Sterling City (2014) by Stephen Graham Jones

In my own definition of the 'Weird Western' I extend the sub-genre's purview to include fiction set not only in the western United States of the 'cowboys and indians' era, but also that set in the 20th and 21st century western U.S. - as long as said fiction also includes elements of the uncanny or macabre or otherwise outré.  So in addition to books by, say, Arianne 'Tex' Thompson and Guy Adams it would also include books by, say, Joe R. Lansdale and, our man of the hour, Stephen Graham Jones.  (To take an example from a single author's oeuvre, the Weird Western encompasses both the 1850s Texas-Mexico setting of Cormac McCarthy's scalp-hunting odyssey Blood Meridian and the 1980s Texas-Mexico setting of his brutal crime thriller No Country For Old Men.)

This is my third review of a Jones book (the first two are here and here) and I think I can say that his is always a western sort of vantage, albeit a contemporary Blackfeet Native American one.  (That said, explicitly American Indian characters are by no means a guarantee in his fiction.)  His works also always seem to contain some element of the bizarre or gruesome, from out and out genre material, such as zombies and werewolves, to surreal and 'meta' narration of dark and mysterious events and relationships.  And Jones's brand of weird can imbue a range of modes from crime thriller to family drama to horror story, all with loose and blurry borders, often hybridised, and yet always 'literary'.  I've rarely seen someone so joyously and offhandedly mix the 'highbrow' and the 'lowbrow'. (All the 'high' stuff is in the prose style and themes by the way.  It's the content that seems pretty consistently working class, with occasional white collar stuff in the margins.)  There's often a lot of poignancy, and ever an undercurrent of very, very wry (and occasionally bonkers) humour.  (I get these impressions from having dipped into his first few novels as well, an experience I'll return to below.)

So, to a degree, I think all of Jone's work can be said to be of the Weird Western mode, though that by no means captures the entirety of what he's doing.  In fact, his kind of western writing is really just showing us how weird the western USA (and at a larger scale, existence itself) simply is, a fact we are prone to ignore.  Thus our need for prophets like Jones.  And thus advancing my own theory that all good literature is weird literature, all good philosophy is weird philosophy, all good theology is weird theology, etc.   And by the 'weird' I don't mean just the 'messed up' or the morally twisted. Jones's is not a freakshow literature for the titillation of easterners' prejudices.  It's a regionalised mirror that can be held up to anyone from anywhere to show that the comically grotesque carnival shapes are not in the glass but in life.  For all of us.

Reality is weird.

Sterling City is a lovely little meditation on just that.  Coming in at a mere 81 pages, it's a one-sitter for you fast readers out there and a two or three sitter for slowpokes like me.  I don't want to give too much away, but on page one you know there's a cosmic element and by page six you see a big reveal of the creepily weird, which the rest of the novella circles round as a major plot factor.  In tandem with this knowingly pulp element is the story of the breakdown of one man's marriage.  Or rather, the very moment his wife leaves him and his attempt at playing that event cool, and failing to.  Both of these - a grotesquery's arrival and a spouse's departure - would be highly dramatic events in real life, and yet Jones's relentlessly elliptical and indirect style makes them seem almost like things that happen in the corner of your eye.  I mean, he confronts both directly.  You get a juicy view and the weird element in particular is initially surrounded by strong emotion from one of the characters.  But it feels like the view is for mere seconds at a time.  The history of the marriage's troubles and the present bizarre cosmic influences come only in half-understood glimpses for the reader.  Both of these happenings consume the consciousness of the protagonist, yet both seem oddly just off stage for most of the novella.

Similarly, the larger West Texas landscape is fully backgrounded in favour of the farm on which the story unfolds (with one episode in town).  This makes for a tight focus.  It achieves some atmosphere in its concision, mostly focused on farming equipment and farm buildings and farm work.  This is good, and I enjoyed being there in that kind of small psychogeography.  Yet I can't help but feel that the story's possibly a little too long to sustain its own smallness.  After forty pages or so I felt it needed to somehow open out to the greater environs more, and possibly the point of view of more characters.  I enjoyed being in Lee Graves's head, and recognised a little of myself in him, but a story this length needed a little more scope I felt.  It's a fairly minor complaint and by no means ruined the read.  There were, it must be said, about ten pages toward the end that didn't work at all for me.  It was supposed to be a tense scene of the central piece of large equipment almost malfunctioning, but I have no knowledge of this whole area (farming and its equipment and procedures) and the description did not enlighten me, so I was just plain bored.  But again, it was a minor misstep and the story finished well. The denouement of the weird element was especially satisfying to me, gorgeous with alien wonder.

