Yup, these ones were good!
I finished them off December 8th, but a bunch of stuff happened.
Storms, Christmas, appliance breakdowns, stuff.
The Ballad of Black Tom (2016)
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016)
Ring Shout (2020)
The original plan was Machen, Lovecraft, King, Douglass; with Douglass as "the moral mouthwash" as I called it.
These, "Lovecraft Country", and "Helen's Story" have given that mouthwash feeling just fine.
I'm good. On to Stephen King after this review.
Then Douglass, but not part of this weird fiction thing, cuz that feels insulting to him now.
Well, I mean, the pattern of the read-a-thon hadn't fully taken shape when I started out.
Adjustments need to be made sometimes.
It'll be 12 books when it's done. Exactly double what I started with.
I'd almost say "oof!! 😓" but its been a fucking blast. 😎👍
Anyhoo!!
The Ballad of Black Tom.
Observations on "The Horror at Red Hook".
The style is very Machen-ripoff.
Glad I read all the Machen now.
This is exactly what I thought I was going to have to cringe through when I started my journey with the Cthulhu book.
This makes "Shadow Over Innsmouth" look like The Emerald City.
Rambles about the "filthy" people being tapped into ancient pagan religions.
Like Machen, but angry and dark.
Where Machen is fascinated, HPL is hopelessly revulsed and phobic.
Malone "our hero" is (basically) ICE. Our hero/protagonist is a fucking ICE guy. Yipee. 🙄
The cult they're building up is like the most fevered racist conspiracy theories out of fucking "Turner Diaries".
Yeah, it's not canon-connected to Cthulhu-verse, but it's like a rough draft of "Call Of Cthulhu".
A more racist to the point of spittle-flecked rough draft.
Another thing this reminds me of!! "Big Trouble In Little China"!
Except that one's funny, and the Chinese are both the good guys and bad guys.
And the white guy who sees himself as the hero is actually the goofy sidekick.
The monsters are even Lovecraftian.
Yeah, "Little China" is an accidental parody of "Red Hook".
Or! Knowing Carpenter, maybe not!
Now, Black Tom...
Opposite of Lovecraft. Charles Tommy Tester is fascinated by New York & Brooklyn, not vomit induced.
Tommy says many make the mistake of not looking at the actual city, but looking for magic, good or bad.
Sees life in the city, not rot.
Well, the obvious difference between Tommy and the dudes in "Jeroboam Henley’s Debt" is they went to an HBC, and are fancy gentlemen, and Tommy is a Harlem dweller trying to claw his way out.
Tommy is caught up in some shady stuff, but he's good at heart.
He actually reminds me of Spike from "Cowboy Bebop".
Malone shows up, and he's physically described as Lovecraft himself.
He's accompanied by a big guy detective named Mr. Howard.
Robert E. Howard? Get it? Get it? Eh? 😉
A bit of a spoiler legalistically, but I don't think it spoils. I think it'll make you want to read it more.
Lavalle turned "Red Hook" and this into a "Call Of Cthulhu" prequel! 😲😃
Yeah, like "Jeroboam Henley’s Debt" Black Tom isn't a pure hero, and it's not a classical happy ending. It's Lovecraft-verse, so it's gotta be tinged with gloom.
Just like "Helen" and "Pan" you could theoretically skip "Red Hook" but I'm gratified I read "Red Hook". It was a gloomy slog through HPL's angry head, but it better sets up the counter-vibe of Tommy.
You appreciate it more.
It's made to be a different experience either way. Like "Lovecraft Country" with or without the TV show.
Loved it.
I dunno that it "fixes" "Red Hook" morally, but certainly makes it artistically better.
Did it feed my post "Jeroboam" hunger for social justice in the HPL-verse?
Not all by itself, but combined with "Ring Shout" fuck yeah.
But I'll get there.
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
Observations on "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath".
From Kij Johnson in the acknowledgements of "Vellitt-Boe".
Re: "Kadath".
"I first read it at ten, thrilled and terrified, and uncomfortable with the racism but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic. This story is my adult self returning to a thing I loved as a child and seeing whether I could make adult sense of it".
Put a pin in that.
"Kadath" is very "Lord Of The Rings" meets "Neverending Story" with sprinkles of Zelda, and D&D, and with some Guillermo del Toro sauce.
But before all of them. Even "Rings"!
Randolph Carter (the protagonist, and Lovecraft's self-insertion) is rescued by an army of cats at one point.
HPL excitedly lists off all the kinds of kitty, and it's darkly funny that kitties can come in colors and shapes, but people can't. 😒
So!! Stephen King ripped off the army of cats!
Sometimes, he makes his own stuff, sometimes, he lazily cut-and-pastes Lovecraft.
"Sleepwalkers" is a lazy cut-and-paste.
One hundred motherfucking percent.
Leng pops up.
So, we've got our direct "Mountains of Madness" connection.
Night-Gaunts are unquestioningly the prototype for Xenomorphs.
And this written in 1927. Holy shit.
Nyalathotep shows up in a humanoid talking form.
Kij Johnson is right; where the fuck ARE the goddamned women?
They aren't even there to be mothers, or maids, or grandmas, or anything!
It's like Smurfs before Smurfette is added!
WTF?
And, the racism is there, and it didn't need to be.
Lovecraft crowbars it in.
There's a whole subplot about filthy stinky slaves that Carter/Lovecraft victim blames, and then Carter gets sent back to the start, and that plot didn't even matter.
You're a dick, Lovecraft.
A stunningly talented dick, but a dick.
Now, Vellitt Boe!!!
Yeah, the total lack of women was indeed noticeable and weird.
So, this is a sequel to "Kadath" rather than a beside-quel like "Black Tom" was to "Red Hook".
