Continuing on the cosmic horror kick is What the Hell Did I Just Read, which doubles as both an effective title as well as a pithy summary of most people's reactions, including my own. This, the third entry in the John Dies at the End series, is sublime and infuriating in about equal measure. I think that's intentional.
The second entry in this series, This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It, was one of my favorite books of 2012. I was worried that this one wouldn't live up to that, and frankly I'm still thinking about it. I can say that I didn't enjoy this one nearly as much as Spiders but on an objective level I don't know if I can say it isn't as good. We revisit our "heroes" John and David as they return older and . . . older. This one also focuses a lot more on Amy, still dating David.
If you're not familiar with Wong's work on this series, it's a dizzying combination. Quite a bit of all of these novels focuses on really lowbrow toilet humor, mostly on the part of David and John. While you're looking at that, Wong manages to sneak in some fairly trenchant social analysis and commentary. And then when you think you know where things are going, he blindsides you with all sorts of legitimately scary and incredibly fucked-up shit. I first noted these abrupt shifts in tone in the original John Dies novel, and Wong's continued to hone them as a signature style. I was almost aghast at how totally vile and awful some of the situations get in this novel, almost thinking that the narrative hadn't earned the right to invoke those sorts of images. But upon reflection, I began to consider this may be the whole point.
After all, this is billed as a cosmic horror novel. The nature of cosmic horror is that it's not malevolent by any human understanding, it's just that it's completely indifferent to humanity. People often make fun of Lovecraft's protagonists going mad at the drop of the hat, but forget that what they'd realized is that there was no malice but also no pity on the part of the vast forces beyond Earth.
So anyway, let's look at Dave and John. They're high school graduates, and they're pretty smart. But they didn't pursue any formal education and they have only spotty employment. David in particular hasn't been able to find any work since the video store he used to manage shut down, and the only reason he has food and a place to stay is because Amy works at a call center for $9 an hour. David drinks too much, and John does everything too much. They hunt monsters, but the only reason they can see through the veil of reality is because they do a bunch of drugs. This gig also doesn't pay very well. Even Amy, who is more sensible and grounded, takes a lot of pain medication, subsists on a diet mostly composed of sugar and caffeine, and doesn't sleep so she can play her MMORPGs.
I don't know if Wong read The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman or not but I was thinking that these series are considering the same sorts of issues from wildly different perspectives. Quentin Coldwater is also a depressive malcontent, but when his life doesn't meet up to his expectations he manages to fall upwards into a sinecure so he can wallow in his misery in comfort. This is the difference a college education and social status makes, I guess. There's not really that much between their mental states, but society has written David off entirely and as of this one he's basically writing himself off, as well. Sure, there are dimension-hopping alien monsters to contend with, but the slow grind into oblivion that's claiming this whole Midwestern town is just as bad if not worse.
As for the main action, what's to say? There's some missing children involved. But remember that some of the antagonists in these books can mess with you past all understanding. Case in point: Amy's missing a hand from an accident she was in as a child. Except that she had two hands in the second book until she was touched by one of these extradimensional horrors, at which point not only did she lose the hand but she had always been missing a hand. So things can not only change, but change to the point that you can't remember it being any different, and if you have any expectations that you know what's going on, prepare to set them aside. Wong doesn't play fair, John exaggerates, David omits some important facts, and all three narrators occasionally outright lie.
Again, it's not for the squeamish. Aside from depictions of horrible atrocities to every sort of sympathetic persona imaginable, there's body horror, relationship horror, poverty horror and a simulacrum of a Korean porn star made of insects. And yet despite all that it manages to end up on a note of hope. Ish. Hope-ish. Happy 2018.
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Thursday, December 7, 2017
The Book of Cthulhu and The Book of Cthulhu 2 (edited by Ross Lockhart)
“After all that, you came here and brought a woman as well. Could it be, sir, that you are not too bright?” “I didn’t believe all them stories then.” “But you do now?” “I do."
-From "The Crawling Sky" by Joe R. Lansdale
There's a lot of things you can say about H.P. Lovecraft, many of them negative. I ended up getting a copy of his complete works during the sale when Borders went out of business. It's a pretty nice book, too, hardbound with a built-in bookmark and fancy pagework, with some editorial commentary in there to help make sense of it all. I couldn't afford the edition bound in human flesh, but that's okay since they don't really do basements in North Texas and I couldn't give such a volume the solemn, freaky crypt that it deserves. And so it sat, for some time, as I found excuses to do many other things rather than read it. Finally, back in July 2015, I actually read through it. And . . . it was pretty okay? I guess? I mean, I'd read "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Colour Out of Space" before, so I knew what I was getting into there, and some of the others were about as tedious as I expected. But although I wouldn't end up describing myself as a fan, I found some of the stories ended up growing on me.
I don't really think that I have much to say on the subject of Lovecraft himself, aside from just a few generalities. That field has been plowed and planted and replowed, and I have very little to add to the work of actual scholars and literary critics. There's really two things everyone has heard about him: first, even by the standards of the era in which he lived and worked, Lovecraft had really outlandish views on race; and second, he was prone to write prose which skips right through "purple" and into ultraviolet, possibly even into the X-ray spectrum on occasion. Both of these things are, in fact, absolutely true. There was a third thing which I didn't know about him before reading this omnibus, and that's that he could actually display a sense of humor when he set his mind to it - the story "Sweet Ermengarde" is legitimately funny.