Indeed, this is kind of a story about the Beauty of Monsters, which I can always get behind.  It's also very intentional and explicit about hope in the end, about New Beginnings after the Apocalypses that punctuate our lives. It reminded me of R. A Lafferty in that respect.  This actually makes it incredibly radical among its Horror and Weird Fiction cohorts, which tend, especially among the avant-garde, towards powerful pessimism and bleakness (the avant-garde of the Lit Fic crew can be this way too, and Double-Fish Jones swims in both worlds).  The story doesn't promote hope without any ambiguity mind you.  And from what I've read from Jones so far, he has a number of pieces both for and against hope and lots of places in between.  His despairing pieces, however, are always poignant and humane and even kind of sweet.  He seems to want to hope, even in despair.  That might make him kind of 'out' with some of the Cool Kids of Nihilism, I don't know.  I hugely respect it.

I'd probably give this particular book something like a 3/5, but right now I'm more into Jones for the total package than merely for particular works.  He's a presence, a force.  Following his elusive, yet somehow generous, remarks on Twitter and Facebook round out both his style and substance, just like his 'Acknowledgements' at the end of Sterling City.  (Always be sure to read any dedications or story notes or other authorial 'paratexts' by Jones - he's always telling you a little bit more of what he means and who he is and what he cares about in those things, even whilst deepening the mystery). Any time you see an article written by him, it'll be worth checking out as well.  I'll note here that I'm still trying to find my way into his more 'literary' works.  I read around a hundred pages each of his first two novels, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong and All The Beautiful Sinners, and while both blew my mind on some level, both also kind of lost me with the almost painfully indirect style in which he wrote them.  Mind you, I wasn't really committed to reading them at the time.  I was only dipping and dabbling and when they proved difficult, I shelved them for a future go.  Which I look forward to, along with a ton of his other prolific output, both on the more literary end and on the more genre end. His is an exciting career to follow.

'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')

'non-supernatural cosmic art' vs. Sensucht: H. P. Lovecraft's God-Shaped Hole

‘The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe.  And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?’

-H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, Selected Letters 295-6, cited in Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, Editor, The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (2014), Ashgate Publishing, Surrey, p. 391 in the article ‘Lovecraft, Monsters In’ by S. T. Joshi, who comments:

‘This view makes it evident that Lovecraft was seeking to go beyond traditional supernatural horror and more in the direction of the new genre of science fiction.’ (ibid.)

But such a move would still be a potently hybridised science fiction literature, one that pulls in different directions, since it is still rooted in ‘revolt’, which could be understood as the bent in humans toward anti-reductionism.  At most, this would mean Lovecraft was yearning toward a philosophically non-reductionist form of materialism in which to express his obvious mysticism.  The likes of Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012) help elucidate this.  But this hybridisation could also signal a fundamental tension in Lovecraft between a sort of Lewisian sense of Sensucht, a longing for the transcendent, and a principled and intuitive drive toward sheer, closed, non-divine immanentism.  Either way, though Lovecraft may have professed a desire to head in a ‘scientific’ (not to mention ‘scientistic’) and explicitly atheistic materialist direction, he was no Dawkins-esque cavalier reducer.  It seems obvious to me that mysticism ran deep in Lovecraft, a ‘spiritual’ sort of impulse that he embraced, guarded, and cultivated, even if he also sought to be as thoroughly non-supernaturalist as he could be.  And it also seems to me that this ‘spirituality’, though it follows in the footsteps of many spiritualities that seek naturalistic closure without divine remainder, couldn’t resist expressing itself through pantheons of deities, through a genuine sense of worship and outward and ‘upward’ supra-spatiotemporal projectionism of deity-manufacture.  In short, Lovecraft seems to have exhibited as well as anyone the ‘god-shaped hole’ so prevalent and prominent in human psychology and activity.

'So get out there and scare some kids today!' - On Horror Stories and Children

(Photo by Flannery O'Kafka)

Good food for thought from this article by Greg Ruth on children and the horror genre:  'Why Horror is Good For You (and Even Better for Your Kids)'.

