I have a friend and co-worker who is such a bibliophile that she'd probably bleed ink were she cut. In one of our conversations, which invariably lead to the subject of books, I mentioned John Bellairs and she said she was a big fan. I then told her that an omnibus edition had been published of Bellairs' fiction for adults, and that it included an unfinished draft of a sequel to The Face in the Frost, the existence of which she was unaware. Well, now I've gone and done it... I feel compelled to lend her my copy of Magic Mirrors. Hey, I know where she works, so the odds that she'll scarper off with it are pretty slim. Now I guess I have to put up a review for the unfinished sequel, the title of which is The Dolphin Cross.
The Face in the Frost is, at its core, the story of an investigation- the protagonists, Prospero and Roger Bacon, become aware of a threat to their (particularly Prospero's) continued well-being, and seek to determine the nature of the threat. Throughout the course of the narrative, they are unsure of the nature of the threat, though they journey on to its potential source in a desperate attempt to counter it.
The Dolphin Cross takes place a few months after the end of The Face in the Frost, after Prospero and Roger Bacon (with some unlooked-for help) have thwarted the evil machinations against them (the nature of the threat is never made explicit). While working outside his improbable house (a line from The Face in the Frost comes to mind- "I do not think, Prospero," he said, "that one should attribute a very high degree of reality to your house."), Prospero becomes aware of the movements of armies throughout the kingdom in which he lives, and he is eventually attacked by a mysterious knight of a singular nature. While catching up with news of local happenings at a nearby tavern, he is separated from his all-important wizard's staff. Thus handicapped, he is unable to fend off another attack and is exiled (like the Prospero you are thinking of) to a remote island. Much of the manuscript is a prison narrative, with Prospero alternately killing time, and devising a means to escape from his captivity. All the while, his sympathetic but unrelenting jailer lets fall snippets of information regarding a new claimant to the throne of the disunited kingdom who seems to wish to bring all of the petty fiefdoms under his rule. Bellairs' description of the disposition of Prospero's country is an inspired bit of lunacy:
The South Kingdom, where Prospero lived, was an insane mélange of tiny princedoms, dukedoms, free cities, fiefs, independent farms, and toll-free bishoprics. The only extant map of the whole domain was done by Abraham Ortelius, cartographer to King Gorm the Wonderworker, the ruler of one of these miniature principalities. The "Measles Map", as it was called in the rather small intellectual community of the South, looked like a picture of something in the last stages of a malignant and disfiguring disease. Blotches of purple rot crept across streams and fields. Pimples and boils popped up everywhere in realistic colors, for when Ortelius had to depict, say, a kingdom within a dukedom within a princedom, he always used pink for the outer ring, red for the next, and bright pustular yellow for the pimple's head. The largest of these nations was about the size of Connecticut, while the smallest was only half an acre. It was called Bedd, and whenever Prospero looked at the map- there was a copy tacked up in his living room- he imagined the crabby old Bishop of Bedd peering over the top of his brass fourposter, threatening all comers to try and do him out of his rightful fief. Or frightful reef. Or something. You couldn't look at the Measles Map for very long without getting the giggles.
So, for much of the narrative, our protagonist sits in lonely exile on a tiny, remote island, until he is able to escape with the aid of a magical MacGuffin which he finds when he makes a thorough search of his environs. Meanwhile, there is a brief interlude in which Roger Bacon discovers that his friend is in danger through the agency of a magic alarm bottle, and departs from his abbey in Scotland. The plot resumes with Prospero safely ashore, where he poses as an itinerant leech-gatherer until he gives his wizardly avocation away by using a trick to cheat at a game, thereby gaining the attention of an angry mob. Escaping the mob, he makes his way to a nearby island where he falls into the clutches of one of Bellairs' most memorable villains, a malignant wizard who calls himself "The Bishop". The scene in which Prospero dines with The Bishop is like a creepy spin on a scene in a "James Bond" movie, in which the spy dines with the supercriminal... the description of the table setting allows Bellairs to indulge in some of his signature creepiness:
What else was there? Hmm. Well, over there was a covered dish of some kind. It was shaped like a duck, with overlapping layers of copper feathers and an ivory bill. One leg was missing. Prospero stared at the thing. For an object that was obviously artificial, it had a very lifelike air. He wondered why. Maybe it was the way the glass eyes caught the firelight. Prospero looked around some more. Near him, behind a small covered dish, stood a sugar bowl shaped like a badger- a badger with the top of his skull cut away. Prospero winced. He had an owl-shaped cookie jar at home, and the head was removable. But he never felt that he was beheading the owl when he reached in to get a cookie. These dishes were obviously made of china, porcelain, and metal, but they all seemed real. And the things they were shaped like were maimed, twisted, mutilated. Prospero felt that he was staring at the display case of a sadistic taxidermist.
The fragment ends with Prospero's escape from The Bishop, and Prospero's parting view of the Bishop's home is another of Bellairs' architectural flights of fancy:
The castle was something to stare at. It looked like what Buckingham Palace might look like if it ever went on a two-week drunk. Essentially, it was a big stone strongbox covered with cornices and pediments and balustrades and balls and vases. But instead of being all triangles and rectangles and squares, as such places usually are, it was droopy crescents and parallelograms and lurching unidentifable shapes. Every angle was out of kilter. Here and there, in niches and in split pediments, Prospero saw busts, and even at this distance he could tell that they were meant to be busts of the Bishop. But some were covered with spider webs and some dripped moss; one was only a half-face split down the middle. The whole building seemed to be afflicted with some horrible stone disease, so that the gray surface was covered with blisters and blotches. A low dome of green copper sprawled across the roof of the building, and from the center of the dome a column of black smoke rose.
The Dolphin Cross went unfinished due to Bellairs' concentration on writing successful children's thrillers (his young adult fiction career began with The House with a Clock in its Walls). The published draft of this, the first third of the book, is a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been. While it's not the equal of The Face in the Frost (it's a draft, so it's not very polished), it does feature Bellairs' trademark blend of humor and horror, though the horror is not quite as unsettling as that in "TFitF". The dangers presented in the plot are more concrete, less existential. There is, though, one moment in which I had to pause in my reading to howl "NOOOO!!!", an experience which most Bellairs fans would no doubt share, especially since the book is unfinished, so the actuality of the plot hook remains up in the air.
Now, here I am, looking at my cherished copy of Magic Mirrors, questioning the wisdom of letting it out of my sight for an instant. I know I can trust my friend, like I said, I know where she works. Yeah, I have to lend it out... I know the exact moment when she'll pause in her reading and howl "NOOOO!!!"
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query bellairs. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query bellairs. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The Book to Which I Alluded Earlier, The Face in the Frost
In an earlier post, I mentioned ordering a book that I'd had my eye on for months. Well, I finally have my hands on Magic Mirrors: The High Fantasy and Low Parody of John Bellairs. John Bellairs was perhaps best known for his supernatural thrillers for children, starting with The House with a Clock in its Walls.
