Throwback Thursday: H.P. Lovecraft and the Parody of Religion

(For Throwback Thursday, here's a short post I'd forgotten about from my old blog Panic on the Fourth of July, posted in 2009.  Enjoy!)

H.P. Lovecraft was a lifelong resident and antiquarian from Providence, Rhode Island, who supported himself by writing the most vivid star-flung nightmare fantasies of the early 20th century. His shadow over the field of horror entertainment since his death in 1937 is unparalleled and unmistakable. To say something is "Lovecraftian" is to intimate its awesome alien strangeness, as in, "Some early scenes in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) are truly Lovecraftian." 
 

In Lovecraft's tales, gone were the dank castles of Count Dracula, the Gothic laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, the cross and the silver bullet to destroy the beast, the pure of heart and the Lord's Prayer. He wrote for the new scientific age of Darwin, Einstein, and Freud, when our fears were no longer blasphemous monsters of superstitious Old World folklore, but of the vastness of the universe and humanity’s lowly place within it; terrors not of the soul, but of the mind.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." 

"The Call of Cthulhu," 1927

Lovecraft's infamous Great Old Ones are not, as some have insisted, simply evil alien creatures, as Arkham House founder August Derleth posited and promulgated in his own stories; no, they represent the inability of humans to comprehend anything outside their own earth-bound experience. From deep space and other dimensions, these beings are not the saucer-eyed, woman-hungry Martians of science fiction; these entities are vast, incorporeal, protean, inconceivable. Degenerate cults worship them as gods, and Lovecraft at once parodies and mocks notions of religion, spirituality, sacred texts, and transcendent knowledge. 

An atheist who, as he said, "hated and despised religion," Lovecraft saw no real qualitative difference between, say, "Shub Nigurath, the Goat with a Thousand Young" or "Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth," and "Transubstantion of the Eucharist" or "There is no God but God." The dread Necronomicon is their bible; the acolyte's cry of "Iä! Iä!" is Cthulhu-speak for "Hallelujah!"

"They worshiped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him." 

"The Call of Cthulhu," 1927

The final lines of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (used so well in Stuart Gordon's 2001 film Dagon) can be seen as a nightmarish twist on the Lord's Prayer: "And in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever." Compare: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen." 

"Man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it." 

"The Shadow out of Time," 1935

The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas (1980): Loathsome, Ornery and Mean

The nicotine-yellow fingertip tapped the paperback cover. "Scary fuckin' book," said the grizzled old bookstore owner, grinning, "scare the shit outta ya!" When I set my stack of horror paperbacks on the counter of that used bookstore in Utah I was not expecting such an encomium about any of them, much less one of the sleazier-looking titles. But nope: this guy was jazzed I'd found a copy of The Nest, a Zebra paperback published in 1980, written by an utterly undistinguished Gregory A. Douglas (actually the pseudonym of one Eli Cantor; more on him later). Don't remember where I first heard of this one, but I'd been searching for it quite awhile. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was totally worth the wait!

Yep--The Nest is powerhouse pulp horror, written with enthusiasm and tasteless know-how, a creepy-crawly scarefest that assaults the reader with one revolting sensation after another. If everyday roaches are disgusting, six-inch-long roaches with mandibles of chewing death are immeasurably more disgusting! A swarm of mutated cockroaches have somehow "organized" themselves by some unknowable miracle of evolution into a thinking organism, each individual creature a cell in the larger mass. Get used to that wave of shivers across your neck and shoulders, because this writer doesn't skimp on the gory details (like how the insects eat through the victim's eyes into the brain!). All-out over-the-top '80s schlock-horror doesn't get much better.

Oddly understated New English Library edition

You can learn the set-up by the front and back cover copy, so I won't get into that. Just know there are plenty of characters that Douglas handles well enough so they each have an identity other than just as roach repast, while the setting itself of fictional Yarkie Island off Cape Cod is depicted as if by someone who's actually been to a Cape Cod town and knows a little of its seafaring history, which adds notes of local color. Happily for the reader, he lays out truly suspenseful scenes of terror and unbelievable tragedy with a professional pulp writer's commitment. I don't know if he was literally getting paid a penny a word, but Douglas sure could stretch a dollar:

Dimly, Bo Leslie saw himself in a mad magician's crate, with sharpened swords slashing his viscera. Or, he was a side of beef on a butcher hook, and cleavers were hacking his carcass into small chunks. The man wanted to curse and howl, but there was no sound except hissing air because his throat was gone. It happened so quickly that the man's body was still shuddering with his orgasm when his final breath issued, a crimson foam out of his decapitated torso... The Yarkie cockroaches, in obedience to commands encoded in their preternatural genes, mounted the new food supply Nature had bounteously furnished again...