It's an area near and dear to me as I've slowly and hopefully wisely introduced my love of horror and monsters to each of our five children.  The only thing I think the article leaves out is love for the monster as Beautiful-Ugly Terrifying-Fascinating Other. The monster is not only something to survive or defeat.  It can also be a lover, friend, guide, companion, and ally.  This oversight is perhaps also why the article's viewpoint seems silent on spirituality or faith of any kind and perhaps slightly over-reliant on Darwinian survivalist rhetoric.

Here are some excerpts:

The time has become ripe again and with the collapse of the DC and Marvel models, it was time to do what they wouldn’t: scare the hell out of kids and teach them to love it.

From Reason # 1, Childhood is Scary:
Look, the kids are already scared, so let’s give them some tools to cope with it beyond telling them not to worry about it all... when they really have every right to be scared poopless. Scary stories tell kids there’s always something worse, and in effect come across as more honest because they exist in a realm already familiar to them. Scary tales don’t warp kids; they give them a place to blow off steam while they are being warped by everything else.

From Reason # 3, Power to the Powerless:
Plainly put, horror provides a playground in which kids can dance with their fears in a safe way that can teach them how to survive monsters and be powerful, too. Horror for kids lets them not only read or see these terrible beasts, but also see themselves in the stories’ protagonists. The hero’s victory is their victory. The beast is whomever they find beastly in their own lives. A kid finishing a scary book, or movie can walk away having met the monster and survived, ready and better armed against the next villain that will be coming...

From Reason # 4, Horror is Ancient and Real and Can Teach Us Much:
The thrill is an ancient one, and when we feel it, we’re connecting with something old and powerful within us.

Reason # 4, 'Horror Confirms Secret Truths', is worth quoting in full:
“You know when grown-ups tell you everything’s going to be fine and there’s nothing to be worried about, but you know they’re lying? ” says the Doctor of a young, mortified Amy Pond. “Uh-huh ,” she replies, rolling her ten-year-old eyes dramatically. The Doctor leans in, a wink in his eye and intimates... “Everything’s going to be fine.” And then they turn to face the monster living in her wall with a screwdriver in one hand and a half eaten apple in the other.

In doing this, Moffat touches brilliantly upon another essential truth of horror—that it shows us guardians and guides that will be more honest with us than even our own parents. Within the darkness and shadows is our guide, who can lead us out and back into the light, but you can only find him there in the darkness, when you need him most. Kids are aware of so much more that’s happening in their house than we as parents even want to imagine. But because we don’t share all the details of our anxious whispers, stressful phone calls, or hushed arguments, (and rightfully so), they are left to fill in the facts themselves, and what one imagines tends to be far more terrible than what is real. They know you’re fighting about something, but not what. They can tell what hastened whispers in the hall mean outside their door... or they think they do. And what they don’t know for a fact, they fill in with fictions. Storytellers dabbling in horror provide them with an honest broker who doesn’t shy away from the fact of werewolves or face-eating aliens that want to put their insect babies in our stomachs. They look you straight into their eyes and whisper delightfully “Everything’s going to be fine.” The mere fact of telling these tales proves a willingness to join in with kids in their nightmares, bring them to life, and then subvert and vanquish them. Children love you for this, because you are sharing a secret with them they don’t yet realize everyone else also knows: this is fun.

The end result, for me, at least was a great sense of trust in scary movies I never got from my parents, who tried to comfort me by telling me ghosts weren’t real. Horror told me they were, but it also taught me how to face them. We deny to our kids the full measure of what we experience and suffer as adults, but they aren’t idiots and know something’s going on, and what we’re really doing by accident is robbing them of the trust that they can survive, and that we understand this and can help them to do so. Where we as adults cannot tell them a half-truth, horror can tell them the whole, and there is a great mercy in that.


From Reason # 5, Sharing Scary Stories Brings People Together:
Like vets having shared a battle, they are brought together in something far more essential and primordial than a mere soccer game or a surprise math test. And looking back myself, I cannot recall having more fun in a movie theater or at home with illicit late night cable tv, than when I was watching a scary movie with my friends. The shared experience, the screams and adrenaline-induced laughter that always follow are some of the best and least fraught times in childhood. And going through it together means we aren’t alone anymore. Not really.

