Countdown to Hallowe'en 2016
- Thread starter Hobbit
- Start date
Hi, Mark. If I'd known you'd reviewed it, I'd have supplied a link. Looking around, though, I haven't found it.
But, while looking around, I saw your review of "Who Goes There?" Nicely done, as usual.
Randy M.
But, while looking around, I saw your review of "Who Goes There?" Nicely done, as usual.
Randy M.
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Just finished Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts. Wow. Very clever.
Ooooh. I know I wrote it. I'm going to have to look around for it now.
If you find it, by all means add a link here, Mark.
I'll be discussing the Tremblay in the next couple of weeks. It is clever, also affecting and thought-provoking. An easy read, even so it's the most complex book I've read in the last year or two.
Randy M.
I'll be discussing the Tremblay in the next couple of weeks. It is clever, also affecting and thought-provoking. An easy read, even so it's the most complex book I've read in the last year or two.
Randy M.
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Looking forward to reading what you think. The ending is certainly a twist, which made me keep thinking about the book after I'd finished it (and just when I'd thought I'd worked out what was going on.) Subtle and clever - I had to reread the ending just to make sure I'd got it.
Has the US edition got notes at the back from Paul? Made interesting reading, too.
It's the first novel in a long time that I was tempted to re-start from the beginning after finishing. I think there were things I missed, but I may give it a little time before a reread.
I did get the pb and it had the notes. His thoughts on horror, particularly horror dealing with possession were very interesting. His selection of other works worth looking into were good, too. I don't have it with me so can't check the list, but shortly after I saw his recommendation of Session 9 it happened to be on one of our pay channels. Very good. Really good. And for anyone generally put off by David Caruso, he can act when forced to, and he's solid in this as is Josh Lucas and the rest of cast, though they were lesser-known.
Randy M.
I did get the pb and it had the notes. His thoughts on horror, particularly horror dealing with possession were very interesting. His selection of other works worth looking into were good, too. I don't have it with me so can't check the list, but shortly after I saw his recommendation of Session 9 it happened to be on one of our pay channels. Very good. Really good. And for anyone generally put off by David Caruso, he can act when forced to, and he's solid in this as is Josh Lucas and the rest of cast, though they were lesser-known.
Randy M.
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- Jul 16, 2001
- Messages
- 18,438
And speaking of the land of Lovecraft, where lots of recent writers are roaming, let’s pull out an oldie …
The Black Wolf by Galad Elflandsson (1980, Centaur Books)
All Paul Damon wanted was a fishing vacation. Well, mostly he wanted time away from the city to relax and if the fish bit, all the better. But there he is on the steps of Daley’s General Store in June of 19--, and Corey Thatcher ranting at the townsfolk to leave and never come back, and apparently not for the first time. The Thatchers, richest family around those parts, have been, to put it mildly, eccentric since first arriving.
The owner of Daley’s tells Damon the Thatcher family history, of how the earliest Thatcher, Elias, formerly a ship’s captain, had met his wife on an island during his voyages, decided to settle, brought his young bride to town and built a fine house. But the family had odd ways and the townspeople grew wary of them. Seems there was howling in the night in the vicinity of the Elias’ homestead and rumors of more unsettling practices, and then there were disappearances and the antagonism between Thatcher and his neighbors grew until it led to violence, the consequences of which are coming due: There is a force rising, gathering strength and summoning allies, and that force wants revenge on the people of Thatcher’s Ferry.
As trouble and violence brew, Damon cannot in good conscience leave the townsfolk to their fate and has to tap into all the resourcefulness and courage he showed in the Great War to help them fight an implacable foe. In the process he learns the dangerous and abhorrent secrets of the Thatchers.
When he was creating his mythos, H. P. Lovecraft invited other writers to join him, thus stories like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos,” Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone,” Robert Bloch’s “The Unspeakable Betrothal” and later additions like Bloch’s “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” and “The Tugging,” and Fritz Leiber’s “The Terror from the Depths.”
