfortably vertiginous and hallucinatory.
- The Horror under Warrendown (1995): Very funny pastiche turns a famous English children's book series into a source of cosmic body horror.
- The Other Names (1998): Very solid combination of a sensitive character study and a Lovecraftian menace.
- The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash (2010): Funny, satiric examination of one very bad Lovecraft fan.
- The Last Revelation of Gla'aki (2013): Campbell's return to his Lovecraftian god Gla'aki manages to be both disturbing and weirdly soothing at points -- and it does a better job of showing why people might find comfort in the embrace of these terrible 'gods' than any story I can think of after David Drake's brilliant Lovecraft-meets-Joseph-Conrad novella "Than Curse the Darkness."
- The Successor (First draft of Cold Print) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
- The Franklyn Paragraphs (First draft) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
- Mushrooms from Merseyside (2015): Campbell's often hilarious salue to Lovecraft's sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth sees the writer summarize all of his Lovecraftian fiction in a series of... limericks.
- Two Poems by Edward Pickman Derby (2015): Interesting early poetry.
- The Horror in the Crystal (Story fragment) (2015): 1960's fragment; interesting.
- Rusty Links (Essay) (2015): A snarky Ramsey Campbell from the 1960's.
- Lovecraft in Retrospect (Essay) (1969/1994): A very pissy Campbell from the late 1960's gets critiqued by the lovable Campbell of the 1990's.
- On Four Lovecraft Tales (Essay) (2013): As good an explanation of Lovecraft's strengths as a writer as you'll ever read, this essay really caused me to re-evaluate certain aspects of Lovecraft's work. It's a concise piece that explains how much more complex Lovecraft's style and structure were than he's generally given credit for from even his greatest admirers.
- Afterword (Essay) (2015): Campbell contextualizes all the pieces in the book. Invaluable, but I want more!
Overall: The stories are great, the non-fiction pieces are great, and the illustrations by Randy Broecker are extremely enjoyable and often very much 'Old School' in an early 20th-century pulp magazine way. Highly recommended.
Providence Book One: The Ancient Track: (Providence Issues 1-4): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows (2015): Well, I say it's Book One because it took me longer to read the first four issues of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows' 12-issue Avatar Press foray into (all) the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft than it normally takes to read 20 normal comic books. Maybe 30.
Moore has said that he wants to save Lovecraft's work from its domestication in plushie Cthulhu dolls and jokey pop-culture references. Or at least I think that's what he means in his interviews supporting Providence. As in Moore's previous HPL comics, Providence makes explicit enough disturbing sexual elements that were implicit in HPL's original works to unsettle almost anyone who previously thought Cthulhu and friends were cute, cuddly, tentacled monsters who just need a little lebensraum on dear old Planet Earth.
Moore has also called Providence his Watchmen for the Cthulhu Mythos. This certainly works on a number of levels. As with Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, Providence proceeds as an investigation. It involves pastiches and homages to characters not created by Moore et al., characters reimagined and altered by Moore's sensibilities into new configurations and meanings from their source texts. And Providence contains lengthy text pieces at the end of each issue which expand our understanding of the narrative we've just encountered in the comics portion of the books.
One major difference between this and Watchmen is that Providence seems to aim at dovetailing back into H.P. Lovecraft's original stories by the (as-yet-unpublished) end of the narrative. Most of the post-WWI events of Providence occur before the events of Lovecraft's main horror stories, Mythos and otherwise. Though HPL was indeed writing by the time of this narrative, "The Call of Cthulhu" was still several years away.
And so our protagonist is Robert Black, a gay, Jewish reporter for the New York Herald when we first encounter him. We don't know much about HPL's views on homosexuality, but we do know that he was anti-Semitic (despite the fact that he married a Jewish woman...oh, paradoxical HPL!). Lovecraft's stories and letters tended to avoid overt references to sexuality, though it was often implied.
Black, though, is sexually active throughout the first four issues. Moore has set him up as both a Lovecraft proxy and an anti-Lovecraft. Like HPL, he's something of a snob when it comes to about 99% of everybody. But while Black has fled New York, just as HPL once did, he still loves the city, which HPL definitely did not. Given the title of the series and the structure of its protagonist's wanderings, I'd imagine that Black will eventually end up in HPL's beloved home city of Providence, Rhode Island. On Lovecraft's tombstone is the inscription "I am Providence," after all.
The desire to write a non-fiction book about odd rural traditions in New England motivates Black's wanderings first in and then outside of New York. He's also leaving the city for awhile to get over the death of an ex-lover. His initial investigation of a mysterious, ancient book and its lengthy, star-crossed history leads him to characters we've met before, under different names, in New York HPL stories that include "Cool Air" and "The Horror at Red Hook." Further explorations will send us to real-world towns that include Salem, Massachusetts -- only now superimposed upon them are creatures and situations from Lovecraft's demon-haunted, imaginary New England towns of Arkham and Innsmouth and Dunwich.
But while some situations mirror Lovecraft's stories, Providence really is set Before The Play. And Moore's version of one of Lovecraft's most interesting characters, Wilbur Whateley from "The Dunwich Horror," seems to be aware that he's about to become part of the Story of that Play. And he's not all that happy about it when he meets Black.
Providence appears to be a prequel to Moore and Burrows' present-day Cthulhu comics The Courtyard and Neonomicon. But this may not entirely be the case. One doesn't need to have read those other works to enjoy Providence, though they do add an extra layer of cosmic horror to Black's investigation. He is from the Herald, after all. Or maybe he is the Herald, though of what, no one says.
I'm not sure how well Providence works for people who haven't read at least some of Lovecraft's work. However, Moore constantly puts his own revisionist, totalizing spin on things. What is implicit is often made explicit, and this often works quite well in terms of the horror in the text. The cosmic level of Lovecraft, that Sublime dread, is still absent from the narrative, though it certainly seems to be coming.
As we end the comics portion of the fourth issue, Moore quotes a Lovecraft poem named "The Ancient Track." It suggests that worse and bigger things are waiting for our intrepid writer, whose conscious mind still hasn't clicked on to the supernatural horrors he's walking through. But the text pieces, journal entries 'by' Black, suggest that his unconscious mind is about one step away from shrieking and gibbering: as Black wonders in one journal entry, what if he wrote a novel about an investigator who doesn't know he's in a mystery until it's too late? And what would be a reasonable reaction to events of the supernatural for this investigator? Would he keep rationalizing what he's seen until it's too late as well?
Moore's writing is sharp and mordant. Jacen Burrows' slick, hyper-realistic style works for Providence as it did for Neonomicon and The Courtyard. It supplies a sort of hyper-real documentary style that approximates the pseudo-documentarian aspects of Lovecraft's best work. When the horrors come, you almost believe in them. And Burrows really, really nails 'The Innsmouth Look' -- it's a comic-book-art triumph to make Innsmouthians seem visually unsettling again. Highly recommended.