From Reason # 6, Hidden Inside Horror Are the Facts of Life:
Fear is not the best thing in the world, of course, but it’s not going anywhere and we are likely forced to meet it in some capacity, great or small, each and every day. There’s no way around it. Denying this fact only provides more fertile ground for fear to take root. Worse yet, denying it robs us of our agency to meet and overcome it. The more we ignore scary things, the bigger and scarier those things become.
[...]
Don’t be afraid to scare your kids, or your kids’ friends, with scary books you love. Obviously you have to tailor things to your kids’ individual levels. For example, films and books I let my 11-year-old digest, I won’t let my younger boy get into until he’s 14. They’re just different people and can handle different levels of material. They both love spooky stuff, but within their individual limits. Showing The Shining to an 8-year-old is generally a poor idea, so my advice is when there’s doubt, leave it out. You can’t make anyone un-see what you show them, and you should be responsible as to what they are exposed to. I’m a bit nostalgic about sneaking into to see The Exorcist at the dollar cinema way too young, but I also remember what it felt like to wake up with twisty-headed nightmares for a month afterward, too. Being scared and being terrorized are not the same thing. Know the difference and don’t cross the streams or it will totally backfire on you. But if you navigate it right, it can be a completely positive and powerful experience.

So get out there and scare some kids today! Do it right and they’ll thank you when they’re older. There will be a lot of adults who find this whole post offensive and terrible, even as their kids cry for the material... I remind them that children are often smarter than the adults they wind up becoming. The parents that find this so inappropriate are under the illusion that if they don’t ever let their kids know any of this stuff, they won’t have bad dreams or be afraid—not knowing that, tragically, they are just making them more vulnerable to fear. Let the kids follow their interests, but be a good guardian rather than an oppressive guard. Only adults are under the delusion that childhood is a fairy rainbow fantasy land: just let your kids lead on what they love, and you’ll be fine. 

('Midnight Gallery' by Bill Rogers, aka Giveawayboy)

Godzilla (2014)

Prologue

This is maybe the most beautiful giant monster film I have ever seen.  Maybe the most beautiful any-kind-of-monster movie I’ve ever seen.  If you don’t read anything else in this review, I want you to at least have seen that much.  That’s the take-home message here.  I can’t get over the awe I feel from experiencing this film, even as I sit down to finally write this after taking in quite a number of other reviews both for and against.

            But before we get to discussion of the new film, a few contextualising words of introduction are in order as to my own lifelong relationship with the King of Monsters.  When I compulsively and devotedly watched Godzilla movies as a little kid in the late 70s and early 80s, my mom would eventually walk through the living room, pause and watch with me a moment, and then, not without kindness and good humour, pronounce the whole production ‘so fakey!’  She smilingly wondered how I could love it so much.  

This was in an era when a household still usually had just one main TV in one main room for viewing it, and when you had to view whatever programming your TV stations provided – home videos were not yet common and online streaming was, of course, still nothing more than a gleam in some technophile’s eye, if that much.  Lucky for me, some executive guardian angel of my imaginative development saw to it that there were plenty of Godzilla movies aired.  And I mean the whole crew too:  Ghidorah, Rodan, Mothra, Mecha-Godzilla, Gamera, the lot.  But especially Gamera, beloved Gamera, The Friend of All Children.

The thing is, I had never consciously noticed the ‘fakiness’ of these movies until my mother first pointed it out to me.  But even when I did clock that fact, I positively liked that men were in monster suits playing, knocking down toy cities, wrestling with each other.  Plus, I either forgot about the fakey factor altogether while absorbed in watching the film at hand or I believed both the artistic lie and the artistic truth at the same time without any diminishment of imaginative surrender, no dream-breaking—like those rare moments in sleep where you suddenly realise you’re dreaming but you go on embracing the dream-logic of the scenario anyway.  

            Now, to capture my full experience of these films you have to also add to this ludic (playful, make-believe) quality an element of true fear.  I was mostly never the least bit frightened when watching a Godzilla film when I was little.  But occasionally that playfully imagined sense of scale did creep me out a bit as I watched:  when, for example, that somehow goofy-yet-menacing Godzilla head loomed up from behind the hills while a crowd of people ran screaming away in the foreground; or when the entire gargantuan figure was seen off in the distance at the far end of the city from the perspective of someone looking through a high-rise window miles away; and so on.  In those moments I could enter so far into the make-believe of it that I experienced a tiny tinge of the real feeling that would accompany the sight of a two- or three-hundred foot monster towering above your city.  A sense of awesome fear would bend down and give me a gentle bone-shivering tap.  Little boy me received a tiny dose of mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a spine-tingling sense of mystery that simultaneously repels and fascinates) even from a guy in a hokey rubber suit and a toy model city.  