Magic Mirrors begins with The Face in the Frost, published in 1969, a fantasy novel, which manages to be comic and unsettling by turns. The book starts out cheerfully enough, with an elaborate description of the bizarre home of Prospero, the book's protagonist, which would do a Jack Vance proud:
Inside the house were such things as trouble antique-dealers' dreams: a brass St. Bernard with a clock in its side, and a red tongue that went in and out with the ticks as the tail wagged; a five-foot iron statue of a tastefully draped lady playing a violin (the statue was labelled "Inspiration"); mahogany chests covered with leering cherub faces and tiger mouths that bit you if you put your finger in the wrong place; a cherrywood bedstead with a bassoon carved into one of the fat headposts, so that it could be played as you lay in bed and meditated; and much more junk; and deep closets crammed with things that peered out of the darkness off the edges of shelves, frightening the wits out of the wizard as he poked around looking for jars of mandrake root or dwarf hair in aspic. In the long, high living room--heated by a wide-mouthed green-stone fireplace--were the usual paraphernalia of a practicing wizard: alembics, spiraling copper coils, alcohol lamps--all burping, sputtering, and glurping as red, purple, and green liquids boiled, dripped, or just slurched uncertainly in their containers. On a shelf over the experiment table was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put there to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist. One wall of the room was lined with bookshelves, and on them you could find titles such as Six Centuries of English Spells, Nameless Horrors and What to Do About Them, An Answer for Night-Hags, and, of course, the dreaded Krankenhammer of Stefan Schimpf, the mad cobbler of Mainz.
Prospero's peaceful, contemplative life is interrupted by some mildly off-putting phenomena, and the visit of his friend Roger Bacon, who has come to consult with Prospero about a mysterious book that Prospero had asked him about (there's a funny aside as Roger narrates his misadventure with his brazen head). The two embark on an investigation into the provenance of the book, which takes them to the library of another eccentric wizard (a comic interlude, with another humorous allusion to HPL's works), where they realize that an old colleague of Prospero's is behind the phenomena which have been hounding him. This precipitates a perilous errand to obtain a magical bauble co-created by Prospero and his former acquaintance.
After the whimsical opening, Bellairs plunges the reader into some truly unsettling scenes, as the sorcerous attacks on Prospero increase in intensity, and their focus shifts from unnerving the wizard to a more lethal bent. This particular scene gives a taste of Bellairs' ability to put a subtle chill up the reader's spine:
He had not gone a mile when he saw, off in a clearing beyond some beech trees, the light of a campfire. At least there’ll be someone to talk to, he thought, and he stepped off the road into the swishing wet grass. But as Prospero got near the fire, he saw that there was no one tending it and that it was burning in a very strange way. The flames moved back and forth as if blown by suddenly shifting breezes. As he watched, the movement became rhythmical. Prospero looked about him with growing fear, and he noticed that there was a little stream running nearby. He was drawn by what he first took to be a reflection of the firelight on the water. But as he knelt by the stream, he saw that the faint glow came from beneath the surface of the water. There, on the bottom, in a speckled green trembling light, was a smooth triangular stone, and on it was painted his face. The moving water was slowly flaking away the paint, or whatever it was, and the face appeared to be slowly decomposing. He saw a thin film, like a piece of dead skin, wriggle off the portrait-mask and float away down the stream. And the face underneath… Prospero felt his own hands on his wet cheeks.
Against all his instinct, he plunged his own hands into the greasy-feeling, incredibly cold water and picked up the stone. Without looking at it, and holding it at arm’s length as if it were a rotten dead bird, he took it to the fire, which was dancing faster now- it was moving to the rhythm of his own heartbeat. He knew the words that must have been said. “When the fire dies, let him die too.”
He pulled a burning stick out of the fire and held it to the painted stone as he carefully recited a spell he could just barely remember. When the face on the stone was completely blackened, the thing turned into an awful viscous mush in his hand, like a potato left in a damp dark cellar. With a disgusted shudder and a quick jerk of his left arm, Prospero threw the pulpy thing into the stream, where it hit with a gulping sound. Now the whole stream began to boil, and out of the lurching, hissing water rose a smoke shape with arms. It moved toward Prospero and settled around him in swaying layers of mist. He felt as if his eyes were made of blank white chalk. And the thing was throbbing, to pump the life out of him. Prospero stared with open eyes into that stony nothingness, and he shouted a word that sorcerers can only speak a few times in their lives. The whiteness began to break, and he could see night through the cracking clouds. Now he began to speak like someone reciting a lesson: “Michael Scott is buried in Melrose Abbey. A light burns in his tomb day and night. And it is stronger than your freezing white. Go! In his name, go!”
As the narrative moves along, the protagonists realize that their enemy has stumbled upon sorceries that have the power to warp the fabric of reality- night terrors abound, causing a frightened populace to dismantle the social order. In one particularly horrible scene, Bellairs shows that evil need not take a sorcerous form:
“We’re going over to the north to burn that town… Bow…what’s its name?”
“Bishop’s Bowes,” said the innkeeper. “Why are you doing this?”
“We’ve finally figured out what’s going on. Town’s full of evil people. Witches. I have an order here from Duke Harald to burn it to the ground. Here, look at it. Not that you have anything to say in this.”
He unrolled a long parchment that trailed lead and yellow wax seals on twisted strings of skin. The signature, a cross with a letter on each point, was so large that it covered a quarter of the page.
“They deserve it, too,” the leader went on. “You’ve seen the things. Half the people in Wellfont are afraid to go down into their own cellars. Shadows moving, screams from kettles when there isn’t any fire. Well, a little fire’ll teach ‘em. A couple of my men are out getting wood for torches. Do you have any pitch?”
“In the basement. I use it on the roof.”
“That’s fine. We’re going to use it on the roof, too.” He laughed, spitting flecks of brown beer on the muddy floor.
It's tempting to make the point that this was written while the Vietnam War raged, (it was published in the year that the investigations into the My Lai massacre took place so news of My Lai could not have been a direct influence), but, sadly, John Bellairs is not around to verify if this was meant allegorically.
After that particular bit of dialogue, the supernatural horrors seem a little less horrific, although Bellairs still describes them with his characteristic flair:
In the roadside towns, the wizards picked up stories and rumors. One man told how frost formed on the windows at night, though it was only the middle of September. There were no scrolls or intricate fern leaves, no branching overlaid star clusters; instead, people saw seasick wavy lines, disturbing maps that melted into each other and always seemed on the verge of some recognizable but fearful shape. At dawn, the frost melted, always in the same way. At first, two black eyeholes formed, and then a long steam-lipped mouth that spread and ate up the wandering white picture.
If there's one flaw with The Face in the Frost, it is that the climactic confrontation takes place off-stage. At one point, in a twist that will have some readers cringing (but which I loved), a fleeing Prospero stumbles into a most unusual place, and (less felicitously, though Madonna would approve of this) ***SPOILERS REDACTED***. The end is rather abrupt, which is also the major flaw of The House with a Clock in its Walls.
While Magic Mirrors, at $25, is pretty steep in price (I prefer paperbacks anyway), I'd recommend it for any fans of Bellairs' young-adult fiction, fans of the "Harry Potter" books (which I still haven't read), or fans of "weird fiction" who don't mind comic relief (Bellairs' protagonists are the sort of scholarly types that HPL wrote about, though they know what to do about Nameless Horrors). Anybody not into this sort of genre fiction would be better off either ignoring this review, or trying interlibrary loan to get an old Ace Paperbacks edition of The Face in the Frost.
Perhaps, I'll tackle the other portions of the book in a later post. I've been going on about this book for quite some time.
