'It' (1940) by Theodore Sturgeon

My review of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation is still cooking, but in the meantime I just wanted to drop a note about this story by Sturgeon.  I'm doing some research on 'muck-monsters' for a forthcoming essay.  This is the line of horror fiction creatures that tend to semi-spontaneously arise from environs naturally composed of slime, goop, mold, debris, mud, loam and the like and in a pseudo-humanoid form, usually based on the human corpse such environs have absorbed and grotesquely reanimated.  The transformation takes place by many means, from scientific to supernatural to inexplicable.  Some of the heirs of this sub-genre are the famous Swamp Thing from DC comics and the slightly lesser known Man-Thing from Marvel comics.  But it all started with the story 'It' by Theodore Sturgeon. His seminal muck-monster is of the inexplicable variety and very effectively evoked.

The main reason I wanted to stop here and mention the story is that it is excellent.  I read it over a decade ago in an anthology and it was instantly a favourite.  But sometimes favourite stories lose some of their shine on a re-read, especially if many years lay between.  Sturgeon's story only shined greater.  I was pleasantly surprised at just how lovely the prose was, a wonderful evocation of a region and of the atmosphere of a particular kind of dreadful, cruel horror, all the more effective for its bucolic setting and likable, rustic characters.  If, like me, you've been wondering if it's as good as you remember, it is.  I highly recommend revisiting it.  It's a genuine modern classic of horror, much-anthologised (apparently some 60 times) for good reason.

(Spoiler in what follows.)

'It' has interesting potential intersections with my ecomonstrous readings of Cormac McCarthy and R. A. Lafferty.  The monster in this tale possibly evinces a meaningless cosmic horror, seemingly irrepressible, reminiscent of some of McCarthy's major themes.  Yet it is a persistent, bubbling brook that laughs the monster into nothing at the end of the story, reminiscent of Lafferty's 'cosmic laughter' theme.  Still, the family struck by this monstrosity is marked terribly and do not seem to wake from the nightmare, making the tale very downbeat overall.  It's a pretty bleak iteration of the environment 'speaking' to us, forcing us to reassess the place of the human in the non-human.  But there's some potential light folded into it too.

The ongoing industry of muck-monsters that eventually grew out of this fecund little masterpiece could be seen as the working out of the cosmic-personal themes Sturgeon's imagination initiated. The essay I'm working on explores Lafferty's take on muck-monstrosity and his repeated symbology of swamps, which I was surprised to find recurs fairly regularly in his work.

At any rate, Theodore Sturgeon's 'It' would very likely make it into my personal Top 100 list of classic horror stories.

(From the Marvel comics 1970s adaptation of Sturgeon's 'It')

Revival (2014) by Stephen King

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

What to say about this novel?  It was fun to finally get a chance to read something really recent from King.  And don't be misled by my 2.5 rating.  This is not a bad book, just not necessarily a great one. It was not a waste of time, especially if you want to work your way through the entirety of King's fiction like I'm trying to do.  It has important thematic elements that you wouldn't want to miss if you're hoping to trace some of his major themes across his body of work.  Indeed, as regards King's recurring engagement - from his earliest works to his latest - with theological concerns, this novel is very important.  I'm not sure he says much here that he hasn't said elsewhere, but it's one more iteration, important for tracking the sheer quantity of theological content in King's work if nothing else.

I assume most readers will take this story as a damning portrayal of Christian theology, Christian ministers, and Christianity in general.  But King's being far more subtle than that.  First of all, there are a lot of very sympathetic Christian characters in here, such as the protagonist's own parents. Their faith is simple and sensible.  They are taken in by neither scepticism nor fanaticism.  They are devout but generous, and probably represent a bigger swathe of American culture than is generally guessed.