A few writers attempted novel-length works with limited success artistically like Basil Copper’s The Great White Space and Bloch’s Strange Eons. But Elflandsson touched a nerve with The Black Wolf, many Lovecraft fans praising it. In his introduction, Charles M. Collins brings comparisons to Robert W. Chambers, Poe, Arthur Machen, and others. The novel doesn’t bear up under the weight of those expectations. To me Elflandsson’s novelreads rather as though an admirer of Manly Wade Wellman decided to pit a small town and its outdoorsmen against Lovecraftian powers and force them to defend themselves, and at that level the book is successful entertainment, well-paced and involving. If you come to it unaware of its reputation or willing to give it a fair reading, this is a fun, pulpy mash-up of werewolvery and Lovecraftian shenanigans, not exactly frightening, but often suspenseful and well-imagined and rendered, and maybe just the right reading for a dark Halloween night.
Other enjoyable Lovecraftian novels:
Southern Gods by John Horner Jacobs
The Mall of Cthulhu by Seamus Cooper
The Black Wolf by Galad Elflandsson (1980, Centaur Books)
“It’s easy for you to shrug when you hear my name and say, ‘Corey Thatcher is mad.’ It’s easy for you to dismiss all the things I’ve said as the ravings of a lunatic. … But I’m not mad and I’m warning you this one last time to leave Thatcher’s Ferry. If you refuse to heed my warning, then you’ll learn at first hand I was right. …”
– from the first paragraph
All Paul Damon wanted was a fishing vacation. Well, mostly he wanted time away from the city to relax and if the fish bit, all the better. But there he is on the steps of Daley’s General Store in June of 19--, and Corey Thatcher ranting at the townsfolk to leave and never come back, and apparently not for the first time. The Thatchers, richest family around those parts, have been, to put it mildly, eccentric since first arriving.
The owner of Daley’s tells Damon the Thatcher family history, of how the earliest Thatcher, Elias, formerly a ship’s captain, had met his wife on an island during his voyages, decided to settle, brought his young bride to town and built a fine house. But the family had odd ways and the townspeople grew wary of them. Seems there was howling in the night in the vicinity of the Elias’ homestead and rumors of more unsettling practices, and then there were disappearances and the antagonism between Thatcher and his neighbors grew until it led to violence, the consequences of which are coming due: There is a force rising, gathering strength and summoning allies, and that force wants revenge on the people of Thatcher’s Ferry.
As trouble and violence brew, Damon cannot in good conscience leave the townsfolk to their fate and has to tap into all the resourcefulness and courage he showed in the Great War to help them fight an implacable foe. In the process he learns the dangerous and abhorrent secrets of the Thatchers.
When he was creating his mythos, H. P. Lovecraft invited other writers to join him, thus stories like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos,” Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone,” Robert Bloch’s “The Unspeakable Betrothal” and later additions like Bloch’s “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” and “The Tugging,” and Fritz Leiber’s “The Terror from the Depths.”
A few writers attempted novel-length works with limited success artistically like Basil Copper’s The Great White Space and Bloch’s Strange Eons. But Elflandsson touched a nerve with The Black Wolf, many Lovecraft fans praising it. In his introduction, Charles M. Collins brings comparisons to Robert W. Chambers, Poe, Arthur Machen, and others. The novel doesn’t bear up under the weight of those expectations. To me Elflandsson’s novelreads rather as though an admirer of Manly Wade Wellman decided to pit a small town and its outdoorsmen against Lovecraftian powers and force them to defend themselves, and at that level the book is successful entertainment, well-paced and involving. If you come to it unaware of its reputation or willing to give it a fair reading, this is a fun, pulpy mash-up of werewolvery and Lovecraftian shenanigans, not exactly frightening, but often suspenseful and well-imagined and rendered, and maybe just the right reading for a dark Halloween night.
Other enjoyable Lovecraftian novels:
Southern Gods by John Horner Jacobs
The Mall of Cthulhu by Seamus Cooper
“THE HORROR AT RED HOOK” by H. P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, 1927)
Some visions break you. Thomas Malone, New York City police detective, had such a vision and the story starts with him recuperating in rural New England, but still mindful of his experience, his terror easily triggered.
Just before and during a rash of kidnappings and disappearances in the Red Hook district of New York City, Robert Suydam transforms from portly to svelte, and from distracted scholar to sharply in the moment as he slyly parries his relatives’ attempts to institutionalize him. The change appears to stem from his latest line of study, the moldering tomes he’s bought and imported connected to ancient beliefs and their attendant and loathsome rites.