Magic Mirrors begins with The Face in the Frost, published in 1969, a fantasy novel, which manages to be comic and unsettling by turns. The book starts out cheerfully enough, with an elaborate description of the bizarre home of Prospero, the book's protagonist, which would do a Jack Vance proud:
Inside the house were such things as trouble antique-dealers' dreams: a brass St. Bernard with a clock in its side, and a red tongue that went in and out with the ticks as the tail wagged; a five-foot iron statue of a tastefully draped lady playing a violin (the statue was labelled "Inspiration"); mahogany chests covered with leering cherub faces and tiger mouths that bit you if you put your finger in the wrong place; a cherrywood bedstead with a bassoon carved into one of the fat headposts, so that it could be played as you lay in bed and meditated; and much more junk; and deep closets crammed with things that peered out of the darkness off the edges of shelves, frightening the wits out of the wizard as he poked around looking for jars of mandrake root or dwarf hair in aspic. In the long, high living room--heated by a wide-mouthed green-stone fireplace--were the usual paraphernalia of a practicing wizard: alembics, spiraling copper coils, alcohol lamps--all burping, sputtering, and glurping as red, purple, and green liquids boiled, dripped, or just slurched uncertainly in their containers. On a shelf over the experiment table was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put there to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist. One wall of the room was lined with bookshelves, and on them you could find titles such as Six Centuries of English Spells, Nameless Horrors and What to Do About Them, An Answer for Night-Hags, and, of course, the dreaded Krankenhammer of Stefan Schimpf, the mad cobbler of Mainz.
Prospero's peaceful, contemplative life is interrupted by some mildly off-putting phenomena, and the visit of his friend Roger Bacon, who has come to consult with Prospero about a mysterious book that Prospero had asked him about (there's a funny aside as Roger narrates his misadventure with his brazen head). The two embark on an investigation into the provenance of the book, which takes them to the library of another eccentric wizard (a comic interlude, with another humorous allusion to HPL's works), where they realize that an old colleague of Prospero's is behind the phenomena which have been hounding him. This precipitates a perilous errand to obtain a magical bauble co-created by Prospero and his former acquaintance.
After the whimsical opening, Bellairs plunges the reader into some truly unsettling scenes, as the sorcerous attacks on Prospero increase in intensity, and their focus shifts from unnerving the wizard to a more lethal bent. This particular scene gives a taste of Bellairs' ability to put a subtle chill up the reader's spine:
He had not gone a mile when he saw, off in a clearing beyond some beech trees, the light of a campfire. At least there’ll be someone to talk to, he thought, and he stepped off the road into the swishing wet grass. But as Prospero got near the fire, he saw that there was no one tending it and that it was burning in a very strange way. The flames moved back and forth as if blown by suddenly shifting breezes. As he watched, the movement became rhythmical. Prospero looked about him with growing fear, and he noticed that there was a little stream running nearby. He was drawn by what he first took to be a reflection of the firelight on the water. But as he knelt by the stream, he saw that the faint glow came from beneath the surface of the water. There, on the bottom, in a speckled green trembling light, was a smooth triangular stone, and on it was painted his face. The moving water was slowly flaking away the paint, or whatever it was, and the face appeared to be slowly decomposing. He saw a thin film, like a piece of dead skin, wriggle off the portrait-mask and float away down the stream. And the face underneath… Prospero felt his own hands on his wet cheeks.
Against all his instinct, he plunged his own hands into the greasy-feeling, incredibly cold water and picked up the stone. Without looking at it, and holding it at arm’s length as if it were a rotten dead bird, he took it to the fire, which was dancing faster now- it was moving to the rhythm of his own heartbeat. He knew the words that must have been said. “When the fire dies, let him die too.”
He pulled a burning stick out of the fire and held it to the painted stone as he carefully recited a spell he could just barely remember. When the face on the stone was completely blackened, the thing turned into an awful viscous mush in his hand, like a potato left in a damp dark cellar. With a disgusted shudder and a quick jerk of his left arm, Prospero threw the pulpy thing into the stream, where it hit with a gulping sound. Now the whole stream began to boil, and out of the lurching, hissing water rose a smoke shape with arms. It moved toward Prospero and settled around him in swaying layers of mist. He felt as if his eyes were made of blank white chalk. And the thing was throbbing, to pump the life out of him. Prospero stared with open eyes into that stony nothingness, and he shouted a word that sorcerers can only speak a few times in their lives. The whiteness began to break, and he could see night through the cracking clouds. Now he began to speak like someone reciting a lesson: “Michael Scott is buried in Melrose Abbey. A light burns in his tomb day and night. And it is stronger than your freezing white. Go! In his name, go!”
As the narrative moves along, the protagonists realize that their enemy has stumbled upon sorceries that have the power to warp the fabric of reality- night terrors abound, causing a frightened populace to dismantle the social order. In one particularly horrible scene, Bellairs shows that evil need not take a sorcerous form:
“We’re going over to the north to burn that town… Bow…what’s its name?”
“Bishop’s Bowes,” said the innkeeper. “Why are you doing this?”
“We’ve finally figured out what’s going on. Town’s full of evil people. Witches. I have an order here from Duke Harald to burn it to the ground. Here, look at it. Not that you have anything to say in this.”
He unrolled a long parchment that trailed lead and yellow wax seals on twisted strings of skin. The signature, a cross with a letter on each point, was so large that it covered a quarter of the page.
“They deserve it, too,” the leader went on. “You’ve seen the things. Half the people in Wellfont are afraid to go down into their own cellars. Shadows moving, screams from kettles when there isn’t any fire. Well, a little fire’ll teach ‘em. A couple of my men are out getting wood for torches. Do you have any pitch?”
“In the basement. I use it on the roof.”
“That’s fine. We’re going to use it on the roof, too.” He laughed, spitting flecks of brown beer on the muddy floor.
It's tempting to make the point that this was written while the Vietnam War raged, (it was published in the year that the investigations into the My Lai massacre took place so news of My Lai could not have been a direct influence), but, sadly, John Bellairs is not around to verify if this was meant allegorically.
After that particular bit of dialogue, the supernatural horrors seem a little less horrific, although Bellairs still describes them with his characteristic flair:
In the roadside towns, the wizards picked up stories and rumors. One man told how frost formed on the windows at night, though it was only the middle of September. There were no scrolls or intricate fern leaves, no branching overlaid star clusters; instead, people saw seasick wavy lines, disturbing maps that melted into each other and always seemed on the verge of some recognizable but fearful shape. At dawn, the frost melted, always in the same way. At first, two black eyeholes formed, and then a long steam-lipped mouth that spread and ate up the wandering white picture.
If there's one flaw with The Face in the Frost, it is that the climactic confrontation takes place off-stage. At one point, in a twist that will have some readers cringing (but which I loved), a fleeing Prospero stumbles into a most unusual place, and (less felicitously, though Madonna would approve of this) ***SPOILERS REDACTED***. The end is rather abrupt, which is also the major flaw of The House with a Clock in its Walls.
While Magic Mirrors, at $25, is pretty steep in price (I prefer paperbacks anyway), I'd recommend it for any fans of Bellairs' young-adult fiction, fans of the "Harry Potter" books (which I still haven't read), or fans of "weird fiction" who don't mind comic relief (Bellairs' protagonists are the sort of scholarly types that HPL wrote about, though they know what to do about Nameless Horrors). Anybody not into this sort of genre fiction would be better off either ignoring this review, or trying interlibrary loan to get an old Ace Paperbacks edition of The Face in the Frost.
Perhaps, I'll tackle the other portions of the book in a later post. I've been going on about this book for quite some time.