Secondly, if you're paying attention, this is a damning story of the dangers and pitfalls of unbelief as much as belief.  The antagonist is a man who loses his faith after all, and who becomes a very evil charlatan only after this loss of faith.  You could fairly say that he is an illustration of the notion that if you don't worship God, you'll worship something else, probably to your own and others' degradation and detriment. Also, the book's portrayal of crowd-credulity is really about a very general gullibility that affects most Americans when it comes to 'cures' for health issues.  This novel happens to focus on an intentionally deceiving faith-healer and his all-too-willing dupes.  But this phenomenon is not unique to that context, as multitudes every day practice a similarly credulous hyper-faith in regard to both corporate drugs and alternative medicines or health practices.  The wise reader will take the tale as a reflection and warning about this widespread issue manifested in a variety of ways, not just 'tent revivals'.

Finally, as to whether or not this novel is just a lambasting against Christian theology, practice, and persons, it must be noted that though King gives full roar to unbelief here - and indeed, to the Lovecraft-esque belief that we live in an outright horrific, bleak, and cruel universe - he does not give voice only to such unbelief and belief-in-horror.  He gives a tiny space for the possibility that the Lovecraftian view is not only false, but an outright lie.  In this story, the evidence is very strongly stacked against the disbeliever in the Lovecraftian universe, almost overwhelmingly.  Yet King is careful to leave a pinprick's opening for the possibility of hope.  That's not nothing.  It's really not.  At some moments in life, that's all anyone can see or hold onto.  But it might be enough.  At almost the very end of the novel, King's narrator writes:  ‘There is hope, therefore I live.’  (Page 370 in the edition I borrowed from my local library.)  After all, a pinprick is all it takes to burst a bubble.  And lots of worldviews are up for having their bubbles burst, not just religious ones.

This theological aspect of the novel I actually found quite good, and if it were the only consideration, I'd give it more like a 3.5 or 4.  But other elements, of course, factor into it.

The storytelling itself is really quite lovely for about the first third or so of the novel - King at his nostalgic-but-tragic best.  The 1960s rural Maine life is realised nicely and makes for quite a 'cosy' read really, something of a warm but darkening paean to childhood.  The second third of the novel still grips well enough as we catch up with the protagonist as an adult addict, but it starts to lose some of its depth, becoming more of a merely entertaining yarn than a semi-profound meditation on life. By the final third of the novel, when it is supposed to be ratcheting up to its horrific climax, it threatens to become sheer goofy pulp.  That's, of course, what King is here revisiting and paying tribute to:  early Weird Tales horror, and earlier melodramatic Victorian horror.  But he just doesn't pull it off in my opinion. The antagonist, who was already thinning in the second third, has become a cartoon villain by this last segment of the tale, even speaking in a faux-genteel diction that made me cringe.  The antagonist's development into this kind of character could even have been done with some power, making him effectively creepy and terrifying in his ridiculous self-importance and affectation.  But that was not achieved.  

Worse, the horrors themselves, when they are revealed in fullness at the end, are more ridiculous still. I admire the level King was trying to take things to here, but again, to me, it just didn't come off. King is a genius at what he does well, carving out his own territory in horror by combining 'regular' late 20th/early 21st century American life with supernatural violence and terror.  But here, when he strays into the territory of the likes of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith or William Hope Hodgson or Frank Belknap Long - effective purveyors of otherworldly horrors who already have their own limitations - he just seems out of his depth.  He can occasionally dip into this sort of thing with mixed success, but still somewhat effectively - e.g. 'The Mist' and 'Mrs. Todd's Shortcut' in Skeleton Crew; and occasionally I think he really nails it - e.g. 'I Am the Doorway' and 'Gray Matter' in Night Shift. I'm sure there are other examples that I just haven't read yet.  But here, though I want to like [SPOILER, I guess] the central image of the claw made of faces coming out of the revivified corpse's mouth, it just seems to arrive more or less out of nowhere, with no real atmosphere for it built up, no rationale, no matter how otherworldly or metaphysically weird.  Even the preceding glimpse of the afterlife only strikes me as technically horrific - as in, yeah, that'd be just unspeakably terrible [SPOILER again, of sorts] to be slaves of some unspecified female sort of superbeing, driven by ant-men, but the scene didn't make me feel the horror.  It came closer to making me laugh, not at the horror of such a reality, but at its depiction here.  I again kept thinking of cartoons, and not good ones.  The reason I have trouble even thinking of the above as spoilers is because the horror-reveal came as no real surprise to me when I read it.  Its elements had either already been forecasted and were not substantially developed or deepened here or they were just out of left field, and not in a wow-ing sort of way, but rather in way that robbed them of impact.  

