Let's crack open my copy of 2015's The Madness of Cthulhu: Volume Two and read four more 21st-century stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft that bear the S. T. Joshi seal of approval.
"The Door Beneath" by Alan Dean Foster
Foster's name feels very familiar even though I have read very little of his work during the period of this blog's life; Foster penned the first two
Star Wars novels and the
Black Hole novelization and I think a lot of his books were at the public library when I was a kid (I was born in 1971 so books like
For Love of Mother-Not and
Spellsinger would have been in hardcover at the library when I was in my early teens.) A few years ago I read his story
"With Friends Like These..." and thought it OK. And I think "The Door Beneath" is similarly OK, maybe a little worse than OK, a standard issue science fiction action story with a little Yog-Sothery sprinkled on it.
Our protagonist is the head of safety at an important Soviet installation, the nature of which is kept from us readers. A big wig accompanied by KGB brutes gives our guy a tour of a secret installation under the main installation. Down there we find a huge subterranean chamber where toil an army of scientists and technicians on two unusual objects of tremendous size, a towering hunk of what looks like organic matter bigger than a whale and a bizarre contraption like an abstract sculpture above which shimmers a sort of black sphere. These things were discovered in Antarctica, we learn. As our main characters watch, the white lab coat crew pumps a bazillion gigajoules of electricity into the organic mass and it quivers to life, scores of eyes and pseudopods ending in toothy mouths emerging. And then they see something scary in the black sphere--the sphere, they realize, is a portal to some other world and genocidal monsters are going to come out of it. Our hero hurries upstairs as the monster (eventually Foster just tells us it is a shoggoth) devours his comrades behind him. Upstairs he somehow convinces his colleagues to blow up the public installation they are standing in, which we learn is the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, killing the shoggoth and closing the portal, and thus saving the world.
A simplistic and plodding story in which the characters don't act in ways that are very convincing and which lacks anything like a Lovecraftian tone or spirit and also fails to supply anything engaging on its own terms, "The Door Beneath" is a barely acceptable filler story, with its focus on nuclear power more like a mediocre story from Astounding than something from Weird Tales. (Compare "The Door Beneath" to two stories we read last time from Volume 1 of Madness of Cthulhu--Robert Silverberg's "Diana of the Hundred Breasts," which added good human drama to stereotypical Lovecraftian commonplaces and Darrel Schweitzer's "Warm" which embraced Lovecraftianism wholeheartedly and achieved a real Lovecraftian tone and atmosphere.) Either go all the way with the weird horror goop or give us something new--and good--which integrates some Lovecraftian themes or images; don't give us lowest common denominator science fiction with the most obvious and banal and superficial Lovecraft dressing spritzed on it.
"The Door Beneath" would be reprinted in 2019 in the Foster collection The Taste of Different Dimensions.
"Dead Man Walking" by William F. Nolan
Oy. I compared Foster's story to a below-average specimen from Astounding, but Nolan's is even less Lovecraftian and even less entertaining--"Dead Man Walking" is like a 1970s TV movie written by somebody influenced by somebody who was influenced by what he heard about Dashiell Hammett. I think "Dead Man Walking" may be an unfunny spoof of such TV fare, or perhaps was even based on some script Nolan sketched out that he was unable to sell. Thumbs down!
A writer guy lives in L.A. (I couldn't care less about L.A. and I am sick of always seeing it on screen or reading about it or hearing people talk about it. Who the hell still cares about In and Out Burger and Rodeo Drive and Sepulvedra or whatever the hell it is? Enough already.) Writer guy is working on a nonfiction book about how the supernatural is a load of crap. But then a hot chick whose husband, a sculptor, died, calls him up to ask for his help--she thinks her husband is alive and trying to kill her!
We spend like seventeen pages with the writer, the widow, and a gallery owner who is also some kind of medium or witch or something, Madame Jechiel. Jechiel gave the sculptor a magic ring that allowed him to live forever if he cut a deal with monsters from another dimension--he had to make statues of the monsters and anoint them with human blood and then the aliens would inhabit and animate the statues and take over the Earth. The writer and the woman outfight the sculptor and the aliens in a way that is not scary or exciting and is not convincing in the least.
This story is bad. The characters lack personality and act in ways that are not believable, and Nolan writes in a lifeless barebones style that fails to make anything that happens compelling logically or emotionally--plot developments don't follow each other in a way that makes sense, but seem to exist to set up scenes that have the potential to be visually arresting while not requiring much trouble or expense to film. "Dead Man Walking" is also stuffed with poorly delivered bargain basement jokes, like the writer not liking the nickname his editor has given him and trying to quit smoking and that sort of thing. I kept flipping through pages to see how many were left, the way I used to look at the clock every thirty seconds at school, at my job in a machine shop, at my job in a department store, at my job at a book store, at my job in a government office, at my job in a warehouse....
So bad I am angry. Joshi should have deep-sixed this rough draft.
Looking at the records, it seems I have now read 10 stories by Nolan. That's right, it is links time.