Friday, May 20, 2022
Gonna Disagree with John Bellairs on This One
Longtime readers will know that one of my all-time favorite novels is The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs, who went on to become a bestselling author of creepy, 'gothic' young adult fiction. The Face in the Frost, written for an adult audience, presages Bellairs' later works by combining whimsical humor with genuinely unsettling set pieces- he puts his good-hearted, good-humored protagonists into increasingly unnerving situations, achieving a creeping sense of dread, wisely leavened with comic relief. If you are the sort who likes a bit of spooky fun, give the book a read.
I do have to disagree with the late Mr Bellairs about one thing:
I'm the guy who'd die first in a horror film: "What's that bloodcurdling sound? I've got to find out!"
A few nights back, while on a Zoom conversation with friends during a graveyard shift, I heard a sound which, to me, is familiar, thought not exactly pleasant:
Those high pitched background noises are raccoons squabbling over something, probably a juicy frog or maybe a crayfish. It's not a sound for the faint of heart.
Right now, my boss is going over applications for a couple of positions in my understaffed department. I told him that one crucial question to ask candidates is: "Are you afraid of the dark?" Weird noises, shifting shadowy conditions, the gleam of eyes just outside a flashlight beam... all part of the job. I love them all, but then again, I'm not necessarily normal. Thank goodness it's just a job, not a horror movie.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Thanks, Obama John Bellairs
Now that my Saturday morning volunteer gig is over until October, I don't have to get up at half-past-seven in order to travel downtown. I typically set my alarm for eleven AM so I can listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!, which is a perfect coda to the week for a current events nerd. During this week's show, the special guest portion with bassist Esperanza Spalding, featured a question about Smead Jolley, a baseball player whose main claim to fame is having committed three errors on one play (the guy was apparently a monster hitter, though, so he would have made a fantastic designated hitter, if that had been an option back then).
I'm not a big sportball fan at all, but I actually knew about Smead, because I'm a huge fan of John Bellairs, whose The Face in the Frost is a particular favorite of mine, a short novel which happens to be simultaneously comical and unsettling. The book's protagonists, Prospero (but not the one you're thinking of) and Roger Bacon are two aged wizards who have to put aside their whimsical pursuits, such as watching 20th century baseball games with their magic mirrors, in order to investigate the machinations of a mysterious enemy which is out of their league (heh). Smead's name comes up when Roger Bacon recounts his misadventure with the brazen head.
I reread The Face in the Frost every couple of years. It's a quick read that gives me much pleasure- the funny bits are very funny, the horror bits really atmospheric without being gory or distasteful. The ending of the book is a bit of a letdown on first reading, being abrupt and vague, but on re-reading it begins to make sense, the mysterious antagonist is way too powerful for our protagonists to take on by themselves, so the final struggle takes place on multiple fronts, with only one being 'onstage'. At any rate, if you're a fan of 'weird' fiction of a somewhat comical bent, it's a great read, and an even better introduction to Smead Jolley.
I'm not a big sportball fan at all, but I actually knew about Smead, because I'm a huge fan of John Bellairs, whose The Face in the Frost is a particular favorite of mine, a short novel which happens to be simultaneously comical and unsettling. The book's protagonists, Prospero (but not the one you're thinking of) and Roger Bacon are two aged wizards who have to put aside their whimsical pursuits, such as watching 20th century baseball games with their magic mirrors, in order to investigate the machinations of a mysterious enemy which is out of their league (heh). Smead's name comes up when Roger Bacon recounts his misadventure with the brazen head.
I reread The Face in the Frost every couple of years. It's a quick read that gives me much pleasure- the funny bits are very funny, the horror bits really atmospheric without being gory or distasteful. The ending of the book is a bit of a letdown on first reading, being abrupt and vague, but on re-reading it begins to make sense, the mysterious antagonist is way too powerful for our protagonists to take on by themselves, so the final struggle takes place on multiple fronts, with only one being 'onstage'. At any rate, if you're a fan of 'weird' fiction of a somewhat comical bent, it's a great read, and an even better introduction to Smead Jolley.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Terror Trifecta
Hey, while poking around the t00bz, I found something season-appropriate which touches on several of my interests. I've never seen Once Upon a Midnight Scary, but it is narrated by Vincent Price, the second part of the anthology is a truncated (I kill me!) version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the third part is an adaptation of The House with a Clock in its Walls by Bastard fave John Bellairs. I can't vouch for the entertainment value of the show, but it contains elements which pique my interest:
While I've written pretty extensively on Bellairs' The Face in the Frost, I haven't written about The House with a Clock in its Walls- I may have to put up a review of the book for another weekend.
In the interest of full disclosure, I composed this post last night.
While I've written pretty extensively on Bellairs' The Face in the Frost, I haven't written about The House with a Clock in its Walls- I may have to put up a review of the book for another weekend.
In the interest of full disclosure, I composed this post last night.
Sunday, May 2, 2021
Eerie Cries and Nazgûl Eyes
The common red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is an uncommonly beautiful animal, sleek of form and pleasant of hue. We have them in my neck of the woods, but it is a rare occasion, usually around dawn, when I see one. Hearing them, though, is another story entirely... it's enough to raise one's hackles.
Right around four-thirty this morning, I heard that screa suh m and rushed out to the field with a high-powered flashlight to get a glimpse. While I could see the sleek profile of the wee beastie, the most prominent visible features were the twin glows of the animal's tapeta lucida reflecting back at me. Needless to say, the cat wasn't too happy knowing that there was another predator in the vicinity. She eagerly jumped onto my shoulder, even though the fox kept a distance of about fifty meters, and was glad when we eventually went back inside.
I'm not the sort of person who scares easily, I couldn't function in my job if I were, but there's something unheimlich about such a sound, even coming from a small, pretty animal. Of course, my natural inclination is to investigate the sources... contrary to John Bellairs' advice: "Unexplained noises are best left unexplained."
I love my job, I find it a continuous source of beauty and wonder, but it's not for everyone. To my knowledge, two new hires didn't even last a shift. I like to think that it's my investigative bent which keeps me here... well, that and a certain level-headedness. I know I'm the most dangerous animal onsite.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Saints and Divinities
This being All Saints' Day, I figured I'd do a quick rundown on some pagan divinities and heroes who have snuck in under the theological "velvet rope" and entered the Communion of Saints. Traditional Roman Catholicism is a blend of European philosophical and pagan religious folkways with Levantine monotheism. Much of the work of St Thomas Aquinas was rooted in the philosophy of Aristotle, and the writings of the Greek philosophers exert almost as much of an influence on Catholic theology as the Bible itself.
On a more basic level, the expanding Church incorporated local beliefs into its monotheistic model, and a veneer of sanctity was applied to pagan figures.
St Christopher is often depicted as carrying the Christ child across a river, much like the Greek hero Jason carried the goddess Hera across a raging river. While St Christopher has been quietly removed from the liturgical calendar, devotional medals and emblems are often worn or displayed on car dashboards to invoke protection for travelers.
The Irish goddess Brigid, a patroness of arts and trades, akin to the Greek Athena, has been subsumed by St Bridget of Kildare (also known as Bridey. The feast of St Bridget falls upon the old pagan feast day of Imbolc.
St George, often depicted as a dragon-slayer, shares qualities with a legion of monster slayers.
Even Jesus' mom can't escape association with paganry- the Virgin of Guadalupe is often conflated with the Aztec goddess Tonantzin.
Yeah, even saints sometimes have skeletons in their closets, such as a wild, pagan youth (sometimes, even a youth spent as a god or goddess). Of course, St Adiposa, who sought martyrdom through overeating, doesn't have a pagan connection, but I don't see her listed on the liturgical calendar. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that her feast day falls on Thanksgiving.