So there you have it, my take:  Revival is theologically interesting, good storytelling in its first third, weakened in characterisation and plot in the last two-thirds, and kind of terrible in its horror-reveal finale.  Still glad I read it.  But more looking forward to catching up on King's 80s output.

Up next:  Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (2014).

'this less material life is our truer life' - again, Lovecraft and spirituality

Regarding what I wrote about Lovecraft and spirituality and transcendence yesterday, observe the opening passage to his story 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep' (1919) below.  Sometimes these opening philosophical gambits are worth the price of admission alone, regardless of what Lovecraft may be able to subsequently achieve with the narration itself.  Here I think he rather clearly exhibits the sort of Dark Sehnsucht and anti-reductionism I alluded to:

I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Sometimes I side with those who find Lovecraft's verbose 'purple prose' somewhat ponderous and amusingly porcine.  At other times I think his hefty phrases lean slightly more in the direction of Milton or Faulkner than Edward Bulwer-Lytton and achieve a certain degree of thoughtful opulence (if you're willing to also chuckle a little as you appreciate it).  This whole passage is a pretty good example of his wordiness working well, I think.  His 'immundane' is a very aptly chosen word for his subject matter and one I plan to use in the future.  His 'terraqueous globe' is just delicious - in the way monsters like Godzilla and Gamera are epic and outrageous at once.  The constant recurrence of globulous phrases like 'titanic significance' and 'uncorporeal life', couched as they are in syntactical rhythms that mirror their manatee-like eloquence, induce in the reader a flavour of the very dream state that is under review.  Matching form to theme is one crucial mark of great writing.  Today, here, Lovecraft is a great writer in my opinion.

At any rate, the content is substantial.  This is not merely a dreamy prose-poem.  Lovecraft is hungrily excavating his lifelong philosophical pursuit:  a depth-dive into ontology, a refusal to accept commonsense,  commonplace reality and a determination to dig beneath its surface.  Or, to move the metaphor from 'under' to 'over', a determination to escape the orbital pull of everyday appearances.  This supra-mundane impulse and the careful explication it engenders in Lovecraft's works are, I submit, rather clear signs of his bent toward something not at all unlike a spiritual worldview.  I know many spiritualities seek a totally 'immanent' picture of the world, without immaterial remainder, but 'a certain remainder' is exactly what Lovecraft feels in his gut here and he thinks it unwise to ignore that intuition.  And equally unwise to throw an 'ordinary interpretation' at it (such as that it was just the spicy burritos we ate, or a Freudian/Feuerbachian projectionist sort of explain-it-away theory).

To be fair, the point I cited S. T. Joshi making - that Lovecraft consciously sought a 'non-supernatural cosmic art' (in Lovecraft's own words) - was put forth by Joshi as being an arc of intellectual growth that Lovecraft underwent during his short career.  I agree that just such a development of ideas and ideology occurred in Lovecraft.  But his 'spiritual' roots are prominent in this early story and I'm not yet convinced he ever 'outgrew' them in his heart, even though he sought intentionally to do so by means of the theoretical rhetoric he adopted.  I do think his intellectual convictions had sincerely moved in the direction of materialism, but I also think that position was in tension with his heart's impulse for the 'beyond' and that even his own artistic fleshing out of materialism (the Cthulhu Mythos) was decidedly non-reductionistic.