Those little tinges of fear obviously rooted deep in me and here’s how I know:  I have had recurring Godzilla nightmares all my life.  The latest, I think, was some time last year.  In those dreams the gigantic eye of the kaiju monster somehow almost impossibly sees me – me, little old me – from across the miles of cityscape and air.  And yep, when I try to run away from that gargantuan gaze I might as well be slogging through invisible molasses.  ‘Fakey’?  Sure.  Still, somehow for me Godzilla brings home something of T. S. Eliot’s ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ – and that handful of dust is little old me.  It’s crucial to note thought that this nightmare-inducing capacity Godzilla has for me in no way diminishes my uncomplicated sense of affection for the greatest of monsters.  I did and do love Godzilla and Co. as much as any kid-become-adult did and does love the more innocuous monsters of Sesame Street or what have you.  

Some readers of this blog will know that I even went on to sing here and there about Godzilla monsters in a 90s punk rock band I was in.  But one more important thing to note in connection with my response to this latest film is that I haven’t massively ‘kept up’ with Godzilla over the years.  I’ve only casually and incidentally re-watched some of the old films in my adult years and haven’t more than sampled 90s or 2000s productions and up till now have engaged in almost zero intellectual analysis of the phenomenon.  That gap between childhood enthrallment and now seeing this new movie, linked only by simple love for Godzilla that has never waned even though I’ve not intentionally fanned its flame, may be a central reason the film can really tap into my sense of wonder.

Review

So here comes Godzilla (2014).  I tried so hard to keep my expectations low, low, low.  I did that with films like Pacific Rim and Man of Steel and had a decent time at both despite their obvious flaws.  But I’d forgotten how invested I was in Godzilla.  I sat there in the dark cinema with my older children before the film and had to physically quell my excitement.  I was buzzing!  And alas, I just knew this unjustifiably optimistic attitude was going to ruin it for me, that I’d end up overall underwhelmed.  

But no.

            No, no, no.

            (Spoilers from here on out – this ‘review’ is really a discussion for those who’ve already seen the movie.)  

One of the major categories of this film is majesty.  In the film’s story, the project that has followed the Godzilla monster since the 1950s is called the Monarch project.  We see this in the opening sequence of faux vintage footage.  For my money, the notion that overt word-drop is clearly meant to signal was fulfilled in spades.  The slow-burn pacing of the film only aids the sense of majesty it eventually achieves at the reveal of the wondrous monsters.  The film’s score and cinematography serve almost exclusively this purpose as well:  to make you feel in the presence of immense, terrible, and magnificent royalty.

            Indeed, after processing my feelings of awe in response to the film for a few days, I came to the conclusion that Godzilla (2014) is mainly an aesthetic exercise.  And I have zero problem with that.  I love a good story and brilliant characterisation and drama as much as anyone.  But I also love a successful foray into sheer emotion and atmosphere and visual-visceral punch.  The director himself said they wanted to linger on moments of ‘not story, but cinematic-ness’.  It’s no wonder then that at times the film felt to me, in both score and cinematography, almost echoic of the likes of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This film may have more of what Timothy Beal calls the ‘monstrous sublime’ than any other I’ve seen.  Beal uses this terminology to distinguish an almost worshipful feeling in the presence of monsters from the perhaps more familiar notion of the ‘monstrous diabolical’:  i.e. the merely, if awfully, evil monster.  The monstrous sublime need not be evil at all and in fact may be awesomely, bowel-tremblingly good.  It is, in my opinion, akin to ‘holiness’.

            As one reviewer pointed out, the solid if not especially remarkable human drama of the film mainly serves to give a profound sense of scale to the monsters.  The movie is spectacularly MONSTER-CENTRIC – somehow more so than Cloverfield or Pacific Rim or other recent entries in the giant-monster genre.  But not in a way that bludgeons.  The views of the monsters that we are given are exquisitely judicious, uncompromising in their service of the film’s tone:  lordly as a ten ton lion.  (And really, in the end I felt very satisfied with the amount of giant monster action I saw.  Wishing I could see more of the monsters only makes me want to see the film again as soon as possible, which is a delightful prospect.)  

