Carlos
Many a writer, particularly in the field of horror, has borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft, adopting and adapting the themes, settings, monsters and even sometimes characters that have appeared in his fiction. With this novel, Rick Dakan has taken the more original approach of basing a story on Lovecraft's philosophy.
The story takes place in Sarasota, Florida, where the narrator, Rick, and his best friend, Conrad, have lived most of their lives. Another childhood friend, Shelby, comes to town after having been chased out over an orgy gone awry. He brings with him an exotic girlfriend and vague but oddly sounding plans related to H.P. Lovecraft, for which he enlists the aid of the two friends.
As the two learn more about Shelby's plans, their questions only begin to multiply. How are he and his girlfriend funding the purchase of property and rare documents? Is Shelby really the materialist he claims or has he crossed over into believing in HPL's Great Old Ones? Is Shelby calling the shots or is the mysterious Kym he met in Providence? When a fourth childhood friend falls into the hands of the cult, Conrad and Rick decide to finally penetrate the cult's secrets.
The Cthulhu Cult is an entertaining and thought-provoking journey into paranoia, philosophy and how things can spin out of control. I can't say whether a non-Lovecraft fan would enjoy it to the same extent, but Dakan's novel of Lovecraftian obsession brings a unique approach to the realms of fiction inspired by the Old Gent.
Gutierrez' account of the life of the gaucho Guillermo Hoyo (known as Hormiga Negra) has some of the same charm as his Juan Moreira in its account of 19th Century Argentine life, though it lacks the sense of near-cinematic tragedy that made Moreira so moving. Hormiga Negra starts his life as an outlaw early, when he has to sneak his beloved away from her mother, which leads to various adventures, mostly on the wrong side of the law. Despite eventually settling down, he returns to drinking and making trouble, which eventually lead to new troubles just as he is trying to go straight. Where Moreira was a good man reduced to banditry through injustice, Hormiga is a more ambiguous figure, his courage offset by his impetuousness.
This is a good introduction to Aikido philosophy, covering the basic principals as well as some of Ueshiba's life. What the book lacks in depth it makes up for in breadth, exploring the connections between Aikido and other spiritual traditions and disciplines, as well as the importance of real life applications.
The Seven Madmen is the sort of work that never seems to lose its impact. Even 80 years after its original publication, there's something uniquely unsettling about Arlt's account of one man's involvement in a bizarre criminal conspiracy. The man in question, Remo Erdosain, finds himself in trouble at the beginning of the novel. His bosses at The Sugar Company have figured out that he has been embezzling, and give him a day to return the money he has robbed. To make things worse, when he gets home, he learns his wife is leaving him for another man.
Desperate, he seeks out the help of a man who goes under the moniker of The Astrologer, a strange figure obsessed with criminal conspiracies and the overthrow of the established order. He is soon drawn into the Astrologer's strange plan, in which are involved several other strange characters, including Hafner, a math professor turned pimp whom people call “The Melancholy Ruffian,” an army Major and the Gold Seeker.
I remember the first time I read it, I found it sort of disappointing, perhaps because it ends so abruptly with a “To be continued...” This time around, I found myself drawn more into its unique and nightmarish character. Of particular note is The Astrologer, which has struck me as one of the most intriguing characters in literature, up there with Ahab or Heathcliff. With his fascination for political philosophies, his deep cynicism and his strange schemes, he seems like a foreshadowing of the rise of men like Hitler, Stalin or bin-Ladin. The whole conspiracy he heads strikes similar strange tones, with each participant seeming to have their own strange scheme at play as well.
Arlt's description of the city is wonderfully evocative, and he draws heavily on the smells of the city as well as a pervading sense of darkness. It struck me as having interesting parallels with film noir, in which shadows are part of the atmosphere of moral decay.
Joyce Carol Oates has reimagined the final days of five important American authors: Poe, Dickinson, Twain, Henry James and Hemingway. The stories of Twain, James and Hemingway are the ones that stick closer to the historical record, while those of Poe and Dickinson take flight into the fantastic.
“Poe, Posthomous” imagines that Poe spent his final days not in Baltimore but in an isolated lighthouse off the coast of Chile, hoping that the solitude would allow him to produce an important philosophical treatise. As with most of the stories, Oates mimics the writing style of the author in question, and the story is very reminiscent of those Poe tales where the protagonist succumbs to madness, yet there are several elements, including the setting and the final development, that suggest Oates is channeling not Poe but Lovecraft. “EDickinsonRepiluxe” tells not so much about Emily Dickinson's last days, as of her 21st century resurrection as a sort of robotic family member/pet, purchased by a childless middle-aged couple to fill a void in their lives. Intriguing, but aside from its Twilight Zone-like premise, it felt like a familiar story of middle-age disappointment and estrangement.