It's fascinating really.  I think so many atheists and secularists and 'neo-pagans' are drawn to Lovecraft because he is really one of the great spiritual writers of the 20th century, a mystic for materialists I suppose.  (And I would welcome your thoughts on this if you self-identify as such.)  Lovecraft's keen sense of 'cosmic horror' seems to be in tension with his equally keen sense of Sensucht, of spiritual yearning.  And I think this is why so many 'religious believers' have enjoyed and imitated Lovecraft too, despite not sharing his atheism (in popular genre fiction one thinks of the likes of Catholics such as Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers).

Of course, Christian theology's emphasis on physical creation and bodily resurrection would, ironically, give far more substance and meaning to material, earthly life than Lovecraft intimates here (our 'vain presence' in the physical ecosphere is 'secondary' at best, he surmises).  But Lovecraft's deep-seated hunch that we are more than merely meat-machines remains hugely significant to me and I think we do him an injustice if we reduce him to merely an apostle of a grim cosmic realism comprised of particles-all-the-way-down.  His view was sincerely bleak and devoutly 'scientific' (as he understood it), but the beat of his heart's longing for Something More never stops pulsating throughout his work.  If we ignore that, at times faint, palpitation, it will, Poe-esque, grow louder and louder in our ears until we scream out our confession that we buried it beneath the floorboards.

The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), Image Comics

I think I mainly enjoyed this graphic novel because of the way it resonated with me as an aspiring writer of fiction.  That's a bit odd in that I'm not a huge fan of Lovecraft's actual writing.  I'm more into Lovecraft for his philosophical struggle and unique artistic vision - his actual prose inspires me very rarely.  But it is Lovecraft's vexed career as a writer that forms the central motif of this period comic set in the 1920s.  It's a very well-told and gripping tale if relatively simple.  The complexity comes not in the plot but in the meditation on art and life.  It's about 'high' literary aspirations in a world that can only take what you make as pulp fiction, lurid shockers to be read and trashed.  If what you make can be read at all, that is.  The opening portrays the editor of Weird Tales magazine complaining to Lovecraft's fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith that Lovecraft's stories are just too bizarre and not gripping enough.  The scene shows how even the pulps didn't have much time for Lovecraft's truly (not just surfacely) weird tales.  (Various characters throughout, such as policemen, remark that they've never been able to actually finish reading one of Lovecraft's stories.)

Lovecraft was too freakish and monstrous for the literary canon and too meditative and visionary for the pulps.  Add to that a childhood disfigured by parental mental illness and a failed attempt at romance (central plot features of the graphic novel) and you have the quintessential (and slightly clichéd) Unhappy Poet.  Such a man might be prone to make monsters in his art, but in this comic's story the monsters step outside Lovecraft's brain and murderously into his world. It's another fairly hackneyed trope, but fun enough nonetheless and, again, not really the point.

The point is that it's incredibly difficult to grope toward an original artistic vision in a world that needs to sell, sell, sell, and in a world where we're all nursed on lowest-common-denominator aesthetics and ontologies.  Probably about half of the graphic novel's text is comprised of actual quotes from Lovecraft's writings - I recognised a number of them from both his fiction and non-fiction writing. Some seemed obviously from letters or journals.  There's a lot of soul-searching and frustration and bleak determination, but in a way I found sincere and inviting, not goth-angsty.

The illustrations are fine.  They are skilful drawings that get the job done and tell the story well.  It's not really my style, but some of the monsters are interesting interpretations, quite gruesome and repugnant.  They flesh out effectively the sheer madness of what it would be like to see the brain-shattering otherworldliness of such beings disgustingly intersect with our own organic matter and psyche.  There was, however, perhaps not enough emphasis on the cosmos, the dreadful sense of deep space and lightyears so crucial to the ambient of the Lovecraft's monstrosities, his seminal 'cosmic horror'.