Mentioning St Adiposa reminds me, I never did review the non Face in the Frost parts of John Bellairs' Magic Mirrors... who's the patron saint of unfinished business?
At least I know who the patron saints of the stranded are:
On a more basic level, the expanding Church incorporated local beliefs into its monotheistic model, and a veneer of sanctity was applied to pagan figures.
St Christopher is often depicted as carrying the Christ child across a river, much like the Greek hero Jason carried the goddess Hera across a raging river. While St Christopher has been quietly removed from the liturgical calendar, devotional medals and emblems are often worn or displayed on car dashboards to invoke protection for travelers.
The Irish goddess Brigid, a patroness of arts and trades, akin to the Greek Athena, has been subsumed by St Bridget of Kildare (also known as Bridey. The feast of St Bridget falls upon the old pagan feast day of Imbolc.
St George, often depicted as a dragon-slayer, shares qualities with a legion of monster slayers.
Even Jesus' mom can't escape association with paganry- the Virgin of Guadalupe is often conflated with the Aztec goddess Tonantzin.
Yeah, even saints sometimes have skeletons in their closets, such as a wild, pagan youth (sometimes, even a youth spent as a god or goddess). Of course, St Adiposa, who sought martyrdom through overeating, doesn't have a pagan connection, but I don't see her listed on the liturgical calendar. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that her feast day falls on Thanksgiving.
Mentioning St Adiposa reminds me, I never did review the non Face in the Frost parts of John Bellairs' Magic Mirrors... who's the patron saint of unfinished business?
At least I know who the patron saints of the stranded are:
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Bringing Together Horror Greats
In the runup to Halloween, I have been watching a classic horror movie every night (oddly enough, watching a supernatural thriller is good escapism from the real world horrors of the day). I recently watched The Haunted Palace, produced and directed by King of the B Movies Roger Corman, a mad genius who could crank out a movie in three weeks for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Corman had directed a run of successful horror movies adapted from short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, widely considered the greatest horror author of all time, at least here in the United States. Corman wanted to attempt something different, so he hit on adapting The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a posthumously published novella by H.P. Lovecraft. The management at American International Pictures insisted on slapping an Edgar Allan Poe title on the film, however, as Lovecraft was relatively unknown at the time, so it was entitled The Haunted Palace and Vincent Price recited lines from the poem to give a patina of Poe-etry to the proceedings. The screenplay of the movie was written by Charles Beaumont, a prolific science fiction and horror author who wrote numerous Twilight Zone episodes, but is largely forgotten today- his precipitous neurological decline and death at the age of thirty-eight constitutes a horror story in and of itself. Penguin Books has recently released an anthology of Beaumont's stories, Perchance to Dream, which will hopefully pull this interesting writer back from obscurity. Beaumont's script adapts The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but also admixes an unsavory element from Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror to augment the rather bare-bones motivation of Lovecraft's sinister warlock. Beaumont's script also moves the action of the novella from the city of Providence to Lovecraft's fictitious town of Arkham, probably due to budgetary constraints.
Lovecraft's villain, Charles Dexter Ward's ancestor Joseph Curwen, while engaging in necromancy by calling up the remains of the dead using their 'essential saltes', really has a vague motivation... he and two other necromancers, based in Europe, are calling up dead persons of renown in order to interrogate them to gain more knowledge and power.
What these horrible creatures—and Charles Ward as well—were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit of light both old and new which had filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all the ages, including those of the world’s wisest and greatest men, in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them.
A hideous traffick was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together.
He attributes the alchemical means by which this is accomplished to Borellus:
“The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust where into his Bodie has been incinerated.”
John Bellairs parodied this in The Face in the Frost, a particular favorite of mine:
In the meantime, he fribbled away the day with mindless tasks like cleaning the ash pit of the fireplace and raising the ghosts of flowers. From a square bottle marked "Essential Salts," Prospero poured a few green crystals into a white ceramic dish; when he had mumbled some words over the bowl, a pink and green cloud began to ascend from the shimmering translucent pebbles.
Before long, a definite shape appeared.
"Carnations," said the wizard disgustedly. "Phooey."
Of course, raising dead humans poses a greater risk than raising flowers, even flowers unsought for:
Certainely, there was Noth’g butt ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais’d upp from What he cou’d gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of Any Thing miss’g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak’g or yr Copy’g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou’d have you Observe what was tolde to us aboute tak’g Care whom to calle up, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of ——, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.
Beaumont's screenplay dispenses with all of the alchemical bafflegab and substitutes for it a more traditional 'village girls in peril' theme, making it more accessible to the typical audience member.
The film is a great collaboration between horror greats- Lovecraft, Poe, Corman, Beaumont, and Price. Add in a sympathetic portrayal of Ms Ward, a woman nonplussed by the terrible transformation of her formerly loving husband, by the luminously gorgeous Debra Paget, in her last film role before retiring from the big screen, and you have a fun, gruesome little horror gem. It is also the first film adaptation of a Lovecraft story. Vincent Price, years later, recorded an introduction to the film for Iowa public television:
In The Haunted Palace, you get twice the Price- with the horror maven playing both the benevolent Charles Dexter Ward and the monstrous Joseph Curwen. In his introduction to the film, Price notes that his own career parallels his performances in the film... the kindly, urbane Vincent Price ably playing every stripe of villain. It is a perfect spooky entertainment for the Halloween season.
Lovecraft's villain, Charles Dexter Ward's ancestor Joseph Curwen, while engaging in necromancy by calling up the remains of the dead using their 'essential saltes', really has a vague motivation... he and two other necromancers, based in Europe, are calling up dead persons of renown in order to interrogate them to gain more knowledge and power.
What these horrible creatures—and Charles Ward as well—were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit of light both old and new which had filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all the ages, including those of the world’s wisest and greatest men, in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them.
A hideous traffick was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together.
He attributes the alchemical means by which this is accomplished to Borellus:
“The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust where into his Bodie has been incinerated.”
John Bellairs parodied this in The Face in the Frost, a particular favorite of mine:
In the meantime, he fribbled away the day with mindless tasks like cleaning the ash pit of the fireplace and raising the ghosts of flowers. From a square bottle marked "Essential Salts," Prospero poured a few green crystals into a white ceramic dish; when he had mumbled some words over the bowl, a pink and green cloud began to ascend from the shimmering translucent pebbles.
Before long, a definite shape appeared.
"Carnations," said the wizard disgustedly. "Phooey."
Of course, raising dead humans poses a greater risk than raising flowers, even flowers unsought for:
Certainely, there was Noth’g butt ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais’d upp from What he cou’d gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of Any Thing miss’g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak’g or yr Copy’g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou’d have you Observe what was tolde to us aboute tak’g Care whom to calle up, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of ——, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.
Beaumont's screenplay dispenses with all of the alchemical bafflegab and substitutes for it a more traditional 'village girls in peril' theme, making it more accessible to the typical audience member.