You got your town authorities stymied by this surge of Nature at its most nastiest, so they call in Harvard help and big-city scientists show up. Various Yarkies end up victims, and the rag-tag team of heroes can scarcely believe what they're up against, even after seeing it with their own eyes, these swarms of cockroaches that advance like a "living brown carpet" over everything in their path. The creatures' preternatural behavior seems insurmountable; they are piranha-like in their appetite and aggression (and some can even fly!).  

The Nest is a bit of an overwhelming story, emotionally, despite its ridiculousness. Gregory repeatedly notes the character's states of mind, their anger and despair and grief and sadness and fear, but his attempts at humor fall flat and don't lighten the mood. The constant descriptions of the repulsive roaches wears the reader down too, increasing not just horror but hopelessness, which is almost worse. After one particularly unsettling lecture from scientist Hubbard:

When the scientist stopped, the room was silent. Elizabeth and all the men were stunned. Peter Hubbard and Wanda Lindstrom had moved them into a world so alien, ogreish, and alarming that they had no way to formulate their reaction. The ghastliness was in the blood, beyond the reach of words or horror or comradely comfort. A strange, raw wind was blowing up from a biological nether world of phantasmagoric claws, fangs, and mindlessness.

Behind the Douglas pseudonym is Eli Cantor, a man of some erudition--like many pulp writers--so he is easily able to infuse his story with science, history, character detail and motivation, etc. His style is muscular and verbose, which makes The Nest a more effective read than many other pulp-horror paperbacks--because don't get me wrong, this book is definitely pulp, but somehow I can see Mr. Cantor just running hell-for-leather over good taste and restraint with a grin on his face as he pounds out page after page of hellish delight!

For example: a little over halfway through the book, he sets up a harrowing sequence in which children must face the ravening insect hordes; your tolerance for such a scene will depend on how you feel about animals and children being killed in horror fiction. Me, I found it kinda ballsy; maybe he didn't know better; more likely he thought, Fuck it, they want a cheap pulpy horror novel, I'm gonna give 'em one! It's shocking stuff, no matter what.

The boy dropped his own body over his sister's, trying to shield her. The bloodthirsty insects crawled between them, now tearing and ripping at both juvenile bodies. Kim's silken corn hair was ropy with her blood and her brother's. Their empty-socketed eyes stared at each other face to face as  they perished... It was not a field of battle, only a rapine slaughter of innocents, because there had been no way to fight back.

Sure, there are mis-steps: for one, the book is about 100 pages too long! Tightening this baby up would have done wonders, made it a lean and mean machine, and I think readers would agree that much of the scientific speeches/lectures should've been whittled down. Asides spent on character development needed more economic skill, while virtually every attempt at humor is leaden, obvious, and painfully cornball. The conversation isn't exactly scintillating, mostly blocky chunks of wooden exposition and exclamation ("Goshdarn critters!"). So with all this excess verbiage, the narrative drags in spots. Maybe Cantor really was being paid a penny a word! I skimmed some sections if I didn't see the words "roach" or "bloodthirsty" or "vomit."

Cantor's only other horror novel, 1981. Woah.

On the plus side: there are just too many amazing passages in The Nest, purple and ripe and rotting even, for me to quote them all!

Having partaken of human meat and drunk human blood, the new cockroach breed was ravenous for more... they could not get enough of the human taste and would seek it endlessly, implacably, and with many more victories... While she could see out of one eye, Deirdre Laidlaw had to live with the inconceivable sight of great cockroaches coating her husband's face, a vicious, quivering crust of filth...

All that and more (even a well-earned sex scene near the end)! Hoo boy. No doubt, I highly recommend The Nest, despite its length, and because of its delirious lapses in taste and good sense, and a climax which, while straining scientific credibility, makes a bizarre kind of sense. With its well-turned out cover art of moody, moonlit menace, The Nest might appear to be another forgettable piece of Zebra flotsam, another derivative vintage animals-attack bit of trash fiction, but I'm here to tell ya: it'll scare the shit outta ya!

Her horror enclosed the whole space of her life; it came to her that there was another meaning to "the fourth dimension." In addition to time and space there was a dimension of terror, a world of its own, for dying in.

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson (1981): Just One Deathless Night

Nazism will forever be the benchmark by which all other human evil is measured (well, until something worse comes along). So what do you get when you pit the SS against an unimaginably malevolent supernatural force that, with their stubborn reliance on "rationality," they can scarcely comprehend? You get The Keep, the first horror novel from New Jersey physician/author F. Paul Wilson, who spent the 1970s writing science fiction tales when not practicing medicine (and apparently has spent the decades since writing a series that began with The Keep). There is nothing resembling science fiction in this highly-regarded (going by reviews on Goodreads and Amazon) "novel of deep horror," and it's dedicated to pulp horror/fantasy icons Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. This is no surprise - The Keep's fictional grimoires, subterranean lairs, manly adventuring, and even some sword-and-sorcerering, find Wilson emulating those classic writers but not slavishly imitating them. After finishing the novel, and at various moments throughout, I wished he had emulated those guys more. Much, much more.