Investigating the kidnappings and disappearances, Malone, a man sensitive to intimations of powers beyond our own, suffers dreams suggesting horrors. Inevitably, Malone and Suydam must meet and when they do Malone glimpses the source of Suydam’s metamorphosis.
Based on his short residence in Brooklyn, this is one of the least of Lovecraft’s works and also one of his most overtly racist. His frequent descriptions of the “Syrian, Spanish, Italian and negro elements” inhabiting Red Hook and the implication of their degradation and unsavory character can easily make readers today gnash her or his teeth. But even Malone isn’t allowed off the … um … hook since Lovecraft attributes his sensitivity to his Celtic ancestry. Though “The Horror at Red Hook” is unsuccessful and even repellant as a story, it features some strong images and, in Robert Suydam, a villain who draws the reader’s attention.
Lovecraft’s imagination and creation still exerts a pull on contemporary writers, even some who because of his stated beliefs objected to his bust as the World Fantasy Award, and maybe that’s why several recently published works incorporating Lovecraft and his mythos examine, analyze and challenge the problematic features of his work. Two have specifically adapted “The Horror of Red Hook” to their purposes. One of those writers is Victor LaValle.
THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM by Victor LaValle (2016, Tor)
Charles Thomas Tester is, among other things, a low-level dealer in rare objects living in Harlem and a young man who knows a few things; for instance, when travelling on the subway carrying a guitar case makes you less visible to white people; also, don’t try to read The Supreme Alphabet, and when you sell it to Ma Att minus its final page, she will be angered. But $200 is good money in 1920s Harlem and it helps support his blind father. Sometimes Tester’s guitar case even holds a guitar, though he is not an adept player. Still, knowing a few chords allows him to con people out of money, which leads to meeting Robert Suydam.
Robert Suydam also has interests in the occult, his scholarship escalating with his investments into ancient tomes of forgotten lore. Rumors about him have reached the police and they are following him when he hears Tester playing guitar and he invites Tester to his house to play for his guests the following evening. Once Suydam moves on, Tester meets Thomas Malone.
Thomas Malone, police detective, knows Brooklyn, he has a feel for the Red Hook district, so he knows something is changing, something is coming and he has suspicions about Suydam. Malone also has a sensitivity for the outré, his reading and interests leaning in that direction, so what he feels nags at him. Almost before events start he is investigating, trying to find the source of his unease, impatient with the lack of insight of his ham-handed partner. Why would Suydam stop and talk to a young black guitar player? What is Suydam up to and is he involved with recent disappearances and kidnappings?
Tester’s interactions with Suydam are confusing because Suydam seems not quite of this world and seems to sense something about him, but his interaction with Malone is more disconcerting because Malone sees Tester in a manner unlike other cops, as an individual, though not in a positive way.
If LaValle doesn’t attain the level of cosmic awe Lovecraft strove for, neither did Lovecraft much of the time. What LaValle achieves, and which I would guess was his primary goal, is a sharp sketch of a time and place, overlaying the Lovecraftian cosmic view with a more realistic portrayal of being a Black man in 1920s New York City, contrasting Lovecraft’s attitude toward Red Hook and New York City with the perspective of an inhabitant contemporary with Lovecraft and more aware of street-level politics. The social attitudes on display are all too plausible: Police distrust of Black men and distrust of police by the Black community, and a casual recourse to violence to solve even small problems.
That said, LaValle doesn’t preach, he illustrates the effects on an individual and on a community of institutional racism and unchecked violence, and he portrays the inherent racism of the time so that it resonates with the unfortunate chords still sounded in recent news. And in the course of his story he shows Tester recognizing in the power Suydam seeks an opportunity for himself so as events between Suydam and Malone take their course, hidden from their sight by their low expectations, Tester begins to see a path for himself.
Other Lovecraft inspired novels:
The Mist by Stephen King
We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory
The Croning by Laird Barron
Some visions break you. Thomas Malone, New York City police detective, had such a vision and the story starts with him recuperating in rural New England, but still mindful of his experience, his terror easily triggered.
Just before and during a rash of kidnappings and disappearances in the Red Hook district of New York City, Robert Suydam transforms from portly to svelte, and from distracted scholar to sharply in the moment as he slyly parries his relatives’ attempts to institutionalize him. The change appears to stem from his latest line of study, the moldering tomes he’s bought and imported connected to ancient beliefs and their attendant and loathsome rites.