The film is a great collaboration between horror greats- Lovecraft, Poe, Corman, Beaumont, and Price. Add in a sympathetic portrayal of Ms Ward, a woman nonplussed by the terrible transformation of her formerly loving husband, by the luminously gorgeous Debra Paget, in her last film role before retiring from the big screen, and you have a fun, gruesome little horror gem. It is also the first film adaptation of a Lovecraft story. Vincent Price, years later, recorded an introduction to the film for Iowa public television:
In The Haunted Palace, you get twice the Price- with the horror maven playing both the benevolent Charles Dexter Ward and the monstrous Joseph Curwen. In his introduction to the film, Price notes that his own career parallels his performances in the film... the kindly, urbane Vincent Price ably playing every stripe of villain. It is a perfect spooky entertainment for the Halloween season.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
The Maternal Glow
It has often been said that having given birth imparts a certain glow to a mother, a fruition of natural beauty. I can vouch for this, because a friend of mine recently gave birth (and not the one you're thinking of*). Yeah, my friend and co-worker Shelly (she's with the grounds staff, her job entails removing organic detritus from the small river on site) gave birth on Sunday. Doesn't she look beautiful?
Shelly sure is a looker, though I have no idea where the father of her children is these days. Unfortunately, he didn't stick around for the kids' sake. Shelly's on the rebound, but I know just the guy for her.
Note, anyone referring to Shelly as a snappy-headed ho is flirting with a lifetime ban.
Hilariously, the Wikiwakiwoo has this statement, which is a remarkable example of understatement: "The common snapping turtle is not an ideal pet"
*Not-so-veiled John Bellairs reference
Shelly sure is a looker, though I have no idea where the father of her children is these days. Unfortunately, he didn't stick around for the kids' sake. Shelly's on the rebound, but I know just the guy for her.
Note, anyone referring to Shelly as a snappy-headed ho is flirting with a lifetime ban.
Hilariously, the Wikiwakiwoo has this statement, which is a remarkable example of understatement: "The common snapping turtle is not an ideal pet"
*Not-so-veiled John Bellairs reference
Thursday, January 2, 2014
SNERMAHGERD!
Tonight is pretty brutal, weather-wise, here, in the the trailer park Greater Yonkers Metropolitan Area. As my inclination on nights like this is to stay put, rather than to travel, I switched shifts with tonight's "midnight man" to obviate the need for both of us to travel. It's not a fun night, but it's bearable, as long as one wears plenty of layers of clothes... and as long as (dare I tempt fate?) the power isn't affected by high winds. As a precaution, I collected a bunch of candle stubs in case of a power failure.
My typical line regarding work is that it's a cushy job, except when it's not, and tonight is clearly in the "not" column. I can't complain, I packed as if I were going on a campaign trip, and I have mah preshus kittehs to accompany me. It's going to be a tough night, but not a terrible one.
Post title explained... I missed out on the "Gersberms" phenomenon (for the record, when it comes to scary Young Adult fiction, I'm a big John Bellairs fan), but author R.L. Stine seems like a pretty good guy.
My typical line regarding work is that it's a cushy job, except when it's not, and tonight is clearly in the "not" column. I can't complain, I packed as if I were going on a campaign trip, and I have mah preshus kittehs to accompany me. It's going to be a tough night, but not a terrible one.
Post title explained... I missed out on the "Gersberms" phenomenon (for the record, when it comes to scary Young Adult fiction, I'm a big John Bellairs fan), but author R.L. Stine seems like a pretty good guy.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Reviewing the Archives WARNING SPOILERS!!!
Last month, I stated that I would post a review of The Atrocity Archives Charles Stross, and I shall!
The Atrocity Archives, as I described in my earlier post, can be likened to a "a mash-up of Lovecraft's "mythos", Cold War espionage thrillers, and Office Space". The book's premise is that esoteric mathematical formulae may be used to punch holes in the barriers between different universes, sometimes allowing nasty entities to enter our own:
I could wibble on about Crowley and Dee and mystics down the ages but, basically, most self-styled magicians know shit. The fact of the matter is that most traditional magic doesn't work. In fact, it would all be irrelevant, were it not for the Turing theorem- named after Alan Turing, who you'll have heard of if you know anything about computers.
.................
The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simulatneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (Wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted in to P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms - translation: all your bank account [sic] belong to us -- and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.
This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct- except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe we need to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of other universes there are things that listen, and talk back...
The Laundry is the fictional (?) governmental agency of the U.K. which deals with such "reality incursions" (much like the Men in Black of UFOlogy, comics, and film). The protagonist, Robert Howard (heh), is a relatively new agent of The Laundry, being conscripted after he "worked out the geometry curve iteration method for invoking Nyarlathotep and nearly wiped out Birmingham by accident." Howard is gifted, but brash, and often insubordinate- chafing under the restrictions of agency bureaucracy, and eager to make the transition to fieldwork. The narrative begins with his initial foray into the field, and paints a distinctly unglamorous image of the work- Howard stands in the rain outside a nondescript corporate park, waiting for an opportunity to enter an office undetected to scrub some data from a desktop computer.
The narrative, after a view of Howard's unconventional home life, then delves into office politics and the minutiae of bureaucracy, as Howard navigates the Byzantine regulations of the civil service, and eventually receives training in the more esoteric aspects of fieldwork, including "certification of weaponry expertise, unconventional, level two". After these blackly humorous sequences, the espionage narrative starts.
Howard's first international assignment involves an attempt to extract a Miskatonic University educated philosophy professor from the U.S., an endeavor which rapidly degenerates ("goes pear-shaped" in Stross' lexicon), leading to a roller-coaster ride of a plot involving Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, Nazi necromancers, tentacled horrors, a visit to the museum of evil of the novel's title, and an eerie incursion through a hole punched between universes to a dying world. Stross ably builds suspense as Howard tries to piece together the reality of the situation into which he is thrown, as the circumstances in which he finds himself quickly degenerate into a nightmare. The novel is, in some sense, a bildungsroman, as the brilliant smartass Howard matures into a careful, loyal agent acting in defense of all that is human and humane.
The Atrocity Archives is chock full of Easter eggy goodness- Stross cites the espionage novels of Len Deighton and the stories of the Old Gent of Providence as influences. The villains of the novel are somewhat reminiscent of the baddies in Illuminatus!. One particular description in the book calls to mind Jack Vance's The Face. The intersection of computing and the occult reminded me of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and my favorite bit of internet "conspiracy" kookery. The overall theme of the book, supernatural espionage, is similar to that of Tim Powers' Declare (Stross mentions that a friend of his told him not to read the book, because it would have derailed his creative process).
While familiarity with these works would definitely heighten one's enjoyment of the book (the Lovecraft is probably essential groundwork, though), the book stands on its own merits. Stross shares with the late, lamented John Bellairs (one of my favorite authors) a knack for leavening his horror narratives with humor. This particular bit demonstrates Stross' irreverent wit (although the shade of the martyred Alan Turing, victim of bigotry, looms over the entire novel) and skewering of genre conventions:
“Once a year (REDACTED-SPOILER) drags (REDACTED-SPOILER) out to Pride so he can maintain his security clearance.’
‘I see.” She relaxes a little but looks puzzled. “I thought the secret services sacked you for being homosexual?”
“They used to, said it made you a security risk. Which was silly, because it was the practice of firing homosexuals that made them vulnerable to blackmail in the first place. So these days they just insist on openness- the theory is you can only be blackmailed if you’re hiding something. Which is why (REDACTED-SPOILER) gets the day off for Gay Pride to maintain his security clearance.”
The Atrocity Archives is accompanied by an additional novella, The Concrete Jungle, and (perhaps the best part of the book) an afterword, in which Mr. Stross discusses Cold War espionage tales as horror fiction, and Lovecraftian horror tales as espionage fiction (most of HPL's stories involve investigations of one sort or another).