The Twain, James and Hemingway are closer to what you'd expect given these authors final days. Twain is a broken man after the death of his wife and beloved daughter, resentful of the public persona he has to play. He seeks solace in the company of girls, younger than 16, mostly innocent but with somewhat creepy undertones. James volunteers in a veteran's hospital during WWI, where the suffering of young men affects him deeply. Hemingway struggles with his poor mental and physical health as he obsesses over bringing his life to an end. There's an interesting dichotomy between the first two stories, with their fantastic concepts, and the final three, which feel so much more grounded that it's hard to know when the truth ends and Oates' extrapolations begin.
Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites is a science fiction novel set in what was once the future (the late '90s as seen from the late '60s) and inspired loosely by H.P. Lovecraft. The novel is narrated by an archeologist who while on a dig discovers ancient and cyclopean structures miles beneath the earth. Further investigation of these leads him to realize that mankind is under some form of attack by invisible psychic entities which draw from people's vital energies and leave them feeling depressed, frustrated and confused. All of mankind has been suffering to some extent or other from these parasites since the 1800s. The narrator decides to fight back and begins to recruit allies in this great psychic struggle, but the parasites will not go gently into the night...
As Wilson states in the introduction, this novel was inspired by a response he received for his criticism of H.P. Lovecraft; August Derleth had challenged Wilson to try his own hand at writing Lovecraftian fiction. Wilson certainly seems to have grasped the way that Lovecraft's fiction could serve as a potent metaphor for his worldview, for while there is quite a bit of speculative fiction in The Mind Parasites, it also seems to reflect much of Wilson's own philosophy. I won't attempt to rate Wilson's ideas, but I'm sorry to say he's pretty mediocre as a writer of weird fiction.
The concept of psychic parasites and the struggle against them is intriguing enough, but unfortunately Wilson falls prey to that great pitfall of speculative fiction: exposition. I appreciate the book doesn't waste much time on world-buidling, instead being written as if it was meant for a contemporary, so it never bogs down with details of this alternate future/past. However, he does spend considerable time with the description of and theories about these invisible, insubstantial parasites. A more skilled writer might have been able to make that material compelling, but I generally found it pretty dull. Here, I think Wilson's background as philosopher does him a disservice, as much of this ends up coming across as some alternate form of Scientology. Though Wilson clearly doesn't believe in mind parasites, the premise does reflect much of his own thinking, and so he often proceeds with the didactic sincerity of an amateur philosopher. The novel does have moments of tension, but it tends to drag, especially at the beginning, and also feels rather dated.
A quick note (and SPOILER WARNING) on the Lovecraft connection: the discovery of the cyclopean city, which is this novel's most Lovecraftian aspect, turns out to be something of a red herring. It felt like a bit of a bait and switch and, considering the introduction, made me wonder if Wilson had started with the idea of the discovery of a R'lyeh-like ancient city and then, grown bored with it, shifted the emphasis over to the mind parasites, where he could indulge in more of his own interests.
An interesting collection of stories which captures little moments of an ambiguous nature packed with a hidden emotional charge. A husband and wife's differing perceptions of a draft of cold air underscore the tensions in their relationship, a young boy makes a strange wish upon seeing the ghost of his grandmother, two brothers wait for the dawn and visitors that may never arrive. Quiet yet unsettling moments, the stories leave fairly strong impressions despite a general lack of action.
A witty satire on language, ideas and the hypocrisies of modern life, yet only intermittently engaging. The author is clever and full of ideas, yet in what was clearly meant to be a great set of screwball send-ups and absurdities I found myself amused but rarely laughing out loud.
I started the audiobook of Lolita one day at the gym while “Jersey Shore” played on one of the big TVs in the cardio section, and found myself thinking there was some sort of irony there, listening to Jeremy Irons' silky tones narrate a tale of a man whose behavior goes past the bounds of decency while images of people engaging in more banal forms of debauchery played in front of me. This is all a round about way of expressing my own trepidation when I began Lolita, the first-person account of one man's criminal relationship with a 12-year-old girl. Yet, Lolita is less about the narrator's crimes than about his own mental derangement. The spirit of Poe hangs over the novel, from the beginning when we learn that Humbert Humbert (our narrator) mourns for a childhood love named Annabel Leigh, and I found myself thinking much of The Tell-Tale Heart. Nabokov takes all of the sickness, literary style, rationalization and guilt of that short tale and stretches it out into a strange, haunting aria of obsession and memory, with a healthy dose of black comedy. Yet he does not let us completely off the hook, and we often see through Humbert's narration, though he is blind to it, the terrible impact of his actions. It's the sort of novel that lingers long after the last page, like a vivid dream whose images continue to haunt long after wakefulness has returned.