Investigating the kidnappings and disappearances, Malone, a man sensitive to intimations of powers beyond our own, suffers dreams suggesting horrors. Inevitably, Malone and Suydam must meet and when they do Malone glimpses the source of Suydam’s metamorphosis.
Based on his short residence in Brooklyn, this is one of the least of Lovecraft’s works and also one of his most overtly racist. His frequent descriptions of the “Syrian, Spanish, Italian and negro elements” inhabiting Red Hook and the implication of their degradation and unsavory character can easily make readers today gnash her or his teeth. But even Malone isn’t allowed off the … um … hook since Lovecraft attributes his sensitivity to his Celtic ancestry. Though “The Horror at Red Hook” is unsuccessful and even repellant as a story, it features some strong images and, in Robert Suydam, a villain who draws the reader’s attention.
Lovecraft’s imagination and creation still exerts a pull on contemporary writers, even some who because of his stated beliefs objected to his bust as the World Fantasy Award, and maybe that’s why several recently published works incorporating Lovecraft and his mythos examine, analyze and challenge the problematic features of his work. Two have specifically adapted “The Horror of Red Hook” to their purposes. One of those writers is Victor LaValle.
THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM by Victor LaValle (2016, Tor)
For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings
-- Dedication
… Being inside now, seeing this place truly, was like learning another world existed within – or alongside – the world he’d always known. Worse, all this time he’d been too ignorant to realize it. The idea troubled him like a pinched nerve.
-- from The Ballad of Black Tom
Charles Thomas Tester is, among other things, a low-level dealer in rare objects living in Harlem and a young man who knows a few things; for instance, when travelling on the subway carrying a guitar case makes you less visible to white people; also, don’t try to read The Supreme Alphabet, and when you sell it to Ma Att minus its final page, she will be angered. But $200 is good money in 1920s Harlem and it helps support his blind father. Sometimes Tester’s guitar case even holds a guitar, though he is not an adept player. Still, knowing a few chords allows him to con people out of money, which leads to meeting Robert Suydam.
Robert Suydam also has interests in the occult, his scholarship escalating with his investments into ancient tomes of forgotten lore. Rumors about him have reached the police and they are following him when he hears Tester playing guitar and he invites Tester to his house to play for his guests the following evening. Once Suydam moves on, Tester meets Thomas Malone.
Thomas Malone, police detective, knows Brooklyn, he has a feel for the Red Hook district, so he knows something is changing, something is coming and he has suspicions about Suydam. Malone also has a sensitivity for the outré, his reading and interests leaning in that direction, so what he feels nags at him. Almost before events start he is investigating, trying to find the source of his unease, impatient with the lack of insight of his ham-handed partner. Why would Suydam stop and talk to a young black guitar player? What is Suydam up to and is he involved with recent disappearances and kidnappings?
Tester’s interactions with Suydam are confusing because Suydam seems not quite of this world and seems to sense something about him, but his interaction with Malone is more disconcerting because Malone sees Tester in a manner unlike other cops, as an individual, though not in a positive way.
If LaValle doesn’t attain the level of cosmic awe Lovecraft strove for, neither did Lovecraft much of the time. What LaValle achieves, and which I would guess was his primary goal, is a sharp sketch of a time and place, overlaying the Lovecraftian cosmic view with a more realistic portrayal of being a Black man in 1920s New York City, contrasting Lovecraft’s attitude toward Red Hook and New York City with the perspective of an inhabitant contemporary with Lovecraft and more aware of street-level politics. The social attitudes on display are all too plausible: Police distrust of Black men and distrust of police by the Black community, and a casual recourse to violence to solve even small problems.
That said, LaValle doesn’t preach, he illustrates the effects on an individual and on a community of institutional racism and unchecked violence, and he portrays the inherent racism of the time so that it resonates with the unfortunate chords still sounded in recent news. And in the course of his story he shows Tester recognizing in the power Suydam seeks an opportunity for himself so as events between Suydam and Malone take their course, hidden from their sight by their low expectations, Tester begins to see a path for himself.
Other Lovecraft inspired novels:
The Mist by Stephen King
We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory
The Croning by Laird Barron
(See also, The Croning reviewed by George Anadiotis)
Hi Randy and Mark
I've just started Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children.
