2010: Week 50 Blots

BLOT: (19 Dec 2010 - 02:40:20 PM)

What does the S.T. Joshi edited anthology have to say about Lovecraftian Horror? A review

In The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, S.T. Joshi accomplishes two primary things. First off, he gives us probably the best summation of H.P. Lovecraft and his "successors" (some more literal than others...I think pun intended) that has ever been put to pages and secondly, he manages to convey his great dissatisfaction with the majority of anything ever referred to as Lovecraftian. For those without much time to read but a desire to take in something a bit "bile-ridden", look up the chapter on Brian Lumley. Blimey.

When a leading scholar on Lovecraft* and great disparager of what he sees as faux-Lovecraftian tendency going as far back as August Derleth puts out an anthology that is a collection of brand-new mythos tales selected by himself, you take notice. While this could be like getting a mixed tape from a music-ranting hipster and finding out that is 70' of slow-beat electronic pap backed by nonsensical lyrics and whining, it could also be like a guru of 1980s era tunes laying some sublime post-punk on you and you realize that there was more to love than even your Rick Astley adoring self had ever dreamed. It could be a celebration or a pie-in-the-face moment. Either way, you—the reader—are a winner.

Rest assured, fair Lovecraftian readers, Black Wings, Joshi's "Tales of the Lovecraftian Mythos", is a celebration. Not so much of Lovecraftian form (very few hyphenated adverbs), but of theme and approach. Somewhat. Because Joshi lays bare the fact that since endless namedropping Elder Gods and their eldritch tomes becomes painful pastiche, the heart of Lovecraftian ideals as translated into modern horror is much more an embracing of a theme. An idea that humanity is not alone, that the Universe does not care, that it might be a bit sinister, and that this sinisterness extrudes right into the edge of every day life. Again, somewhat, because of the slightly more than 20 tales, nearly all of them focus directly on personal horror. Which seems antithetical to all those practically nameless and faceless Lovecraft protagonists. He was a writer of ideas, and occasionally forgot things like plot and characters along the way.

In many ways, this is much closer to "Tales of Horror Which Mostly Only Exist Because Lovecraft Helped Us to Understand New Concepts in Horror, Oh, and Some Have Mythos Elements." This is not a complaint, the stories are generally good to great and you never have to ask, "Now, what is *this* story doing here?". It is just a statement about the question of what makes Lovecraftian Lovecraftian. Great elder things lurking in the shadows of history? Dark tomes? Epistolatory expositions? A sense of creeping dread? Stark Cosmic Horror? Black Wings reaffirms the fact that you cannot really say *what* Lovecraftian horror is, but you will know it when you read it.**

[Note, for those wanting to skip discussions of the individual stories and just to get the review of the book as a whole, skip here to the last paragraph.] What of the stories themselves, that the make the volume worth buying? They are all over the place but there are some interesting themes and patterns that develop. "Desert Dreams" (Donald Burleson) and "The Dome" (Mollie Burleson***) are straightforward Lovecraft small-bites where things are being talked about and oh, the horrors are real(!). The former is superior to the latter, but mostly because the latter barely rises above outright derivation. There's this dome, see, and it opens up and something with tentacles comes through, partially, and we are supposed to gasp. I would probably consider "The Dome" to be the low point of the book, though you have to realize that I am largely saying this due to it being the most like the sort of things plenty of Lovecraftians have already written. It wouldn't be out of place in The Watchers Out of Time. Another straightforward one, "Tunnels" by Phillip Haldeman, comes across as a little less pastiche but is still easily assigned to this first category.

Two play with crimes and those who commit them: Michael Shea's "Copping Squid" and Joseph S. Pulver's "Engravings". "Squid" is the more interesting because it answers the question about why do cultists do it by asking: "Why do drug users do drugs? Don't they know it will only destroy them?" "Engravings" on the other hand is about a man making a desperate delivery and is much better in build up than in payoff.

Then you have the quiet desperation of everyday life when it gets interrupted by darker things. "Substitution" (Michael Marshall Smith) about a man who dreams of a woman not his wife and finds the reality a bit disturbing (interestingly could be read as a shout-out to "Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath" but is probably "Shadow over Innsmouth"). William Browning Spencer's "Usurped" is partially about an underwater city that is now in a place that is a desert—the way that certain areas used to be sea bed basins but are now other things—but mostly about the weird way a marriage can become untrusting after a bad thing occurs. And "The Broadsword" is Laird Barron's immaculate descent into the horrors below as experienced by an older man mostly worried about committing to a relationship before he is ready. Strangers show up at his door while he is not around, voices whisper vile things in the air vents of his room, and eventually very not-right things begin to happen, and in some ways it is always about the expectations of relationships and when the right thing or wrong thing occurs. "Howling in the Dark", by Darrell Schweitzer, fits in this category, though it tends to be long on the trope and low in the tooth. A mood piece.