The scene where the two MUTOs are mating in the rubble of a city they have rampaged to ruins put me very much in mind of Lovecraftian visions from the Cthulhu Mythos, where a future is imagined when primordial Old Ones rule the Earth again.  (Dave Henry over at Zekefilm noticed the Cthulhu connection too in his excellent review, noting that these kaiju seem more like mystical Old Ones than naturalistic atomic abominations or what have you.)  This film’s convergence with the Cthulhu Mythos seems significant, but a crucial difference it has with Lovecraft’s celebrated ‘cosmic horror’ is that this monstrous mating scene, for example, is not all pure horror, like some return to madness-inducing chaos and carnage.  It is ecologically beautiful, if also no good for the safety of humans.  

            But speaking of Cthulhu & the Gang, that sort of giant monster mythology is already rooted in ancient Mesopotamian Chaos Monsters.  Coming out of that culture, the writers and compilers of the Hebrew Bible were ruminating on the ecological and existential majesty and monstrosity of a very Godzilla-like creature millennia before the Godzilla franchise was conceived.  The  Bible calls its own mega-monster iteration Leviathan.  (Dave Henry beat me to this punch also with his excellent Echoes of Eden article on the new Godzilla film:  Leviathan Redeemed.)  Just look at the description of Leviathan in chapter 41 of the Book of Job and keep one eye at the same time on all you’ve seen Godzilla be and do.  You’ll be tempted to skim past this part, but don’t.  Take the extra minute to actually read through this and let the poem’s imagery heave up before your mind’s eye.  I can’t promise it won’t bite, but I can promise it’s worth it.  And remember, keep one eye on Godzilla:

“I will not fail to speak of Leviathan’s limbs,
    its strength and its graceful form.
 Who can strip off its outer coat?
    Who can penetrate its double coat of armor?
 Who dares open the doors of its mouth,
    ringed about with fearsome teeth?
 Its back has rows of shields
    tightly sealed together;
 each is so close to the next
    that no air can pass between.
 They are joined fast to one another;
    they cling together and cannot be parted.
 Its snorting throws out flashes of light;
    its eyes are like the rays of dawn.
 Flames stream from its mouth;
    sparks of fire shoot out.
 Smoke pours from its nostrils
    as from a boiling pot over burning reeds.
 Its breath sets coals ablaze,
    and flames dart from its mouth.
 Strength resides in its neck;
    dismay goes before it.
 The folds of its flesh are tightly joined;
    they are firm and immovable.
 Its chest is hard as rock,
    hard as a lower millstone.
 When it rises up, the mighty are terrified;
    they retreat before its thrashing.
 The sword that reaches it has no effect,
    nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.
 Iron it treats like straw
    and bronze like rotten wood.
 Arrows do not make it flee;
    slingstones are like chaff to it.
 A club seems to it but a piece of straw;
    it laughs at the rattling of the lance.
 Its undersides are jagged potsherds,
    leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge.
 It makes the depths churn like a boiling caldron
    and stirs up the sea like a pot of ointment.
 It leaves a glistening wake behind it;
    one would think the deep had white hair.
 Nothing on earth is its equal—
    a creature without fear.
 It looks down on all that are haughty;
    it is king over all that are proud.”

Some of the resemblances between ancient Leviathan and the very contemporary creation Godzilla are to me rather uncanny.  

I will say that I do think you have to see the new film to appreciate the incredible effects that create the ‘graceful form’ of this latest Godzilla (complete with the ‘glistening wake’ when it swims gigantically through the ocean).  The posters and movie stills don’t look all that impressive to me personally.  And I have qualms about some of the design choices.  The snorting nostrils certainly add an air of believable animality to Godzilla, for example, but I just don’t like the feel they give all that much.  But no such qualms could quell the overall effect of majestic monstrosity this director and his team have achieved.  I wanted to jump up and cheer at moments in the film, but I had to settle for covering my mouth and moaning a little since I didn’t want to be the lone loud American cheering in a British cinema.  (I’ve heard reports of spontaneous applause in American cinemas.)

The wonderful monsters in this movie are what eco-critics call ‘charismatic megafauna’ (e.g. elephants, tigers, whales) turned up to maximum.  The problem eco-critics have often had with, say, a wildlife television program emphasising, often through slow-motion camera work and epic orchestral scores, such beasts is that ‘the camera sometimes seems to stand in for the colonial figure of the white game hunter’, which can distance us from real encounter with the animal Other (Ecocriticism: 2012: Routledge: p. 175).