Based on your recommendations I bought 'Headful of Ghosts' and from the library borrowed a lovely 2016 hardback sf masterworks edition of The Midwich Cuckoos. I have a vague memory from childhood being allowed to stay up late watching Village of the Damned so am looking forward to reconnecting with my inner kid!
I'm waiting on 2nd hand DVDs of Session 9 and The Borderlands.
I've just started Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children.
Based on your recommendations I bought 'Headful of Ghosts' and from the library borrowed a lovely 2016 hardback sf masterworks edition of The Midwich Cuckoos. I have a vague memory from childhood being allowed to stay up late watching Village of the Damned so am looking forward to reconnecting with my inner kid!
I'm waiting on 2nd hand DVDs of Session 9 and The Borderlands.
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Hi Ubergeek!
Really hope you enjoy what you've borrowed, and that we've not given you false hope! We're in the process of interviewing Paul Tremblay for the countdown, which we're hoping will happen soon...
Still can't find my review of it, which I did for the blog, I think, back when we used to have a separate one. Still think this is appropriate!
Still gives me chills!
Like you, I saw it when I was little - never forgot it.
Here I've read Susan Hill's latest story collection, The Travelling Bag - good, but not perfect - and am now reading a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu crossover novel. (It shouldn't work, but so far it's been surprisingly good!)
Really hope you enjoy what you've borrowed, and that we've not given you false hope! We're in the process of interviewing Paul Tremblay for the countdown, which we're hoping will happen soon...
Yeah, I still haven't read that one. And I've had quite a few people tell me they think I'd like it. I really should....
Yes, I know that one.
Still can't find my review of it, which I did for the blog, I think, back when we used to have a separate one. Still think this is appropriate! Still gives me chills!
Like you, I saw it when I was little - never forgot it.
Here I've read Susan Hill's latest story collection, The Travelling Bag - good, but not perfect - and am now reading a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu crossover novel. (It shouldn't work, but so far it's been surprisingly good!)
A sherlock holmes/cthulhu mash-up. I'm intrigued!Hi Ubergeek!
Really hope you enjoy what you've borrowed, and that we've not given you false hope! We're in the process of interviewing Paul Tremblay for the countdown, which we're hoping will happen soon...
Yeah, I still haven't read that one. And I've had quite a few people tell me they think I'd like it. I really should....
Yes, I know that one.
View attachment 434
Still gives me chills!
Like you, I saw it when I was little - never forgot it.
Here I've read Susan Hill's latest story collection, The Travelling Bag - good, but not perfect - and am now reading a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu crossover novel. (It shouldn't work, but so far it's been surprisingly good!)
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2001
- Messages
- 18,438
It's called Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove. Out here in the UK in November. So far I've been impressed by how much the tone of the original Conan Doyle is used, though these are darker. Written (allegedly) by Dr Watson, they are the 'real' unexpurgated story of what Homes was really fighting against when he was doing all those things that we know through the Conan Doyle canon. Here are the tales that they didn't want to scare readers of the 1890's with.... much better than I was expecting (so far.)
Another writer tapping into “The Horror at Red Hook” is Jonathan L. Howard.
Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard (2015, St. Martin’s Press)
Daniel Carter, former detective, quit the force after watching Charlie Hammond kill himself. Daniel and Charlie had just moments before cornered, and Hammond had shot, Martin Suydam, the serial killer known as Child-Catcher. As Suydam lay laughing and dying, Carter began searching for the most recent kidnap victim and upon returning found Charlie laughing and crying, and too late to stop his partner from putting his service weapon in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
Months pass, dreams of that night recur and his memory of Suydam’s psycho wall, a rare find outside movies and TV shows, includes a sense of underlying meaning in the pictures and crisscrossing strings pinned there. Unable to shake his funk Carter quits to become a private investigator. Not a great life and not lucrative, but he’s his own boss when the eccentric Henry Weston of the prestigious law firm of Weston Edmunds finds him and informs him he is now the owner of Alfred Hill’s residence in Providence. Carter is confused since he didn’t know Hill and, oh, yeah, Hill disappeared seven years ago and so is presumed dead under the law. Carter’s cop instincts go on red alert.
