The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh; this 2004 Broadview Press edition edited by Julian Wolfreys: In 1897, Richard Marsh's The Beetle outsold that far-better-remembered horror classic, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It was a short-term victory. Nonetheless, The Beetle is a fascinating slice of fin de siècle Victorianism with an unusual narrative told by four different first-person narrators.
Julian Wolfreys' edition provides a lot of worthy commentary and context for the novel, especially in relation to the anxieties and obsessions of late-Imperial Britain. One should read his lengthy introduction after reading the novel, however -- it's one long Spoiler.
In sequence, the novel tells the story of The Beetle in the voices of a hapless, homeless, unemployed clerk; a gentleman scientist; a headstrong noblewoman engaged to a bedeviled Member of Parliament; and the Confidential Agent (what we would now call a Private Detective) hired to help sort out the Affair of the Beetle.
The eponymous Beetle is the star of the show, a shape-shifting, gender-bending emissary from demon-haunted Egypt -- as Wolfreys notes, Britain's travails in Egypt were a major source of Imperial agita in the latter part of the 19th century. Like Dracula himself, the Beetle is also a threatening Cultural Other, inscribed with a myriad of the fears of the period.
Like X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Beetle ends with a train chase. At least it makes period sense here. Marsh's novel is a bit murkier in its climax than Dracula, but I'll leave that for you to discover. The narrative of the poverty-stricken clerk is certainly the most emotionally affecting of the four narrative streams. Marsh also does a fine job of writing a self-aware, independent woman's POV in the third stream.
The second stream is enjoyably wonky -- Marsh's scientist, a friend of the female narrator since childhood, is a pompous goof who's working on weapons of mass destruction (specifically poison gas) for the British Army. All of this is treated in a strangely off-hand fashion, and I'll go just a bit spoilery to note that none of the weapons research pays off in the climax of things. It's just there.
Our narrating Confidential Agent brings things to a somewhat orderly close -- mysteries remain, but like Van Helsing in Dracula, the Agent marshals the forces of Order against the invasive Other. The Beetle doesn't have the pulpy, bloody heft of Dracula, but it does have its own charms, racist and bigoted though those charms may be when it comes to any and all non-WASP characters in the novel.
Wolfreys finishes this edition with excerpts from a number of end-of-century source texts to situate the novel further in its context. In all, this edition and the novel, recommended.
Us (2019): written and directed by Jordan Peele; starring Lupita Nyong'o (Adelaide Wilson), Winston Duke (Gabe Wilson), Shahadi Wright Joseph (Zora Wilson), Evan Alex (Jason Wilson), Elizabeth Moss (Kitty Tyler), and Tim Heidecker (Josh Tyler):
Jordan Peele again demonstrates an impressive ability to rework genre tropes for shock and social commentary. Here, we start with the doppelganger and end with... well, that would be telling. Peele's first two movies, this and Get Out (2017), have melded genre and social commentary, and been critically and financially successful. It seems to me that Peele is still developing, though, that his best work lies ahead if he stays the course.
The childhood trauma of Lupita Nyong'o's character bleeds into the present when she and her family (the charming Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alex) visit her grandparents' cottage in coastal California for the first time in decades. Something happened in a creepy house of mirrors at the local amusement park long ago. Now it's about to happen again.
Nyong'o is terrific as a dominating mother and wife. Winston Duke makes an affable Everydad forced to summon reserves of courage and ass-kicking to protect his family. And daughter Shahadi and son Alex are no slouches when it comes to monster-fighting. If the things they face really are monsters.
With about 25 minutes to go, Us veers into the territory of the totally loopy. To be fair, so did many Twilight Zone episodes in the final Act. There's maybe a bit too much evident straining to make the social commentary explicit and concrete here. But at least there is social commentary. And rabbits! Keep an eye on the videos on that shelf at the beginning -- they are relevant! Recommended.
Bird Box (2018): adapted by Eric Heisserer from the novel by Josh Malerman; directed by Susanne Bier; starring Sandra Bullock (Malorie), Trevante Rhodes (Tom), John Malcovich (Douglas), Sarah Paulson (Jessica), Jacki Weaver (Cheryl), Rosa Salazar (Lucy), Danielle Macdonald (Olympia), Lil Rey Howery (Charlie), and BD Wong (Greg):
Apocalyptic horror gives us monsters who cause people to commit suicide when they see them. Daredevil, where art thou?
The movie generates a fair amount of tension throughout, though improbabilities related to Sandra Bullock's ability to navigate the outside world without recourse to sight eventually swamp all credibility.
Alas, Bird Box is also one of those movies that curdles somewhat in the remembering. This is partially because at the heart is a very, very conservative story of how a single woman finds redemption in the ARMS OF A GOOD MAN and MOTHERHOOD.
Speaking as someone with bipolar disorder, I also found some stuff involving the mentally ill is tremendously iffy in the most retrograde way imaginable (and not needed in the story). And not one but two self-sacrificing African-American men! And one of them is literally named 'Tom'! Get out! By the end, you may feel Bamboozled. Lightly recommended.