One thing I found interesting was that the editor of Weird Tales complained that Lovecraft didn't have busty blondes and the accompanying sexual under- or overtones in his tales, the misogynistic soft-smut that sold so well.  But this graphic novel's illustrator made sure to include a number of panels of fairly graphic sex and nudity (the comic would surely need to be rated R for a number of elements).  I thought most of these sex scenes fairly gratuitous.  Some of them were commenting on men's abuse of women (e.g. prostitution), but as is so often the case in our society, these depictions drag the male imagination through a suspiciously loving and lingering objectification of lust-embellished female bodies in order to 'subvert' that same male gaze. I find this element of the comic highly ironic in light of the complaint that Lovecraft couldn't sell well without such lubricious voyeurism.  There is a deeper and real issue in Lovecraft about phobia of sex and relationships, but that's not really touched on in this comic in favour of a more simple Hollywood tragic romance line.

Speaking of Hollywood, there have apparently been talks with Ron Howard about adapting this comic to film.  I found myself wishing that might happen as I read it, especially as a number of counter-cultural writers have had films made about them in the last decade (e.g. Hunter S. Thomson and Allen Ginsberg).  I just wish a more visionary director than Howard could get hold of it.

Fellow Lovecraft enthusiasts might at least enjoy seeing Lovecraft's own words on writing and life strung together into a tale as I did.  And those interested in a first glimpse of the thinking and worldview behind this tragic mad genius of outré literature might find this graphic novel an accessible intro (but please don't stop here as it is probably misleading in some ways).  The book cemented a growing feeling for me, that in spite of the fact that I don't care for Lovecraft's actual prose, he is becoming something of a writer's writer for me, a rather poignant champion of artistic integrity in a world that doesn't value that often enough.

For an outro, here are a few of the pretty cool cover illustrations from individual issues of the series, found at the back of the book:

Zombie Sharks With Metal Teeth (2013) by Stephen Graham Jones

Look, I'm the type of person who, if you give your book this amazing title and adorn it with this amazing artwork, I'll buy it before I really knew what hit me.  It's a Pavlovian reflex for a dog like me. Plus I'd already read Jones's Zombie Bake-Off (2012) and was very eager for more.

I polished this sucker off pretty quick after receiving it in the post (I don't know if local bookstores even stock this kind of stuff).  It's a compulsively readable collection of short stories and yes, there's a titular one. But no (I think readers deserve to know), there are no zombie sharks with metal teeth, not really - I mean, yes, technically there are, right at the end of that story, but barely and only in a passing conjecture.  This surprised and disappointed me because Zombie Bake-Off had been about exactly that. And when the blurb said it had zombie soccer moms vs. zombie pro-wrestlers, it wasn't lying or exaggerating.  The whole novel's setting was a bake-off and the whole novel's action involved pro-wrestlers, soccer moms, and zombies - battling each other and a small band of the living.  So I don't think I was out of bounds in expecting from the titular story of this collection literal undead sharks that somehow had teeth made of metal.

But I wasn't disappointed with this volume, no no no.  When what it does give you is plenty of stories that do feature zombies, in fresh variations of scenario and depth of survivor characterisation, and a story about a hardboiled detective flying through outer space by means of being psychically implanted into a giant space-faring lobster, and enigmatic alien encounters aplenty, more apocalypses than one has a right to expect from a collection, the most elliptical meta-fictional slasher story you'll ever read, and a story starring Rod Serling, well, you don't complain, you give thanks.

But the reader will inevitably wonder:  what am I reading?  What is this stuff?  Horror?  Well, some of it, yeah.  Sort of.  Science fiction?  Some of those too.  Kind of.  Weird fiction or ‘the New Weird’? Mm, not really, not to me, not from what I've read of China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer - this is a different kettle of queer fish.  Is it ‘bizarro’ fiction?  I guess maybe that’s the main thing I expected from the title and cover art.  But that label too only partly captures it.  I want to say these stories feel like they're by someone who set out to be a pulp writer influenced by the cosmic horror of Lovecraft (or, probably closer to the mark, the nihilism of Romero's classic Dead Trilogy), but said pulp-ist got liberal arts educated and introspective and transmuted his impulse toward horror through the likes of, what... Wes Anderson?  David Foster Wallace?  I don’t know exactly.  (I don’t have the reference in my experience, but I’m sure someone does.)  There’s an unflinching attention to monstrosity, violence, freakishness, aliens, cosmology-that-dwarfs-the-cosmologist, and so on.  But it’s all delivered through a very sensitive, even tender, heart.  Indeed, even though there is bloodshed and body-horror aplenty in this book, my final impression is that it is gentle, contemplative.  And I think that's just Stephen Graham Jones.  No one genre or genre-mix can really hold him.  He does what he does.