Weston didn’t mention that Hill resided above his business or that Hill’s niece, Emily, has been running the business in Hill’s absence. And so, when Carter reluctantly goes to Providence, a city he dislikes, he finds he owns a bookstore and he meets Emily Lovecraft, a young African-American woman well aware of the racist tendencies of her distant relative, H. P. Lovecraft, and rather smugly pleased at the disquiet her existence would have caused the old gent. She’s also aware of the significance of the name Carter.
Carter has been set up, not knowing that his own ancestor, Randolph Carter, by most people believed to be a fictional character in Lovecraft’s stories, was a real person who shared occult knowledge with H.P. Lovecraft. Soon these younger Carter and Lovecraft have to work together to learn what their forefathers knew and try to stem another threat from Outside.
Howard’s writing is spare and moves the story along at a good pace. The novel is as full of incident and event as any good mystery as Lovecraft and Carter try to understand what they are facing while contending with a rich, vapid young politician, a graduate student with supernatural powers, and an old, seemingly devolved family planted on a spit of land along Waite Road biding their time until the world turns into what they want instead of what it is.
Like Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Howard’s story springs from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” and Howard's approach to the racism in the story is more off-hand and oblique than LaValle's, alluding to it then going on, creating in Emily Lovecraft a character intelligent, knowledgeable, tenacious and courageous; her rapport and partnership with Carter grows with believable ebb and flow as the story continues.
As supernatural adventure/mysteries go, this is a good, fun read and I would not be surprised to learn Howard is writing a sequel; it almost demands one.
Other Lovecraft-inspired novels:
The Croning by Laird Barron
The Red Tree & The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan
Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard (2015, St. Martin’s Press)
And there it was. Right there. An actual psycho wall.
-- from Carter & Lovecraft
Daniel Carter, former detective, quit the force after watching Charlie Hammond kill himself. Daniel and Charlie had just moments before cornered, and Hammond had shot, Martin Suydam, the serial killer known as Child-Catcher. As Suydam lay laughing and dying, Carter began searching for the most recent kidnap victim and upon returning found Charlie laughing and crying, and too late to stop his partner from putting his service weapon in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
Months pass, dreams of that night recur and his memory of Suydam’s psycho wall, a rare find outside movies and TV shows, includes a sense of underlying meaning in the pictures and crisscrossing strings pinned there. Unable to shake his funk Carter quits to become a private investigator. Not a great life and not lucrative, but he’s his own boss when the eccentric Henry Weston of the prestigious law firm of Weston Edmunds finds him and informs him he is now the owner of Alfred Hill’s residence in Providence. Carter is confused since he didn’t know Hill and, oh, yeah, Hill disappeared seven years ago and so is presumed dead under the law. Carter’s cop instincts go on red alert.
Weston didn’t mention that Hill resided above his business or that Hill’s niece, Emily, has been running the business in Hill’s absence. And so, when Carter reluctantly goes to Providence, a city he dislikes, he finds he owns a bookstore and he meets Emily Lovecraft, a young African-American woman well aware of the racist tendencies of her distant relative, H. P. Lovecraft, and rather smugly pleased at the disquiet her existence would have caused the old gent. She’s also aware of the significance of the name Carter.
Carter has been set up, not knowing that his own ancestor, Randolph Carter, by most people believed to be a fictional character in Lovecraft’s stories, was a real person who shared occult knowledge with H.P. Lovecraft. Soon these younger Carter and Lovecraft have to work together to learn what their forefathers knew and try to stem another threat from Outside.
Howard’s writing is spare and moves the story along at a good pace. The novel is as full of incident and event as any good mystery as Lovecraft and Carter try to understand what they are facing while contending with a rich, vapid young politician, a graduate student with supernatural powers, and an old, seemingly devolved family planted on a spit of land along Waite Road biding their time until the world turns into what they want instead of what it is.
Like Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Howard’s story springs from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” and Howard's approach to the racism in the story is more off-hand and oblique than LaValle's, alluding to it then going on, creating in Emily Lovecraft a character intelligent, knowledgeable, tenacious and courageous; her rapport and partnership with Carter grows with believable ebb and flow as the story continues.
As supernatural adventure/mysteries go, this is a good, fun read and I would not be surprised to learn Howard is writing a sequel; it almost demands one.
Other Lovecraft-inspired novels:
The Croning by Laird Barron
The Red Tree & The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan
Hi, Mark.