Sforza's tales take place in the intersection of the Gothic and the personal. Old houses in his hometown of Victoria (Entre Rios) are haunted by the spirits of those people who lived and died within their walls, some of whom the narrator knew personally when he was a child, others who are only second-hand stories, shading into urban legends. There's a subtle shading to these spirits, not quite true phantoms, though perhaps not exclusively artifacts of memory. In some ways reminiscent of Mujica Lainez' Aqui Vivieron, De Casas y Misterios tells the story of a place through the people who lived there and the dwellings in the which they lived out those brief lives.
An interesting book in that it can be considered either an episodic novel or a series of linked short stories, tells the typical Derlethian story of Great Old Ones trying to bust out of their confinement and the human beings who struggle to defeat them. Although the theme is heroic, the stories could use a little more action and less exposition. It's also hard not to compare Derleth's fictions to those of Lovecraft he so closely models on, and Derleth's suffer in the process.
Fascinating little novel about a serial killer in Paris, the police investigators attempting to track him down, three friends chatting in an Argentine diner, a mysterious manuscript and the fall of Troy.
A collection of notes and observations from Lo Ch'in-shun, a 16th Century Neo-Confucian. Some of it was over my head, but overall very interesting.
As a fan of horror fiction, I'm interested in the question of why people read horror. After all, why seek out fictional cruelties when the world is so full of real ones. Horror authors themselves, from Stephen King to Thomas Ligotti, have provided interesting answers, but Cavallaro's book provides a very interesting perspective. The Gothic Vision shows how works of dark fantasy allow us to contemplate and even accept the dark facets of our lives and our own beings that we do not tend to acknowledge in our “daytime” vocabulary. If you're interested in horror and the Gothic not just as sources of dark amusement but of philosophical insight, I would highly recommend this book.
While I really liked Wang Chao's Playing for Thrills, I found Please Don't Call me Human mostly dull and difficult to get through. This may be just a case of it not really being intended for me. Human has a strong satirical element, especially as concerns China's loss of the 2000 Olympics, and I suspect if I had a deeper appreciation of Chinese culture and history, more of the humor would have rung true.
The plot, what there is of it, involves a private group calling themselves the Mobilization Committee (MobCom) organized around redeeming China's international reputation by proving that China has the toughest fighter in the world. To that end, they recruit a young man, who happens to be the son of one of the members of the Boxer Rebellion, and put him through all sorts of routines and diets in order to make him the ultimate fighter.
Despite the interesting premise, it mostly felt like a lot of strange stuff happening with little reason, the characters are mostly caricatures, and there's never a sense of anything really being at stake. It did have its moments, but overall I think it was not really intended for a non-Chinese audience.
I found the first book in the series underwhelming, but I thought I'd give the second one a chance, figuring that this one wouldn't get bogged down in world-building like the first did. Too much of the first third of this book seems to be taken up with rehashing the events of the previous book, and it feels like Fforde's stabs at humor haven't really improved. I could bore you with describing every strained attempt at wackiness or over-explained joke, but having recently re-read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I have to say Fforde just has no bite. Considering that the Thursday Next books are aimed at book nerds, the whole idea of taking shots at giant corporations, bureaucracy, celebrity culture and fashion just feel like lazy pandering. Sorry, Jas, this is where you and I part ways.
When Juan Peron returned to the Argentine presidency for the last time in 1974, he brought along two intimates who would go on to create some trouble. The first was his third wife Isabela, who would ascend to the presidency after his death. The second was Jose Lopez Rega, a character so odd it seems hard to believe he was not invented by Arlt or Borges. Rega was fascinated with occult and mystic arts, including Umbanda (like Santeria or Voodoo) and astrology. His interests earned him the nickname El Brujo, not inappropriate given the Rasputin-like hold he had on Peron and later Isabela. It was under Rega that Dirty War began, which was run out of the Office of Social Welfare under the auspices of the triple-A. (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance)
Cola de lagartija is based loosely on Lopez Rega, parting ways with the historical facts of Lopez Rega to create a surreal and disturbing meditation on violence and power. After the fall of Isabela's government, El Brujo heads to his childhood home of Laguna Negra in northern Argentina with his followers. Here he organizes new rituals of blood and sacrifice, and stages a very twisted orgy to which he invites prominent members of Argentine society.
Even in internal exile, he is dangerous enough to inspire enemies, among them the ruling junta, a revolutionary, and an author working on El Brujo's biography. The revolutionary and the author have a brief relationship, during which the revolutionary asks the author to finish her book by killing off El Brujo. But can she really pull it off in such a way as to kill the original?