A few words to preface this review: I read Wilson's short story collection Soft and Others couple years back and mostly hated it because his writing was so one-dimensional, dull, and tone deaf. Honestly, I think Wilson can be a downright terrible writer, so I was relieved to find when I began reading The Keep he'd seemingly improved (how could he not?). What keeps the reader glued to the pages is the sheer power of the story. I mean it's Nazis, in a keep - a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility, Wikipedia tells me - battling an evil entity who slaughters Nazis handily. I'm in!

Or... am I?

 Original 1981 hardcover

So we've got a German army, led by Captain Klaus Woermann, stationed in a keep high in the Alps of Romania, to protect precious oil fields needed for the Nazi war effort. But when two grunts dig into the fortification trying to find out if the oddly-shaped metal crosses embedded in the stone walls everywhere in the keep are made of real gold and silver, they find behind those stones an opening that leads to... Well, evil and darkness and decapitation. And unsolvable impossible deaths follow after, each night for a week, till an exhausted, reluctant Woermann sends for help from the Nazis, whom he regards with skepticism and distrust, himself too old to have been seduced by the charismatic Hitler (I found this detail quite satisfying). He words his missive carefully: Request immediate relocation. Something is murdering my men... That ought to get their attention!

Enter SS Major Erich Kaempffer, an honest-to-God Nazi, and his einsatzkommandos, reinforcements for the beleaguered soldiers, to find out what the hell that something is that's killing Woermann's men. Kaempffer is eager to begin his post as commandant of a coming-soon death camp in Ploiesti, and feels this assignment is almost beneath him, but must impress his superiors. If he succeeds in discovering the murderer, he knows he will make Woermann look like an ineffective fool - something he's longed to do since Woermann witnessed an unfortunate incident of cowardice on Kaempffer's part in the Great War. The two men barely tolerate one another, and their conflict, well-done by Wilson in the first third of the novel, propels much of the story.

But Kaempffer has no luck sniffing out the killer even though he scoffs at notions that it might be a supernatural agent of some kind - surely it's just local guerrillas. Then his men start turning up dead, two of them even walk right into his room from their post, their throats torn out, and collapse before him (all kinda cool). Reluctantly he accepts the advice of the local innkeeper - after terrorizing him and threatening to kill the nearby villagers he's taken into the keep - and brings in Theodore Cuza, an old sick man who lost his position as an esteemed professor because of his Judaism. Cuza is an expert on the history and folklore of the region. Along with Cuza comes his 30-ish daughter Magda, his caretaker, beautiful and untouched. Meanwhile, a strange scarred unnamed red-headed man is doggedly traveling miles across land and sea, avoiding wartime danger zones, for some unknown reason to meet an evil in Romania he thought had been vanquished ages before...

And now The Keep begins to crumble. One prominent weakness is the thoughtless, cliched romance that grows between Magda and that redheaded man - Glenn, at first - a relationship practically clipped with scissors out of a cheap historical or Harlequin romance novel, seemingly inserted to make the novel fit the bestseller mold: She had found the man unattractive in the extreme; in addition to his odor and grimy appearance, there was a trace of arrogance and condescension that she found equally offensive. Ugh! There is no originality, no human insight, just gross lazy simplifications about men and women and sex. Would that Wilson had just left this part out completely, or rewrote the passages another time or two to tone down the rank sexism, or at least evince a sort of detached or ironic attitude about it. Or something to make it palatable, anything!

And the depiction of Nazis and their reign of terror - an easily exploitable topic, a hack writer's dream! I like tasteless exploitation/horror when done right, but Wilson doesn't rise - or sink - to the occasion. The Nazis are barely cardboard - as the novel goes on, all the characters become cardboard pieces. When we first meet the god-like evil denizen of the keep, a baddie named Molasar, there are the de rigueur horror moments, such as his "friendship" with Ol' Vlad Tepes back in the day and talk about feeding off the evils of humanity. But Molasar is dressed like a comic-book villain and speaks like one too: "I have my own means of moving about which does not require doors or secret passages. A method quite beyond your comprehension."  My God, who knew evil was so dorky?