But in Godzilla (2014) all the drama and cinematography seem to work to make us feel like ‘strangers in a strange land’ rather than entertain us with a sense of our control over a wild ecology portrayed before our masterly gaze.  (Hey now, don’t get worked up:  I’m not over-intellectualising a Godzilla film.  It’s just an awesome movie about giant monsters wreaking havoc that taps into our childlike sense of play.  Nevertheless, the director clearly upped that ante into an intentionally crafted space of awe and humility and I’m just trying to go with that flow in this little chat here.)

In distinction, I think, from wildlife documentaries a lot of the sense of sublime in this film comes from the way the camera portrays the monsters:  like ‘hyperobjects’ that you can’t usually see all at once and never for very long, some vast portion the kaiju swimming up into view, its aural centres sounding forth in gorgeous alien noises, terrifying and tantalising at one and the same time (mysterium tremendum et fascinans, people, I’m telling you).   Furthermore, these strutting mega-monsters give a slight ‘pingback’ to their tiny cousins too in various scenes of the film:  for example, we see in different moments a beautiful millipede and a small horned lizard. On the opposite end of the scale, towering even over the MOTUs, the film also evokes monstrous landscapes, the topography on top of which we live our lives (and far underneath which, the MUTOs had up to this point dwelt), especially the incredible aerial view of the mountain range in the Philippines that looks like the back of a super-kaiju rising out of the earth itself. 

The Japanese lead scientist in the film’s story warns the military and his fellow scientists that our mistake is in thinking we are in control of nature when it’s the other way round.  It’s actually rather amazing that this is one brief line in the movie (with maybe another similar line or two – I can’t recall exactly).  The old Toho Godzilla franchise was fond of much longer soliloquies on this theme.  But this new film, like the passage from the Book of Job above, shows you this truth rather than lecturing.  The result is that you walk away feeling it in your breast rather than cognitively assenting to it or debating it in your intellect.  

(image from http://godzilla.wikia.com/)

This all ties in somehow to what some eco-critics have called the ‘swamp dragon’ in our ecological visions and what Timothy Morton calls ‘dark ecology’:  i.e. ecosystemic harmony and thriving is not all about pretty flowers and bunnies, nor even simply inclusive of beautiful predators savagely but impressively devouring their prey – a full ecology has to include all the ‘ugly’ and ‘gross’ and poisonous stuff too (toxins and sludges and parasites and so on).  But I don’t want to rush into making such connections too easily.  In fact, I heartily approve of the subtlety and ambiguity of the film as regards politics and other ‘messages’.  I agree to some degree with monster historian Scott Poole that monsters are ‘meaning machines’, but not first and foremost (as Poole himself notes when he admits that the term ‘monster’ tends to resist definition).  A monstrum, as many monster theorists have pointed out, is a ‘warning’ or ‘sign’ or ‘portent’.  Monsters do seem to point us onward as harbingers of Something Else.  But they have an integrity all their own as well.  To parody the title of an older little work on theology of art, Monsters Need No Justification.

Primarily and primordially monsters are MONSTERS.  They are there to be MONSTROUS.  I’m reminded of how one reviewer recently said that horror-master Stephen King sells himself a bit short in emphasising the humans over the monsters in his own comments on his fiction:  rather, said that reviewer, 'one of the central ideas in King's fiction' is 'that the universe is more mysterious, freaky, and bad-ass than we know'.  

That’s the first ‘message’ of Godzilla (2014) and I don’t think we should take much else from it until we’ve sat and soaked in the roaring stomping truth of that for a good while.  We should be floored, awed, speechless.  Start there.  And do not proceed unless you find it hard to articulate what you’re feeling.  That’s the way the world feels (or ought to feel, contra all-too-quick headlines and taglines and recriminations and justifications) when tsunamis hit and tornadoes touch down or a loved one dies (or when a eucatastrophe strikes as well – the birth of a baby, for example).  

When the giant monsters show up, the tiny people shut up.  (After the initial screaming and crashing have died down at least.)

So Godzilla is not just about ecology any more than the original film was just about atomic bombs.  Godzilla, inasmuch as it evokes majesty and awe, is about ontology.  They are about questioning the boundaries of what is real.  