Title TLDR quote from my blog post on the story
"Starblood" "lacks any sort of character, feeling or plot"
"Dead Man Walking" "So bad I am angry."
Never again, Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award and International Horror Guild Living Legend Award winner William F. Nolan, never again.
(UPDATE SEPTEMBER 29, 2024: I didn't do a good job looking through the records because today I find I've also read a story by Nolan called "Jenny Among the Zeebs" and declared it "unfunny and nonsensical" and "Bad.")
"A Crazy Mistake" by Nancy Kilpatrick
I've never read anything by Kilpatrick before, though I've read
stories in
anthologies she has edited. Kilpatrick has written a lot of fiction we might describe as niche, like novels about Jason Vorhees of
Friday the 13th fame and pornographic novels about having sex with Dracula, Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll, or the Frankenstein monster. I'm not going to judge; I'm as horny as the next guy and I have done things I might not brag about for money--I've worked in a government office, after all.
The narrator of "A Crazy Mistake" is a self-sacrificing woman who left her boyfriend, a student at Miskatonic U, so she wouldn't distract him from his studies and moved to L.A. (ugh) to work as a researcher for B-movies. She helps schlock filmmakers by doing research on mythology and the supernatural, looking for ideas about mummies or vampires or whatever they can integrate into their bad movies. She is hired to do research on Amazons and talks on the phone with her ex-boyfriend about them and that gets her interested in purported prehistoric matriarchal societies and
those famous Paleolithic sculptures of obese women with beehive hair. The narrator takes a trip back East to use the Miskatonic U. library to do deeper research, including reading a handwritten first-hand account of the expedition described in
At The Mountains of Madness, and she comes to believe that space aliens, the Great Old Ones, created human life on Earth, starting with fat women with beehive heads and then breeding them with Neanderthals, more or less as a joke. She compares this frivolous entertainment to the B-movies she has had a small part in creating--life is meaningless so intelligent beings, be they the Great Old Ones or their creations--us!--try to fill their empty lives with pointless entertainment. She ends up insane, believing her body is changing, getting fat, like one of those prehistoric sculptures, because she stole and ate a piece of that manuscript upon which was a sketch of just such a sculpture seen by the explorer in the Antarctic.
"A Crazy Mistake" feels kind of long even though quite little happens; Kilpatrick devotes long passages to describing theories of prehistoric matriarchy and to summarizing At The Mountains of Madness. But it is not terrible, and maybe will appeal to feminists (the characters use the word "patriarchal" totally unironically like a dozen times) and to goth kids who recognize that life is meaningless and everybody is psychologically damaged but don't keep this knowledge to themselves like the rest of us do. (Kilpatrick is also author of 2004's The Goth Bible.) We'll call "A Crazy Mistake" acceptable if forgettable.
I'm never going to read William F. Nolan again, but if I ever feel like reading about women having sex with animated corpses or demons, Kilpatrick is going to be my go-to, so you can look forward to that.
"Deep Fracture" by Steve Rasnic Tem
This is a pretty literary story, with descriptions of the sky, themes of the sadness of working class life and conventional sexual relationships (ignoring phone calls from your nagging wife while you are out running errands, getting the supplies you need to do the cosmetic home repairs she expects you to do after spending a tiring week at work), themes of decay and a recurring motif of lines--cracks, hair, wires, worms. I think I can mildly recommend this one--it is certainly the best one we are reading today, Tem taking the task seriously (unlike Foster and Nolan who are phoning it in or making a joke of it) and pacing and structuring the story ably (unlike Kilpatrick.) There are lots of Lovecraftian things going on, and the literary stuff doesn't get in the way of the weird horror elements--Tem's metaphors and descriptions are not too long or too opaque and they all work.
Tom and Walt live in an Appalachian coal town that recently has been afflicted with earthquakes, such that the roads and buildings--ugly stores, houses and strip malls--are crumbling. Walt is the older man, a geologist, and he is tagging along as Tom drives all over town buying stuff so he can refurbish his and his wife's house--his wife keeps calling him on his cell phone. Snow is threatening, and Tom is sort of looking forward to snow covering up the ugliness of his decaying town.
All through the story we get hints that suggest a Lovecraftian cataclysm is about to strike, an alien city and its monstrous inhabitants about to rise up under the town and, I guess, kill everybody. The cold feels strange; Walt admits that his father retired from coal mining because he kept having dreams of an alien city beneath the mines, then Walt shows Tom a spire or some such architectural fragment his father found in the mines which has indecipherable writing inscribed on it; wife calls up to say the contractors hired to clear their sewer line have found it is clogged with "lines" like hair and worms.
Nolan, Kilpatrick and Tem completists are going to have to buy a copy of The Madness of Cthulhu: Volume Two because "Dead Man Walking," "A Crazy Mistake," and "Deep Fracture" have not been reprinted elsewhere, though Tem's story deserves to be.
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One good story, two acceptable, and one bad? A big step down from our last episode. Well, sometimes you get the shoggoth, and sometimes the shoggoth gets you.
It's back to the World War II era next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log; see you there, fellow investigators of the astounding and the unknown.