The Atrocity Archives, as I described in my earlier post, can be likened to a "a mash-up of Lovecraft's "mythos", Cold War espionage thrillers, and Office Space". The book's premise is that esoteric mathematical formulae may be used to punch holes in the barriers between different universes, sometimes allowing nasty entities to enter our own:
I could wibble on about Crowley and Dee and mystics down the ages but, basically, most self-styled magicians know shit. The fact of the matter is that most traditional magic doesn't work. In fact, it would all be irrelevant, were it not for the Turing theorem- named after Alan Turing, who you'll have heard of if you know anything about computers.
.................
The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simulatneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (Wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted in to P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms - translation: all your bank account [sic] belong to us -- and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.
This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct- except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe we need to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of other universes there are things that listen, and talk back...
The Laundry is the fictional (?) governmental agency of the U.K. which deals with such "reality incursions" (much like the Men in Black of UFOlogy, comics, and film). The protagonist, Robert Howard (heh), is a relatively new agent of The Laundry, being conscripted after he "worked out the geometry curve iteration method for invoking Nyarlathotep and nearly wiped out Birmingham by accident." Howard is gifted, but brash, and often insubordinate- chafing under the restrictions of agency bureaucracy, and eager to make the transition to fieldwork. The narrative begins with his initial foray into the field, and paints a distinctly unglamorous image of the work- Howard stands in the rain outside a nondescript corporate park, waiting for an opportunity to enter an office undetected to scrub some data from a desktop computer.
The narrative, after a view of Howard's unconventional home life, then delves into office politics and the minutiae of bureaucracy, as Howard navigates the Byzantine regulations of the civil service, and eventually receives training in the more esoteric aspects of fieldwork, including "certification of weaponry expertise, unconventional, level two". After these blackly humorous sequences, the espionage narrative starts.
Howard's first international assignment involves an attempt to extract a Miskatonic University educated philosophy professor from the U.S., an endeavor which rapidly degenerates ("goes pear-shaped" in Stross' lexicon), leading to a roller-coaster ride of a plot involving Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, Nazi necromancers, tentacled horrors, a visit to the museum of evil of the novel's title, and an eerie incursion through a hole punched between universes to a dying world. Stross ably builds suspense as Howard tries to piece together the reality of the situation into which he is thrown, as the circumstances in which he finds himself quickly degenerate into a nightmare. The novel is, in some sense, a bildungsroman, as the brilliant smartass Howard matures into a careful, loyal agent acting in defense of all that is human and humane.
The Atrocity Archives is chock full of Easter eggy goodness- Stross cites the espionage novels of Len Deighton and the stories of the Old Gent of Providence as influences. The villains of the novel are somewhat reminiscent of the baddies in Illuminatus!. One particular description in the book calls to mind Jack Vance's The Face. The intersection of computing and the occult reminded me of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and my favorite bit of internet "conspiracy" kookery. The overall theme of the book, supernatural espionage, is similar to that of Tim Powers' Declare (Stross mentions that a friend of his told him not to read the book, because it would have derailed his creative process).
While familiarity with these works would definitely heighten one's enjoyment of the book (the Lovecraft is probably essential groundwork, though), the book stands on its own merits. Stross shares with the late, lamented John Bellairs (one of my favorite authors) a knack for leavening his horror narratives with humor. This particular bit demonstrates Stross' irreverent wit (although the shade of the martyred Alan Turing, victim of bigotry, looms over the entire novel) and skewering of genre conventions:
“Once a year (REDACTED-SPOILER) drags (REDACTED-SPOILER) out to Pride so he can maintain his security clearance.’
‘I see.” She relaxes a little but looks puzzled. “I thought the secret services sacked you for being homosexual?”
“They used to, said it made you a security risk. Which was silly, because it was the practice of firing homosexuals that made them vulnerable to blackmail in the first place. So these days they just insist on openness- the theory is you can only be blackmailed if you’re hiding something. Which is why (REDACTED-SPOILER) gets the day off for Gay Pride to maintain his security clearance.”
The Atrocity Archives is accompanied by an additional novella, The Concrete Jungle, and (perhaps the best part of the book) an afterword, in which Mr. Stross discusses Cold War espionage tales as horror fiction, and Lovecraftian horror tales as espionage fiction (most of HPL's stories involve investigations of one sort or another).
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Smut Recommendation
A couple of weeks ago, in a thread at the mothership, Smut Clyde had this to say about Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness:
The way BBBB feels about “Face in the Frost” is how I feel about Fritz Leiber’s “Our Lady of Darkness”, his homage to CAS.
With a recommendation like that (I've lauded The Face in the Frost more times than I can remember at this point), I figured I'd have to revisit the novella, because it had been ages since I'd read it. I'm most familiar with Leiber's Nehwon stories, featuring his swashbuckling duo Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and lately I'd read his tributes to H.P. Lovecraft (with whome Leiber corresponded), such as The Terror from the Depths and the touching To Arkham and the Stars- the latter story subverts the whole "cosmic evil" theme of Lovecraft's mythos and ends on a sentimental, optimistic note.
Anyway, it had been a while since I'd read any of Fritz Leiber's contemporary urban dark fantasy, so I got my hands on Our Lady of Darkness. The novella is Fritz Leiber's "love letter" to the City of San Francisco and to the "Weird Tale" author Clark Ashton Smith. The protagonist is an author who is just getting over a long bout of alcoholism after the death of his wife. During his "hazy" days, he acquired two extremely rare volumes from a used bookstore- the first being a journal which may belong to Smith, the second being Megapolisomancy, an exceedingly rare book (the reason for its rarity is explained in the narrative) that posits an occult "science" of urban development:
He handed her the one that had been open, saying, "That's just about the most fascinating book of pseudoscience I've ever seen—it has some genuine insights mixed with the hokum. No date, but printed about 1900, I'd judge."
"'Megapolisomancy,'" she pronounced carefully. "Now what would that be? Telling the future from . . . from cities?"
"From big cities," he said, nodding.
"Oh, yes, the mega."
He went on. "Telling the future and all other sorts of things. And apparently making magic, too, from that knowledge. Though de Castries calls it a 'new science,' as if he were a second Galileo. Anyhow, this de Castries is very much concerned about the 'vast amounts' of steel and paper that are being accumulated in big cities. And coal oil (kerosene) and natural gas. And electricity, too, if you can believe it—he carefully figures out just how much electricity is in how many thousands of miles of wire, how many tons of illuminating gas in tanks, how much steel in the new skyscrapers, how much paper for government records and yellow journalism, and so on."
"My-oh-my," Cal commented. "I wonder what he'd think if he were alive today."
"His direst predictions vindicated, no doubt. He did speculate about the growing menace of automobiles and gasoline, but especially electric cars carrying buckets of direct electricity around in batteries. He came so close to anticipating our modern concern about pollution—he even talks of 'the vast congeries of gigantic fuming vats' of sulphuric acid needed to manufacture steel. But what he was most agitated about was the psychological or spiritual (he calls them 'paramental') effects of all that stuff accumulating in big cities, its sheer liquid and solid mass."
"A real proto-hippie," Cal put it. "What sort of man was he? Where did he live? What else did he do?"
"There's absolutely no indication in the book of any of those things," Franz told her, "and I've never turned up another reference to him. In his book he refers to New England and eastern Canada quite a bit, and New York City, but only in a general way. He also mentioned Paris (he had it in for the Eiffel Tower) and France a few times. And Egypt."