El Brujo soon finds a new enemy in the mayor of the town of Capivari and its little newspaper. He takes over the town and the newspaper, changing the emphasis of the latter to occult themes. This inspires in him the plans for a new ritual, an immaculate conception which will cleanse Argentina in a river of blood.
I was expecting a touch of the strange, perhaps even some magic realism, when I started this book, as can only be expected from a story based on an already strange individual. But the story is strikingly surreal, often disturbing or funny, presenting an exaggerated look at the relationship between power and violence, and the role of the journalist or writer in responding to the terrible.
Derleth's posthumous “collaborations” weren't bad as short stories. Despite being derivative of Lovecraft and resorting to turgid writing, most of them managed to maintain some goofy charm. Not “The Lurker at the Threshold,” whose writing is so terrible it becomes some sort of endurance test. Worse, Derleth fills the final third of the book with pointless exposition, thereby destroying what meager sense of suspense or urgency managed to remain from the previous two-thirds of the story.
An American scholar arrives in India with plans to study the treatment of fear and disgust in Sanskrit literature. A young boy listens in rapt attention as an Irish woman reads to him the tale of Dracula. A wandering storyteller captivates a crowd with stories of rakshashas, prets, bhuts, vetals, ghouls, kapalikas, aghoris–and the brave heros who confront them. A promising politician finds his career and life cut short by a young woman.
Lee Siegel weaves all of these threads together into an often captivating, often moving story about horror stories and what they mean to us. The book was a lot of fun, though perhaps a little less frightening than I had hoped it would be.
This is a story about two Colombians, a mother and a son, who are visiting Buenos Aires. The mother is an ex-Trostkyite who lived in Buenos Aires for several years during the Dirty War, where she fell in love with and married the man who became the boy's father. After the son's birth, the fear of being hauled away proves too great and the family flees back to Colombia. There the marriage fell apart, and the couple separated. The boy grew up without the father, and so they have come back to Argentina to find him.
It's a potentially rich concept, and the execution provides some very interesting themes and moments, but it has its flaws. On the positive side, it's an interesting look at the way narrative is part of how we make sense of our lives. The mother spends a good part of the time telling the boy the story of how he and his father met, fell in love, then came apart. This provides opportunity for a degree of back and forth between them on how the story is told, what facts are important, how is the narrative being dressed up, etc.
However, the novel sometimes feels a little false. The son, in particular, spoke in a way that didn't seem very plausible for an 18-year-old. Also, Restrepo sometimes attempts to underline her themes in ways that felt heavy-handed. One of the back cover blurbs compares the novel to Kiss of the Spider Woman or Waiting for Godot, but it lacks either of those works' confidence in letting the dialogue speak for itself without having to lay everything out for us.
Perplexing, mysterious, hypnotic. Playing for Thrills is the story of Fang Yan, a down-and-out gambler who finds himself accused of a decade-old murder. In trying to establish an alibi, Yan discovers that there is a gap of seven days for which he cannot account. His investigation leads him to some dubious characters, but as he begins to investigate that missing week, he runs into more mysteries. Who is the mysterious woman he allegedly spent the week with? What role did the man in the striped shirt play? Identities shift and become confused. Recalling film noir, the fiction of Roberto Arlt and the movie Memento, Playing for Thrills is a strange story of one man's attempt to uncover a past, yet frustrates both protagonist and reader in the way the facts to be uncovered become clearer yet less helpful the deeper one goes.
Juan Moreira was a renegade gaucho of Buenos Aires province in the 19th century. Gutierrez' work is a novelization (originally serialized) of his life and escapades. Though Gutierrez claims he researched the Moreira and spoke with many witnesses, I'm still a little dubious about the novel's historical veracity. However, even taken with a grain of salt, there is something captivating about the short life of this outlaw. The Moreira of the novel is an upstanding, moral man who runs afoul of the law because of a local administrator's desire for Moreira's wife. He gets his vengance on the administrator, but is then on the run from the law. The narrative is a little repetitious at times, with knife fight after knife fight. Moreira may be portrayed as a noble figure, yet there's something quite ugly about all the death he leaves in his wake. Yet, over the course of the story, I found myself becoming more sympathetic to his plight. If Moreira isn't quite an existentialist hero, there is something tragically noble about him, a man cut off from society but still living by a code, though he knows full well the best he can expect is to die a good death. I wouldn't call it a classic, but definitely a worthwhile example of the gaucho genre.
An interesting idea by the late Joe Pulver in tracing a copy of the Necronomicon down the ages. As appealing as the concept is, I'm not exactly sure it could work. Additionally, suffers from the hit-and-miss nature common to anthologies.
The first half is made up of stories set in a future where Argentina has decided to cling on to “traditional” values, while the rest of the world moves on.
The second half consists of solid science-fiction stories, somewhat Twilight Zone-like (in a good way).