Vellitt was an adventurer who became a teacher at the women's college in Ulthar.
Now, one of her students has vanished with her human boyfriend from the waking world.
The girl's dad is a trustee of the college, and could close the place down due to them losing her.
So, Vellitt is going on the quest to get her back.
Vellitt has to be the one, because 1. she's the only one her student will listen to 2. she had a human boyfriend when she was young, and it was Randolph Carter.
Ulthar is the town preferred by kitty cats.
HPL glossed over its finer details, so it was perfect for Johnson to flesh out.
Dream-people can't wake up into our world, but they can pass through a magic gate.
The couple must be headed there, so that's where Vellitt is going.
Oh, and outside of Ulthar, women aren't educated, or indeed considered educatable.
So...The Six Kingdoms are indeed sexist.
Ulthar is a blue dot in a red state. 😏
Vellitt on Randolph: "he was so wrapped and rapt in his own story, that there was no room for the world around him except as it served his own tale". And "..and all the women invisible everywhere, except when they brought him drinks and served him food--all walk-on parts in the play that was Randolph Carter, or even wallpaper".
There it is. Finally the answer. The invisible women were indeed a mental block.
Johnson/Vellitt chalks it up to narcissism.
The ending is awesome, but I won't spoil it.
Yeah, this fixes "Kadath" in exactly the same way "Tehanu" fixes Earthsea.
This is the "Tehanu" of Lovecraft-verse.
No wonder Le Guin gave it a positive blurb.
This crushes "Sooz".
"Tehanu" crushes "Sooz" "Vellitt" crushes "Sooz".
"Sooz" stinks.
Damned shame. Beagle on his A-game is amazing. "Last Unicorn" "A Fine and Private Place" and I even found out he did "Sarek" for TNG.
"Sooz" was not his A-game.
I gaslit myself that it was better than it was at the time.
It's better having actual good stories with female protagonists, and not have to make excuses for my fellow dudes.
Anyway!
I've determined; I finally have enough rebuttal-quels under my belt to genuinely enjoy the Lovecraft-verse. It feels properly patched up now. 😎👍
Once again, I'm glad I read the prequel.
It needed it.
You COULD enjoy it without it, but you get so much more with it.
So far, it's been the case with all three of these (three being "Helen's Story").
Ring Shout.
Very Buffy meets Evil Dead.
I had it sussed.
So, for our three main leads, we've got Maryse, Sadie, and Chef.
Sadie is their sniper. Chef is their bomb maker.
Maryse can materialize a magic sword like Magik, or Ryoko.
Her magic sword was given to her by dimensional entities that come to her in dreams as "her Aunties".
Then there's Nana Jean. Their leader, and sort of Yoda/Gandalf of the whole thing.
Then there's a bunch of third stringer characters.
My favorite was Emma, the Jewish German Commie.
Reminded me of Emma Goldman, the 19th century Anarchist.
I wonder if it's deliberate. It's gotta be.
There's connection to Lovecraft-inspired things.
The Sam Raimi version of the Necronomicon isn't directly name checked, but it's described, so it leaves no doubt.
The Night Doctors are basically Cenobytes.
Heard in an interview, the Night Doctors are real slave legend! Slaves invented the goddamned Cenobytes!
Our main villain is Butcher Clyde.
A pile of shapeshifting eyeball-and-mouth-goo posing as a Klansman butcher.
He's the Freddy Kreuger to Maryse's Nancy.
Then the Kluxers are the soldier villains, they're zombie-monster things posing as regular Klanners.
Only Nana Jean and her girls can see their true forms.
Uber spoiler-
After they beat Butcher Clyde, a new guy who lives in Providence Rhode Island is going to help the Kluxers spread the evil.
I looked it up.
It's Lovecraft.
He was born in Providence, and spent big chunks of his life there before and after New York and Boston.
It's not meta-Lovecraft, it actually connects after all. 😎👍
All three of these had Lovecraft as a character!
He's Malone in "Black Tom" Randolph Carter in "Vellitt Boe" and himself in "Ring Shout".
End spoiler-
I rank this next to "Pym".
And...running it through my head, numbered lists already don't work; time to switch to tier list.
Golden tier-
"Vellitt Boe"
A Tier-
"Pym" "Ring Shout" Helen's Story"
B tier-
All of "Lovecraft Country" "Black Tom"
C tier is for ones that stink, but there is no C tier yet.
So, my assessment of this 2010's-2020's rebuttal-quel project so far...
So, to an untrained eye, it's like the progressives are "stealing" horror/sci-fi from the bigots....but the bigots stole it first.
One generation back from Poe, you get Mary Shelly, and her dad was an anarchist who was friends with Thomas Paine.
The logo for the publisher for "Helen's Story" is Mary Shelly.
Sci-fi/horror is ours.
Fuck the bigotry. Fuck the apologists.
Is it "rude" to play right on Lovecraft's doorstep?
Maybe. I can't seem to care.
Lovecraft gave a good review of "The Birth Of A Nation" and the Klan were property burners, and land thieves.
So, suck it, buddy.
The baby boomers cared too much about "rude".
Stephen King hitched his universe up literally next door to Lovecraft's, and then he showed off his liberal bona-fides with stuff like "Dead Zone", but he confined it to his Maine towns, and was hands-off of Lovecraft's "turf" as it were.
Naw, I'm with the millennials.
If we're stuck with Lovecraft, let's fix the mythos.
If in a further future, Klanners take over, they're not gonna re-Klan Lovecraft, they're gonna burn all books period.
You can't think along the lines of "if we do this, they'll do that".
That puts yourself in checkmate, and you can't do anything.
I'm glad of rebuttal-quels, and I'm hungry for 'em.
But!! Before I can tear into my next batch....
At long last, the reason I started this...STEPHEN KING!!!!!
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