The Ballad Of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle: There's an ongoing battle in horror circles over just how much emphasis should be placed on H.P. Lovecraft's well-documented racism.
It's well-documented mainly because he documented it himself in his thousands upon thousands of letters. The Ballad Of Black Tom arrived in 2016 as the argument began to pick up steam among HPL's supporters and detractors and all those caught in-between.
Victor LaValle has written a very good novella here, perhaps somewhat overpraised because it's a revisionist Cthulhu Mythos work by an African-American writer. Perhaps somewhat overdamned from the other side, too. It's pretty good. It's not the blistering, lacerating work of greatness I expected from some reviews nor the unmitigated cock-up I feared from other reviews.
LaValle retells Lovecraft's early 1920's New York-set story "The Horror At Red Hook" while adding one major new character to it, our protagonist, dubbed Black Tom once he sets certain supernatural events into motion but born and raised Thomas Tester. LaValle portrays the plight of African-Americans in 1920's New York with a clinical matter-of-factness that turns to passionate horror as non-supernatural horrors push Thomas into the role of Black Tom in order to gain both personal and racial vengeance on the white power structure.
Do you need to be familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos to fully enjoy the story? Oh, probably. The cosmic horror of the story is almost entirely a matter of this prior knowledge. The more visceral horrors, supernatural and natural, are described; the cosmic are told too much and not shown in particularly horrifying terms.
This may be intentional -- LaValle foregrounds the horrors of racism here, in part by pushing the cosmic to the background. It does mute the ending, however, which seems as if it's supposed to cause some final culmination of horror and instead seems pretty obvious and frankly just a bit lame.
Obviously, the major revision to "The Horror At Red Hook" is the addition of a whole new character to it, right? Well, maybe not. For one, "The Horror At Red Hook" never specifically refers to anything in the then-amorphous Cthulhu Mythos. It isn't a Mythos tale. The Ballad of Black Tom is a Mythos tale, chosen by LaValle, I assume, because it's HPL's most racist, non-ghost-written major story*, obsessively detailing how New York went to Hell when all those swarthy foreigners arrived. And Italians! HPL had it in for the Italians.
LaValle drastically recasts the conclusion of "The Horror At Red Hook." He pretty much has to, as a brief foray through a magical doorway grants Thomas magical superpowers that allow him to do anything the plot requires. Is this a Mary Sue moment? Oh, probably. Adding a bit more nuance to Thomas' powers and abilities would ground the work more. As is, it all seems a bit fanboyish. Actually, very fanboyish, which I'm pretty sure is not what LaValle was aiming for.
Still and all, this is a worthy addition to the Cthulhu Mythos, which has been criticizing and self-evaluating itself for decades in the works of its finest writers. The text even manages to get subverted by an attempt at subversion and criticism. LaValle alters Malone's physical appearance from HPL's source text so as to make him resemble HPL himself. He also introduces a horrifyingly racist character who's clearly a parody of HPL pen pal and Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard (the first clue is that the character is named Mr. Howard; the second is that he's from Texas).
But HPL and his pen-friends were introducing characters based on one another in their Mythos work from the late 1920's onwards, generally to kill them off in horrible ways. The fates of Howard and Malone seem somewhat tame compared to how, say, HPL killed off his version of Robert Bloch (in "The Haunter Of the Dark"), how Bloch killed off HPL (in "The Shambler From the Stars"), how Frank Belknap Long killed off HPL (in "The Space-Eaters"), and so on, and so forth. Basically, as friends, Lovecraft and his circle were way better at killing one another off than LaValle is at killing them off. Oh, well. Recommended.
* "Medusa's Coil" is HPL's most racist story. It's a heavily ghost-rewritten version of Zealia Bishop's story.
Get Out (2017): written and directed by Jordan Peele; starring Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Washington), Alison Williams (Rose Armitage), Catherine Keener (Dr. Armitage), Bradley Whitford (Dr. Armitage), Caleb Landry Jones (Dean Armitage), Marcus Henderson ('Walter'), Betty Gabriel ('Georgina'), LilRey Howery (Rod Williams of the TSA), and Stephen Root (Jim Hudson):
A zippy, suspenseful horror movie about racial relations. Rod Serling, who did so many allegorical stories on The Twilight Zone, would be proud of Jordan Peele's creepy, satirical story about an extraordinarily bad visit to the country by art photographer Chris (a great Daniel Kaluuya) to meet the parents (creepy Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) of his girlfriend of four months (Alison Williams, perfectly cast).
Peele builds the suspense gradually over the first half, lightening some scenes with comic-relief TSA agent/Chris's best pal Rod on the phone (one of the jokes is that Rod's paranoid fantasies about what rich white people want with black people is neither paranoid nor fantasy). The ending descends into cathartic violence that seems to comment on both current events and the tragic ending of George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead, with its heroic African-American protagonist.
Peele has a nice director's eye, giving us colour-saturated scenes of privileged gentility and night-time scenes of startling horror. The movie also nods to The Wicker Man (the original), Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain" in interesting ways. I think Peele's just-announced Twilight Zone reboot should be a blast. Highly recommended.
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.