There are two stories that act as sequels to "Pickman's Model". The first, "Pickman's Other Model (1929)" by Caitlin Kiernan is an evocative story about Pickman in other artforms, including the mostly media non grata in Lovecraft's own works: cinema. Stabs itself in the foot, slightly, by making its best bit take place in a dream and largely by just retelling he kick-in-the-pants of the original. With the added bonus of necrophilia. "The Truth about Pickman", the later story by Brian Stapleford is less evocative, probably stronger as far as justifying its need to exist (offering something of an interesting explanation to the original story), but a little less satisfying in the ending which could have went a dozen great places and mostly went to one so-so one.

Joshi identifies W.H. Pugmire's "The Inhabitants of Wraithwood" as another Pickman-centric one, but it is possibly best grouped with Sam Gafford's "Passing Spirits", Jonathan Thomas's "Tempting Providence", and Jason Van Hollander's "Susie" as an exploration of fiction, especially horrific fiction, and the way it consumes real life, occasionally because real life requires such an escape. "Passing Spirits" is the height of this exploration, dealing with a man's descent into a brain-tumor induced escape into the realms of weird fiction. Excellent last line. "Wraithwood" is a good piece; Pugmire mixes up fatalism with the literal implications of being lost in a piece of art. "Susie" will either elicit groans or applause from readers. And, well, "Tempting Providence" as an excellent idea to start—dude trips around the new Providence and laments the changes that Lovecraft would have had to face had he been around to see them, but only gets there after many pages of building descriptions and a couple of mental excursions that come across not altogether hinged. Very slow read. "Rotterdam" (Nicholas Royle) rounds out this theme, and is a mostly inoffensive work kind of about the creative process, about making a movie, and kind of about statues and dead dudes in hotel rooms.

And the rest play with form a bit. "Lesser Demons" (Norman Partridge) is survival horror with a vaguely Lovecraftian vibe. "An Eldritch Matter" (Adam Niswander) is a bit of a dark comedy, kind of a mythos parody of "Metamorphosis". "Violence, Child of Trust" (Michael Cisco) is a back-'n-forth narration by three backwoods-but-cultist brothers who need to make a sacrifice but only have a short time to prepare and no victims...unless they go for someone close... David Schow's "Denker's Book" is a very quick read about infernal engines and hints of their aftermath. Ramsey Campbell even contributes one involving a series of one-way letters and Lovecraft's harshest critic of all: another dreamer who calls him out for not going deeper, or darker enough. Its ending could be said to leave a lot to be desired, if you were so inclined to notice the negative.

If you had to read just five, I would say "The Broadsword" (possibly my favorite in the anthology), "Violence, Child of Trust" (the other likely candidate), "Passing Spirits", "Substitution", and "Copping Squid". If you had to know what to skip, I would include "The Dome" in that for those who have read their share of Lovecraftian anthologies, but not sure what else. I am a big fan of Campbell and what he does in "The Correspondence" is interesting in form but becomes kind of meh by the end and the potential climactic pow misses a mark. So, a Meh story, a handful of Fair stories. a larger handful of Good stories, and a few Great stories. The whole collection is Good and it is easy to look forward to the potential follow-ups that are being hinted about. Not a whole lot of copies of this, probably want to get it before its gone.

* It would only slightly be delving into hyperbole to say that S.T. Joshi is a leading scholar on Lovecraft in the same way that Albert Einstein was a leading scholar on Relativity.

** Apologies to jazz.

*** Until I typed that sentence, I had not noticed the names.

LABEL(s): Horror

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 50
BY MONTH: December 2010

BLOT: (15 Dec 2010 - 09:30:23 PM)

Two awesome videos: the crazy insides of Kowloon city and 270 movie clips from 2010 in 6 minutes with thematic splicing

Working on a story-by-story review of Black Wings that I should post tomorrow. It's a collection of 15-20 (too lazy to count) new stories set in and around various Lovecraftian motifs: mythos, dreamscape, obsessions with the past, artwork, etc. I've greatly enjoyed the collection, and look forward to a Black Wings II coming out, and wanted to get my thoughts down.

Two videos showed up in my Google Reader selection last night and just had to share. I'll just link to the io9 article of the first one: "Incredible claustrophobic footage from inside the Kowloon Walled City". A section of city built around a buddhist temple (apparently, though not show in the video) where housing got tighter and tighter until every bit of space was taken up. Alleyways and roadways were just swallowed by the structure and houses were built on the outside. According to the one of the comments, the temple was still in the middle up until the demolition, and mostly untouched. It was a small temple grove surrounded by artificial light with this catacomb of housing wrapped around it. How flipping cool is that? In my Shadowrun session, the city still stood and was nearby where the player characters lived. Eventually it was going to have to be introduced.

This other one I'll embed. About six minutes long, it features 270 clips from various movies (largely the trailers it looks like) with music and spliced together thematically so they flow together and sometimes are actually set to play off of each other. Kind of fascinating. This is the list of movie clips. The link above, the Youtube page for the video, includes info about the various music used.

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 50
BY MONTH: December 2010

BLOT: (13 Dec 2010 - 03:12:31 PM)

Advertisements and promotions in ebooks are one thing, but in already free books as promotional items? It's like something Jonathan Swift would have written.