That said, it's possible to read this stuff and come away with inspiration quite aside from the flaws of the source material. He was writing at the right time to have a theme about a pitiless and indifferent universe. I don't know if there's really a fine dividing line between horror and cosmic horror, but serial killers and your basic monsters are horror; fighting them may be tough, but you can see your angle. The ocean or the force of gravity are cosmic horror; if the ocean drowns you it's not like it hates you, it doesn't even have what you could regard as a mind to hate you with. It just doesn't care. Lovecraft mined that feeling so well, everyone who's anyone in the fantasy/SF field has written at least one Lovecraft pastiche and many of them are better at it than he was himself.
But, you know, Sturgeon's Law applies to that as well as to anything else. There's a possibly undeserved reputation that Lovecraft-style horror stories will be narrated by a protagonist writing to a journal just before they commit suicide, go mad, or are slain by a horrible cult, about how they ended up in the situation that they are in. I say "possibly" because that actually does happen a bit. It even ends up a bit here, in this two-volume collection of various stories by a wide variety of authors. Despite the title, the stories aren't all about Cthulhu or even about named monsters from the Mythos, although many are.
The authors here run the gamut and so do the stories themselves. There are some that are pure horror. Some that take a different tack and go for pure comedy. Others go for both (Joe R. Lansdale's story, quoted above, is a prime example of that.) They take place in many settings - dead cities on alien worlds, live cities on alien worlds, dead cities on Earth, Mexico in the 1950s, post-Civil War East Texas, present day New York City, Massachusetts in Lovecraft's time, a futuristic interplanetary space pirate ship. Some name-drop H.P. himself as an author, or as a visionary; some don't have anything to say about him at all. You get some that delve into where exactly all these evil cults come from, some that take them as a given, some that ignore them entirely. And of course there's some that end humanity when the stars come right - and some that give humans another day to carry on.
I can't say that every story in the collections is a complete winner, but there are some extremely good ones overall and even the more disappointing ones are usually only that way by comparison. I didn't really know that I was in the mood to read something like this, but I ended up having more fun reading these stories than pretty much anything else I've been trying to get through lately. In short, if this remotely sounds like something you'd be interested in, you probably will be.
-From "The Crawling Sky" by Joe R. Lansdale
There's a lot of things you can say about H.P. Lovecraft, many of them negative. I ended up getting a copy of his complete works during the sale when Borders went out of business. It's a pretty nice book, too, hardbound with a built-in bookmark and fancy pagework, with some editorial commentary in there to help make sense of it all. I couldn't afford the edition bound in human flesh, but that's okay since they don't really do basements in North Texas and I couldn't give such a volume the solemn, freaky crypt that it deserves. And so it sat, for some time, as I found excuses to do many other things rather than read it. Finally, back in July 2015, I actually read through it. And . . . it was pretty okay? I guess? I mean, I'd read "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Colour Out of Space" before, so I knew what I was getting into there, and some of the others were about as tedious as I expected. But although I wouldn't end up describing myself as a fan, I found some of the stories ended up growing on me.
I don't really think that I have much to say on the subject of Lovecraft himself, aside from just a few generalities. That field has been plowed and planted and replowed, and I have very little to add to the work of actual scholars and literary critics. There's really two things everyone has heard about him: first, even by the standards of the era in which he lived and worked, Lovecraft had really outlandish views on race; and second, he was prone to write prose which skips right through "purple" and into ultraviolet, possibly even into the X-ray spectrum on occasion. Both of these things are, in fact, absolutely true. There was a third thing which I didn't know about him before reading this omnibus, and that's that he could actually display a sense of humor when he set his mind to it - the story "Sweet Ermengarde" is legitimately funny.
That said, it's possible to read this stuff and come away with inspiration quite aside from the flaws of the source material. He was writing at the right time to have a theme about a pitiless and indifferent universe. I don't know if there's really a fine dividing line between horror and cosmic horror, but serial killers and your basic monsters are horror; fighting them may be tough, but you can see your angle. The ocean or the force of gravity are cosmic horror; if the ocean drowns you it's not like it hates you, it doesn't even have what you could regard as a mind to hate you with. It just doesn't care. Lovecraft mined that feeling so well, everyone who's anyone in the fantasy/SF field has written at least one Lovecraft pastiche and many of them are better at it than he was himself.
But, you know, Sturgeon's Law applies to that as well as to anything else. There's a possibly undeserved reputation that Lovecraft-style horror stories will be narrated by a protagonist writing to a journal just before they commit suicide, go mad, or are slain by a horrible cult, about how they ended up in the situation that they are in. I say "possibly" because that actually does happen a bit. It even ends up a bit here, in this two-volume collection of various stories by a wide variety of authors. Despite the title, the stories aren't all about Cthulhu or even about named monsters from the Mythos, although many are.
The authors here run the gamut and so do the stories themselves. There are some that are pure horror. Some that take a different tack and go for pure comedy. Others go for both (Joe R. Lansdale's story, quoted above, is a prime example of that.) They take place in many settings - dead cities on alien worlds, live cities on alien worlds, dead cities on Earth, Mexico in the 1950s, post-Civil War East Texas, present day New York City, Massachusetts in Lovecraft's time, a futuristic interplanetary space pirate ship. Some name-drop H.P. himself as an author, or as a visionary; some don't have anything to say about him at all. You get some that delve into where exactly all these evil cults come from, some that take them as a given, some that ignore them entirely. And of course there's some that end humanity when the stars come right - and some that give humans another day to carry on.
I can't say that every story in the collections is a complete winner, but there are some extremely good ones overall and even the more disappointing ones are usually only that way by comparison. I didn't really know that I was in the mood to read something like this, but I ended up having more fun reading these stories than pretty much anything else I've been trying to get through lately. In short, if this remotely sounds like something you'd be interested in, you probably will be.
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