Despite being clearly intellectual, it all comes across fairly working-class too.  The characters tend to be underlings in offices or warehouses or laboratories.  Or they're young or old married couples who remain devoted to each other despite (or because of?) discovering very disturbing darknesses about one another.  Or they're little kids being cruel and kind to one another as kids do.

Part of the gentle contemplativeness is also down to the way tales are told, for they are as much about the telling as the subject matter.  The diction is at first hard to parse until you get the hang of Jones's almost oral cadences and patterns, like how a normal guy from right here and now would talk to you, would unfold a narrative to you in person.  Yet, paradoxically, it's also poetic and writerly, made for the page it seems to me.  It's downright mesmerising when you get into its rhythms.

And (I had never noticed how much this also is how it sounds when someone is telling you a story they know off the cuff) though the narrator usually seems to know what’s coming and codes that story arc into the opening pages, these tales do not feel heavily plotted.  Stephen King says stories are pre-existing fossils that writers discover and unearth and that plotting is a jackhammer that breaks as much as it liberates.  Jones feels almost hyper-aware of this.  He works very delicately, mostly with small hand spade and brush, to exhume the tales he's found.  He leaves a lot of the story still buried. But he has taken depth-readings and he knows what’s down there, if murkily, and I tended to find myself halfway through a story going back over its first few pages with a better understanding of all that was being revealed to me right off.  In other words, Jones writes richly enough that (as with Gene Wolfe) re-reading is almost required, and a pleasure.  You get your money's worth.

Philosophically, the stories evince ruminations rife with material for my own interests in monster theory and horror theory ('Little Monsters' is a two-page piece packed tight with fodder for this and I hope to do a separate post about it).  The story 'How Billy Hanson Destroyed the Planet Earth, and Everyone On It' is my favourite contemporary mutation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror that I've encountered.  It is a mutation though, as is every other bleak demise of humanity or relativising of humanity in the face of infinity that Jones depicts.  There's definitely a warm beating heart underneath the cosmic coldness in Jones's take.  What I can't tell is whether he's simply saying let's hold onto our scrap of humanity even in the face of the nothingness that will eventually devour us all, or whether he might just might be saying that such 'scrap of humanity' might just might actually be a grubby little hint or clue that nothingness is not necessarily the final word about either us or the cosmos.  Even Cthulhu and his elder god ilk look very different in Jones's vision:  alien intelligences vastly above us may view us only as food, sure, but that doesn't mean they might not be 'humane' souls who cause us no more suffering than is necessary.  The story 'Catch and Release' is the best variation on an old s.f. twist-ending that I've come across and illustrates this almost anti-Lovecraftian theme poignantly.

Jones says in an interview (the interview is a masterclass in creative writing, by the way) that one of his favourite short stories is about a boy who can predict the future who has a TV show:

But then one day he looks ahead and sees this comet just hurtling to Earth, to wipe us all out, no chance of survival, no Bruce Willis, so, on his program that morning, he looks right into the camera and he says that this is going to be the best day ever. That people are going to hug each other, nobody's going to be unhappy, all of it. It's the best gift he could possibly have given the world, and it's a lie. This is at the bottom of everything I write.

What I wonder is whether Jones thinks that this 'lie' gives the lie to ultimate meaninglessness, whether he thinks that maybe such a 'lie' really serves a greater truth about us and the world.  I don't know. (His delightful story notes at the end of the book are, though disarmingly vulnerable, as elliptical as the stories themselves and only deepen the mystery and poignancy.)

I do know I can't wait to read more by him (I've got his first novel The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong coming in the post).