 Map of the Keep itself

(Some spoilers) Other faults: Wilson makes an interesting observation about vampire lore when Cuza, a devout Jew, sees Molasar's fear of the Christian cross - does that mean that faith is the true one, and not Cuza's Judaism? He agonizes over his own potential loss of belief, but for Wilson, it's only a dead end. Later Cuza gets Molasar all riled up when he informs him what "death camps" are and that the Nazis are planning on rounding up Molasar's Wallachian "people" and exterminating them. So Malasar decides he's going to kill Hitler and his crew, with Cuza helping out as daytime dogsbody, getting out of the keep and up into Hitler's shit. Yep, that hoariest of tropes, KILL HITLER, seems too convenient a turnabout (to be fair this novel is over 30 years old so I guess the trope wasn't as hoary then). Molasar's gonna gain power from all that Nazi badness, don't you know, then take over the world...

1983 Dutch edition - creepier than any scene in the book

I haven't even mentioned the thudding dialogue, unimaginative scenes of violent mayhem, the climax of ageless good v. evil, and the sappy, unearned epilogue, all of which have been seen a hundred, a thousand times before. It all adds up to the reader never feeling that tingle, that can't-turn-pages-fast-enough vibe that makes this kind of mainstream bestseller work. There's a notable lack of atmosphere too, which makes The Keep deadly dull in places: I mean, the setting is a fucking castle in the mountains of Romania occupied by terrified Nazis because a mysterious monstrous vampire is trying kill them all! You gotta work it hard in the opposite direction to suck the creepy out of that set-up. And Wilson, unfortunately, is up to the task.

Yes, even as the bodies piled up and the mystery deepened, I struggled with this one. You'd think a horror novel like this would be pretty bad-ass and the ever-popular "unputdownable," but it's not at all. I'd put it down for a few days, a week, and almost forget I'd been reading it. I'd pick it up and start yawning after a couple pages, since Wilson's prose style overall is vapid. That dedication to HPL, Howard, and Smith becomes ludicrous - this is some of the lamest "pulp" I've read, and trying to excuse its lameness by calling it pulp doesn't help. If Wilson weren't such a trite, banal writer - Never had the supernatural been so real to him. Never would he be able to view the world or existence itself as he had before -  he could've produced a richly detailed novel of historical horror and eternal evil. But neither his handling of the supernatural nor of the natural has enough conviction or weight; the story is there, and like the proverbial sculptor who knows his subject is hiding in that hunk of marble, all F. Paul Wilson has to do is find it. But most often he doesn't, or he can't; The Keep is a boring blank surface that, while sometimes interesting in and of itself, refuses to reveal the true horror novel that resides within.

Joe R. Lansdale Born Today, 1951

Happy 62nd to the one and only Joe R. Lansdale! As you can see by these paperback covers, Joe can do it all: splatterpunk, thrillers, westerns, crime, dark fantasy, science fiction. If you haven't read Lansdale... what are you waiting for?!

 

 

 

 

 

Guy N. Smith Sucks

Well, he doesn't really. But you know what I mean.

I had such high hopes for October - a classic King review, a classic Bradbury review, some vintage pulps and '80s anthologies - but alas, they will not be. Instead, I'll postpone them till after the Halloween party the GF and I are preparing, which is occupying most of my time this month. So for now, enjoy these lurid and lovely Guy N. Smith covers!

Cold Grinding Grizzly Bear Jaws: More Zebra Horror Cover Art

More cover art wonders strange and appalling for you, thanks to one of horror fiction's preeminent publishers throughout the 1980s, Zebra Books. Behold the splendors of half-skulls and full skulls, of rivulets and baths of blood, of innocence threatened and demons aroused. Deadly Nature got its mojo risin', no?

Daniel Ransom is the pseudonym of crime writer Ed Gorman. These two covers absofuckinglutely rule, classic horror fiction cover art goodies in effect.

Another pseudonym - one might begin to get the idea some writers didn't wanna be known as pulp horror writers! - Jack MacLane is really Bill Crider. Goodnight Moon is still on my to-read shelf, so I don't quite get the "moom" reference. Blood Dreams is one of those nicely reductive horror titles that really crack me up in their dunder-headed obviousness.

 

Grim Reaper by the unlikely-named O'Neil Denoux looks more like a pulp crime novel (oh, I spy the initials "WT" and see that it's our old pal William Teason!); The Evil One is beyond generic; The Doll, I mean, horror publishers knew they couldn't go wrong with that image, not ever. Sometimes I wish I could look at their sales charts - did this shit really work?

Author Joseph Citro is a well-respected regional writer; I've got one of his early '90s horror novels that has lots of critical blurbs - and not the generic "couldn't put it down" kind either - but I haven't read him.

Wow did Stephen Gresham get the Zebra red carpet when it came to cover art!

And *record scratch* these two are too unfocused and too overdone, respectively, to warrant much interest. I mean, gimme a little subtlety, right? Just a little now and then. I mean I don't ask for much do I?