I'll be interested in hearing what you have to say about Lovegrove's Sherlock Holmes novel. He's written a couple of other Holmes pastiches (minus the Lovecraft influence, I believe) that looked interesting. Mount TBR contains a novel he co-wrote with Peter Crowther, Escardy Gap, that's won high praise in some quarters, so I'm aware of him as someone I'd like to eventually read. If only there was more time in the day or I was independently wealthy ...
Randy M.
I'll be interested in hearing what you have to say about Lovegrove's Sherlock Holmes novel. He's written a couple of other Holmes pastiches (minus the Lovecraft influence, I believe) that looked interesting. Mount TBR contains a novel he co-wrote with Peter Crowther, Escardy Gap, that's won high praise in some quarters, so I'm aware of him as someone I'd like to eventually read. If only there was more time in the day or I was independently wealthy ...
Randy M.
Proving you can be weird and not be Lovecraft ...
EXPERIMENTAL FILM by Gemma Files (2015, ChiZine Publications)
Lois Cairns is a Canadian film critic, especially passionate about the Canadian experimental film but down on her luck since the Toronto Film Faculty was defunded by the government and she lost her job. That was 2009, the same year her son, Clark, was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and she and Simon, her husband, became Clark’s intermediaries with the world. She has continued writing, though, mainly film reviews for low circulation, niche venues specializing in the discussion of Canadian experimental films. Feeling ineffective and inadequate as a mother and unsure of how Clark feels about her, her passion for film acts as an outlet for her creative energy and also a distraction from and evasion of the pressures of coping with Clark’s condition.
Invited to its premiere, Lois sees a short film by Wrob Barney, a filmmaker whose past work she found derivative and trite. Barney makes extensive use of clips from other movies and in this film he incorporates scenes that startle Lois; she is positive they come from an older film maker, someone from the silent era, possibly the first woman director of Canadian film; a potentially historic find. Further, something about the ghostly imagery of a towering woman in white sliding into an outdoor scene from nowhere fascinates Lois and is even somehow familiar.
Both obsessive and an insomniac, that night as her family sleeps Lois digs through her belongings until she uncovers an old textbook. The book falls open to the spot she’s read most, “Lady Midday : A Fairy Tale of the Wends” collected and translated by A. Macalla Whitcomb. The fairy tale tells of a boy visited by Lady Midday, who arrives between the minute and the hour of noon, and how the boy through diligence at his work and courtesy toward her evades her displeasure while a man who shows neither has his head lopped off by her blazing sword.
Lois is consumed by the mystery behind these clips. As her health deteriorates under an onslaught of migraines, she digs for information to find where Barney uncovered the footage, and the history of A. Macalla Whitcomb, writer, filmmaker, occultist, wife of a doting millionaire who financed her creative endeavors even after leaving her, and whose disappearance remains unsolved, a disappearance from a moving train while watching one of her own films leaving behind a scorched sleeping cab.
I doubt there’s a bigger cliché in reviewing than, “compulsively readable,” but every so often a book fits the phrase. Granted, stories about films and film-making are catnip to me, there is also a mystery to solve, breathless moments offered in compact, focused scenes and a gradually developed evocation of a force that desires entry into the world, and whose entry portends disaster for anyone involved. But what makes this an exceptional novel of the supernatural is the focus on family, which grounds the story in the reality of a household under stress and presents a son, a husband and a mother who revolve around the narrator, Lois, whose insecurities both drive and undermine her as she tries to accept that she is loved and supported even when she can’t quite grasp why. Lois’ interaction with Clark and Simon, and the prickly moments with her own mother lend the novel a lightly worn gravity that gives the threat to the family and particularly to Lois weight and importance.
Other film-related horror:
Flicker by Theodore Roszak
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
(haven’t read these two, but both have been critically acclaimed and fan praised)
The Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell
Shadow of the Vampire, 2000, dir. E. Elias Merhige; starring John Malkovich, Willem Defoe
Hell Train by Christopher Fowler
“Whitstable” by Steven Volk
[I originally wrote on this, “If you only read one horror novel this year …” but I have to amend that to, “If you only read two horror novels this year, this should be one of them” because as good as this is, the next one I’ll bring up is at least as good and I think maybe a bit better.]
EXPERIMENTAL FILM by Gemma Files (2015, ChiZine Publications)
In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.