The Wall Street Journal looks at the often contentious subject of advertisements being inserted into ebooks. Not only contentious, but I think a largely too tenuous concept. What sort of advertisements? Where at in the book? Do these ads just sit there as plain text or as more advanced interactive bits? Would they require some sort of connectivity just to confirm the advert, or would be they "dumb" adverts that are just attached to sales? Would this be pro-consumer in any way (books for free that wouldn't normally be for free)? How safe would they be to reader's privacy? Too many questions up in the air to get down to brass tacks, but still, three immediate thoughts popped in my head.

#1 Do it and I will hate you. Which is unfair, really, since this could be a good way to help the book industry and to keep book prices down. But no, at the same time, there are very few ways that this could be accomplished that wouldn't make me spit like an old raccoon on a particularly cold morning.

#2 Isn't Stieg Larsson already going this? That man has more references per paragraph to Apple products than Steve Job's future eulogy could possibly have. Each one presented to the reader in loving, carressing detail.

#3 The raison d'être for my #1, above, is summed up in one paragraph in the article.... Namely, this paragraph:

As I said in reply to EReads.com's entry, Oprah's Dickens Selection: a Tale of Two Prices, One of them $0": "Pay a convenience fee to get tickets early to a movie opening on Christmas, just so you can get an already free ebook for free, but with the added benefit of advertisements*? To see a Jack Black movie? That's like the best deal ever. I think I'll take two." I then pointed out, as hinted by the *, that this says promotions, not adverts, so it might actually be codes and whatnot for free movie tickets, however, "but even if these are better than just advertisements to use a service you had to use to get the book to begin with, they are surely going to be time sensitive, meaning you get an ebook that has various codes and deals that are probably expired before you get around to reading it."

I'll do you a favor and list a few of the places where you can get the book without a) a convenience fee or b) spending Christmas watching Jack Black:

• Project Gutenberg (Formats include: Mobi, ePub, HTML, txt...)
• Manybooks.net (Formats include just about anything you want)
• Ebooks @ Adelaide (one of the best places to read well formatted ebooks online, but formats are mostly HTML and ePub)
• Feedbooks (formats: epub, "Kindle", and PDF)
• Amazon (format is the Kindle format)
• Fictionwise (formats include just about anything up to smoke signals).

Sadly, BookGlutton, the online "read at the same time and share notes through a collaborative page...like literally with notes showing up in real time" reading experience did not have one in their free books section. I've not talked about that site for a bit and wanted an excuse.

LABEL(s): Book Publishing

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 50
BY MONTH: December 2010

BLOT: (13 Dec 2010 - 12:24:38 PM)

Take a look at my 27 year old dice...

On the left is an orange twenty-sided die. On the right, a blue six-sider. The orange one has black crayon marked letters, the blue should have white crayon but does not. These are from two of the box-sets from the 1983 revision of the "Basic" Dungeons & Dragons rules. In that year, the "Basic", as opposed to Advanced—aka Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, aka AD&D—which for fifteen or more years was the role-playing game, was released with a pared down rule-set which was neither the original, Chainmail-based rules from the first edition nor the increasingly more complex Advanced rules. Somewhere in between both.

Rather than give you the rules all in one place, it broke them down into five box sets, each not only expanding on a concept of the game but molded around a particular level range of characters. Each set had some player materials and some Dungeon Master material. The first box, which set up the basic rules and concepts of the game, was called, simply enough: Basic. It was for characters levelled 1-3, and was in a red box with red booklets and had orange dice with a black crayon. You got a simple set of six different color themed dice (4-, 6-, 8, 10-, 12-, and 20-sides) and the crayon was so you would color in the numbers yourself (the dice print, as seen in the above blue die, was all one color). I'm not sure if the later sets had any dice, which would be a shame, but at least the first two did: Expert's [level 4-14] was blue with white crayon, and another complete set of six dice.

TSR bounced around a few other versions of the "Basic" rules, culminating in a Rules Cyclopedia that I consider one of my favorite RPG products owned. However, the entrenched racism (all characters from a given character race are not only a given alignment, but have no variation in ability or class), summation of the "goodness" of all human action based on how much they follow law and order, and sometimes widely disproportionate levels of complexity from something like traveling the Planes (strangely simple) to building a castle (in which every little room can mapped out and micromanaged) make it a largely untenable game for more modern role-players. It shows its history as a game originally designed for miniatures and then left behind for a bigger, better flagship product. Still, for simple and old-school RPG fun, it is damn near unbeatable.

By the way, around the 1983 re-write and re-release of the "Basic" D&D, the AD&D line had three core rulebooks. Kind of thin things (maybe 90 pages?), they summed up all you needed to play in a Player's Handbook, a Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. I had two of them, but not the Dungeon Master's Guide, so was never able to play it. I did have the Deities & Demigods sourcebook, which had lots and lots of pantheons to add into your game. Lots. My god. Also, entries like Bast's had boobies showing, which was a revelation to an eight-year-old geek.

LABEL(s): Roleplaying Games.

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 50
BY MONTH: December 2010