In the course of the novella, the protagonist becomes obsessed with observing the Sutro Tower and Corona Heights, where he spies a mysterious brown-clad figure which he originally takes to be a "robed hierophant"- stoned priest of a modern sun god dancing around an accidental high-set Stonehenge.
As the plot moves forward, he becomes more obsessed with the brown-clad figure on Corona Heights and makes a trek to the crown of the hill to find the "priest", a course of action which ends on a surprising note for the protagonist. He also attempts to verify the provenance of the journal he attributes to CAS, paying a call on a burnt-out counterculture figure who is able to fill him in on some of the details of the life of the author of Megapolisomancy, and his relation to Clark Ashton Smith.
The narrative builds to a climax as the protagonist runs afoul of the "paramental" forces conjured up by the urban landscape, in conjunction with his own mind. As things come to head, his "salvation" hinges on verifying whether his home is the building alluded to in the journal, and determining if he can use this knowledge to ward off the paramentals.
The novella is, like everything I've read by Leiber, great fun. It conjured up other works in my head, which is always a good thing, as I love to spot allusions. The protagonist's fascination with the heights across the city from his apartment evoked H.P. Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark. The "paramentals" of the tale reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith's Genius Loci and Leiber's own Smoke Ghost. The whole "megapolisomancy" angle reminded me of the game played by Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, in which they posit that the great towers built throughout history were designed to track "telluric currents"- I wonder if Eco was inspired by Our Lady of Darkness. The search for the McGuffin which can help the protagonist lay to rest the paramentals besieging him reminded me of John Bellairs' wonderfully eerie The House with a Clock in Its Walls, while the final paramental manifestation was reminiscent of M.R. James' Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, though with a somewhat comic twist.
Our Lady of Darkness works on a bunch of levels- it works as a supernatural thriller, it works as a loving tribute to the city in which it is set, it works as an homage to a favored author, it works as a part of a greater "weird" literary tradition, it even works as a comedy, on some levels. One way in which I knew that I was hooked from the get-go is that the novella sent me rushing off to look up the Sutro Tower and Corona Heights. For me, that's a sure sign that I care enough to put the book into a greater context.
Thanks, Smut! Now, regarding the post title, did you dirty little lambies think that this would be a pr0n review?
The way BBBB feels about “Face in the Frost” is how I feel about Fritz Leiber’s “Our Lady of Darkness”, his homage to CAS.
With a recommendation like that (I've lauded The Face in the Frost more times than I can remember at this point), I figured I'd have to revisit the novella, because it had been ages since I'd read it. I'm most familiar with Leiber's Nehwon stories, featuring his swashbuckling duo Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and lately I'd read his tributes to H.P. Lovecraft (with whome Leiber corresponded), such as The Terror from the Depths and the touching To Arkham and the Stars- the latter story subverts the whole "cosmic evil" theme of Lovecraft's mythos and ends on a sentimental, optimistic note.
Anyway, it had been a while since I'd read any of Fritz Leiber's contemporary urban dark fantasy, so I got my hands on Our Lady of Darkness. The novella is Fritz Leiber's "love letter" to the City of San Francisco and to the "Weird Tale" author Clark Ashton Smith. The protagonist is an author who is just getting over a long bout of alcoholism after the death of his wife. During his "hazy" days, he acquired two extremely rare volumes from a used bookstore- the first being a journal which may belong to Smith, the second being Megapolisomancy, an exceedingly rare book (the reason for its rarity is explained in the narrative) that posits an occult "science" of urban development:
He handed her the one that had been open, saying, "That's just about the most fascinating book of pseudoscience I've ever seen—it has some genuine insights mixed with the hokum. No date, but printed about 1900, I'd judge."
"'Megapolisomancy,'" she pronounced carefully. "Now what would that be? Telling the future from . . . from cities?"
"From big cities," he said, nodding.
"Oh, yes, the mega."
He went on. "Telling the future and all other sorts of things. And apparently making magic, too, from that knowledge. Though de Castries calls it a 'new science,' as if he were a second Galileo. Anyhow, this de Castries is very much concerned about the 'vast amounts' of steel and paper that are being accumulated in big cities. And coal oil (kerosene) and natural gas. And electricity, too, if you can believe it—he carefully figures out just how much electricity is in how many thousands of miles of wire, how many tons of illuminating gas in tanks, how much steel in the new skyscrapers, how much paper for government records and yellow journalism, and so on."
"My-oh-my," Cal commented. "I wonder what he'd think if he were alive today."
"His direst predictions vindicated, no doubt. He did speculate about the growing menace of automobiles and gasoline, but especially electric cars carrying buckets of direct electricity around in batteries. He came so close to anticipating our modern concern about pollution—he even talks of 'the vast congeries of gigantic fuming vats' of sulphuric acid needed to manufacture steel. But what he was most agitated about was the psychological or spiritual (he calls them 'paramental') effects of all that stuff accumulating in big cities, its sheer liquid and solid mass."
"A real proto-hippie," Cal put it. "What sort of man was he? Where did he live? What else did he do?"
"There's absolutely no indication in the book of any of those things," Franz told her, "and I've never turned up another reference to him. In his book he refers to New England and eastern Canada quite a bit, and New York City, but only in a general way. He also mentioned Paris (he had it in for the Eiffel Tower) and France a few times. And Egypt."
In the course of the novella, the protagonist becomes obsessed with observing the Sutro Tower and Corona Heights, where he spies a mysterious brown-clad figure which he originally takes to be a "robed hierophant"- stoned priest of a modern sun god dancing around an accidental high-set Stonehenge.
As the plot moves forward, he becomes more obsessed with the brown-clad figure on Corona Heights and makes a trek to the crown of the hill to find the "priest", a course of action which ends on a surprising note for the protagonist. He also attempts to verify the provenance of the journal he attributes to CAS, paying a call on a burnt-out counterculture figure who is able to fill him in on some of the details of the life of the author of Megapolisomancy, and his relation to Clark Ashton Smith.
The narrative builds to a climax as the protagonist runs afoul of the "paramental" forces conjured up by the urban landscape, in conjunction with his own mind. As things come to head, his "salvation" hinges on verifying whether his home is the building alluded to in the journal, and determining if he can use this knowledge to ward off the paramentals.
The novella is, like everything I've read by Leiber, great fun. It conjured up other works in my head, which is always a good thing, as I love to spot allusions. The protagonist's fascination with the heights across the city from his apartment evoked H.P. Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark. The "paramentals" of the tale reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith's Genius Loci and Leiber's own Smoke Ghost. The whole "megapolisomancy" angle reminded me of the game played by Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, in which they posit that the great towers built throughout history were designed to track "telluric currents"- I wonder if Eco was inspired by Our Lady of Darkness. The search for the McGuffin which can help the protagonist lay to rest the paramentals besieging him reminded me of John Bellairs' wonderfully eerie The House with a Clock in Its Walls, while the final paramental manifestation was reminiscent of M.R. James' Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, though with a somewhat comic twist.
Our Lady of Darkness works on a bunch of levels- it works as a supernatural thriller, it works as a loving tribute to the city in which it is set, it works as an homage to a favored author, it works as a part of a greater "weird" literary tradition, it even works as a comedy, on some levels. One way in which I knew that I was hooked from the get-go is that the novella sent me rushing off to look up the Sutro Tower and Corona Heights. For me, that's a sure sign that I care enough to put the book into a greater context.
Thanks, Smut! Now, regarding the post title, did you dirty little lambies think that this would be a pr0n review?
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