-- from Experimental Film
Lois Cairns is a Canadian film critic, especially passionate about the Canadian experimental film but down on her luck since the Toronto Film Faculty was defunded by the government and she lost her job. That was 2009, the same year her son, Clark, was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and she and Simon, her husband, became Clark’s intermediaries with the world. She has continued writing, though, mainly film reviews for low circulation, niche venues specializing in the discussion of Canadian experimental films. Feeling ineffective and inadequate as a mother and unsure of how Clark feels about her, her passion for film acts as an outlet for her creative energy and also a distraction from and evasion of the pressures of coping with Clark’s condition.
Invited to its premiere, Lois sees a short film by Wrob Barney, a filmmaker whose past work she found derivative and trite. Barney makes extensive use of clips from other movies and in this film he incorporates scenes that startle Lois; she is positive they come from an older film maker, someone from the silent era, possibly the first woman director of Canadian film; a potentially historic find. Further, something about the ghostly imagery of a towering woman in white sliding into an outdoor scene from nowhere fascinates Lois and is even somehow familiar.
Both obsessive and an insomniac, that night as her family sleeps Lois digs through her belongings until she uncovers an old textbook. The book falls open to the spot she’s read most, “Lady Midday : A Fairy Tale of the Wends” collected and translated by A. Macalla Whitcomb. The fairy tale tells of a boy visited by Lady Midday, who arrives between the minute and the hour of noon, and how the boy through diligence at his work and courtesy toward her evades her displeasure while a man who shows neither has his head lopped off by her blazing sword.
Lois is consumed by the mystery behind these clips. As her health deteriorates under an onslaught of migraines, she digs for information to find where Barney uncovered the footage, and the history of A. Macalla Whitcomb, writer, filmmaker, occultist, wife of a doting millionaire who financed her creative endeavors even after leaving her, and whose disappearance remains unsolved, a disappearance from a moving train while watching one of her own films leaving behind a scorched sleeping cab.
I doubt there’s a bigger cliché in reviewing than, “compulsively readable,” but every so often a book fits the phrase. Granted, stories about films and film-making are catnip to me, there is also a mystery to solve, breathless moments offered in compact, focused scenes and a gradually developed evocation of a force that desires entry into the world, and whose entry portends disaster for anyone involved. But what makes this an exceptional novel of the supernatural is the focus on family, which grounds the story in the reality of a household under stress and presents a son, a husband and a mother who revolve around the narrator, Lois, whose insecurities both drive and undermine her as she tries to accept that she is loved and supported even when she can’t quite grasp why. Lois’ interaction with Clark and Simon, and the prickly moments with her own mother lend the novel a lightly worn gravity that gives the threat to the family and particularly to Lois weight and importance.
Other film-related horror:
Flicker by Theodore Roszak
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
(haven’t read these two, but both have been critically acclaimed and fan praised)
The Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell
Shadow of the Vampire, 2000, dir. E. Elias Merhige; starring John Malkovich, Willem Defoe
Hell Train by Christopher Fowler
“Whitstable” by Steven Volk
[I originally wrote on this, “If you only read one horror novel this year …” but I have to amend that to, “If you only read two horror novels this year, this should be one of them” because as good as this is, the next one I’ll bring up is at least as good and I think maybe a bit better.]
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2001
- Messages
- 18,438
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2001
- Messages
- 18,438
Must admit, I looked at those before, and didn't go further. I now think I will go back and read them!
I'm really impressed with this one, at about 60% through. Didn't think it was going to work, but it really does (so far).
Think I know what that one is!!
We may even have a double review pending.
M.
Yup. I think you do know which one that is.
Randy M.
Alchemist
Registered User
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2007
- Messages
- 1,117
Finally dug into some Arthur Machen, his longish short story (almost novelette) "The Inmost Light." I liked it a lot - very understated, with only hintings of the supernatural. I must say it is refreshing to "reboot" to a simpler time, when horror, wonder, and awe were inspired through subtlety and not obviousness--gore, outright fear, etc.
Next up I'm going to read another Machen story, his classic "The White People." After that I'll probably read a story or two by Algernon Blackwood, but am sure I'll come back to Machen.
Next up I'm going to read another Machen story, his classic "The White People." After that I'll probably read a story or two by Algernon Blackwood, but am sure I'll come back to Machen.
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