Plus, if you want to talk about over-mining resources unto ruin, ponder the inevitable quickly-churned-out ‘franchise’ the success of this film will likely spawn.  Maybe this is a prime example of ‘eco’ irresponsibility based on greed and disrespect and wilful ignorance, but this time in the ‘ecosystems’ of the arts and culture.  (Thankfully, the director himself said they first and foremost wanted to focus on making an excellent standalone film and wouldn't consider anything else until that was accomplished.  It shows.  I wish others in the film industry could learn from this.)  And these kinds of (cultural) waste and mismanagement have their monstrous consequences too.  Aesthetic mass-destruction in order to restore aesthetic balance can happen too, I suspect.  I’m not sure how or what this would look like, but don’t count it out.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I desperately want to see this particular cinematic vision give us new iterations of Mothra, Gamera, Ghidorah, and Rodan – heck, maybe even Mecha-Godzilla!  But not necessarily too soon or too (aesthetically) cheaply, and maybe not at all if it can’t be done ‘righteously’ as regards cultural production.  I respect the monsters too much to grub for sequels at any cost.

 

(image from http://www.godzilla-movies.com/)

Epilogue

I did not think I was going to see a Messiah-themed film when I went to see this movie.  I didn’t even noticed how much I was seeing such a film until right toward the end when the television news in the film was flashing the headline ‘King of the Monsters - Savior of Our City?’ about Godzilla.  This was after Godzilla had quite clearly sacrificed himself to rid the world of its monstrous attackers, lay buried in dust and rubble, and then ‘rose again’ the next morning.  King and Saviour are explicitly biblical messianic terms – they are what the title Christ, the Anointed One, means in the Bible.  The film goes out of its way to give the feeling that Godzilla was sent in to save us from our horrifying excesses.  You could, of course, read this in some pantheistic or maybe even, at a stretch, some ‘mystical’ naturalistic way.  Maybe the filmmakers would even prefer you to do so.  But I’m not so sure.  

            Probably the most talked about scene of the film is the ‘HALO jump’ the soldiers perform in order to drop into the city that’s being raized by the battling monsters.  The long, score-enfolded depiction of the sky-diving soldiers descending like angels into hell (those are the director’s own words to describe the nature of the scene) will surely go down in cinematic history as one of the most achingly beautiful artistic achievements of early 21^st century film.  It is an awe-inspiring image of the heavenly penetrating into the hellish.

Just before this jump is made we see a chaplain soldier with his open Bible praying for his fellow soldiers.  It is not a ‘name it and claim it’ prayer demanding that God deliver the world from the evil it has at least in part brought upon itself, nor even a prayer of protection or victory.  It is a very simple prayer of thanksgiving that these soldiers have had the chance to serve together.  The sense of surrender to divine will, and willingness to die in service of others, comes across so simple and, to me, profound.  One could, of course, see this scene as nothing more than little humans praying to their pathetic man-made gods as a sort of denial of the shift to eco-centrism that the film enacts.  But I think it resists that all-too-easy categorisation.  The sense seems to me to be that humans must play their part and do everything they can, even when that is very little, and they must trust to something higher than themselves for the rest.

            In this connection it’s also fascinating to note that the main husband and wife couple of the film are comprised, career-wise, of a nurse and a bomb-disposal expert.  These people are professional helpers, healers, redeemers – bit players in the ecologically monstrous drama unfolding about them to be sure, but intriguing in their aiding and redemptive capacities nonetheless.  In their tiny way, they actually reflect what Godzilla is doing at the much larger level.

 

Envoy

In closing, I leave you with another passage from Job 41.  This was the section from the speech of Yahweh that came just before the passage cited above:

“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
    or tie down its tongue with a rope?
 Can you put a cord through its nose
    or pierce its jaw with a hook?
 Will it keep begging you for mercy?
    Will it speak to you with gentle words?
 Will it make an agreement with you
    for you to take it as your slave for life?
 Can you make a pet of it like a bird
    or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?
 Will traders barter for it?
    Will they divide it up among the merchants?
 Can you fill its hide with harpoons
    or its head with fishing spears?
 If you lay a hand on it,
    you will remember the struggle and never do it again!
 Any hope of subduing it is false;
    the mere sight of it is overpowering.
 No one is fierce enough to rouse it.
    Who then is able to stand against me?
 Who has a claim against me that I must pay?
    Everything under heaven belongs to me.”

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).