Added a special surprise bonus book.
Finished all the reading on June 29th.
These were hard to boil down, so the review fought with me to begin with.
It all seemed rather pointless to keep going with it; but, I came up with a sequel idea that ties it into a memorial for Ma, so that gave me strength again.
But! Before I can get to that, I have to do this one! So, here we go!
An Antarctic Mystery (1897)
A Strange Discovery (1899)
At the Mountains of Madness (1936)
Pym (2011)
Yep, Lovecraft's "At The Mountains Of Madness" is the bonus book.
I'll get more into it when I get there.
Jules Verne: An Antarctic Mystery (1897)
Both within "Arthur Gordon Pym" and throughout all these sequels, the events both really happened, and were published as fiction by Edgar Allan Poe.
So, AGP exists as a book within the world.
This story is happening one year after AGP was published, but the events of AGP happened 11 years ago.
Our new narrator/protagonist, Jeorling, finagles his way onto the Halbrane, captained by Len Guy.
Len Guy being the brother of William Guy, captain of the Jayne from AGP.
Along the way, they pick up Dirk Peters (at first under an assumed name) from AGP.
We learn from Dirk that Poe's ending was fake, that Pym was alive the last time Dirk saw him.
So!! Pym is (possibly) alive, and they have to quest for him along with William Guy, and the other lost sailors.
I won't spoil the end.
Verne took 59 years to do his sequel
He fell in love with it at 10, and took 'til 69 to get it done.
He makes my slowpoke ass look like an Olympic sprinter! 😆
Last time I joked about little Poe getting slapped for reading Byron.
I wonder what Verne's parents reaction was to him reading Poe. 😏
Shit, I bet Goth kids todays still get shit for getting caught with Poe. 🙄
Especially in fucking red states. 😒
Star Trek:TNG gets called "competence porn" because there's no fuck-uppery on TNG unlike NuBSG.
Jules Verne is the origin of competence porn.
The crew of the Halbrane has their shit together.
AAM is AGP:TNG. 😉😏
Aside from the racism cringe, I dug it as an adventure.
It may not be "20,000 Leagues" or "80 Days" but it's pretty cool.
Verne sweeps away the magical elements of AGP.
But, in their place, we get some Scooby-Doo science.
Now, to the racist cringe...
"Halfbreed" "savages" and "half-savage" kept popping up.
The worst of it?
Of Endicot, the black cook: "as a negro, who cares little about the future, shallow and frivolous, like all his race....he resigned himself to his fate easily, and perhaps this was true philosophy".
Muthafucka, the Civil War had happened!! Frederick Douglas had written his books and given his speeches!!
What the fuck!?!?!?
Thankfully, Mat Johnson had something to say about this! 😏🍿
Charles Romyn Dake: A Strange Discovery (1899)
Next!! We jump ahead two years in publishing time, and 38 years in story time.
And also, we jump to an alt-universe, cuz AAM didn't happen.
From here on out, these are all alt-universes.
Our nameless narrator says this all happened in 1877.
Our main characters this time are-
-Nameless narrator. An Englishman visiting America who stumbled into all this.
-Doctor Castleton, who's a 19th century troll without an internet to shit all up.
You will want to punch this character. Hard.
-Doctor Bainbridge, Castleton's apprentice who's simultaneously naïve and snooty.
He helps move the plot along, and he's (sadly) the most competent of the bunch.
-Arthur, a bellhop. No relation to Pym. He's there for comic relief, but he's just cringe.
However, he's the only one capable of seeing how full of shit Castleton is for some reason.
Everyone else is hypnotized by Castleton like they're Joe Rogan fans.
-Dirk Peters. From AGP. Again. In his 70's-80's, but still ticking. Getting his "real" account of what happened after AGP is the whole plot. Everything else is goofy sideshows.
Bainbridge gets his story down to pass along to the others.
The framing story of Narrator, Castleton, Bainbridge, and Arthur, I imagine animated like 90's Disney.
These guys are a fucking goof troupe whether Dake intended it or not.
Dirk's story I imagine animated and scored like "Heavy Metal" with Dirk as Den.
Cuz that's what Dirk and Pym found in the deepest guts of Antarctica.
A magical sci-fi kingdom out of "Den" from "Heavy Metal".
Dirk is a superhero in AGP, AAM, and this one....but...it's....complicated.
I'll save it for when we get to "Pym".
One of the cover blurbs says ASD is for fans of both Poe and Lovecraft.
So, I said to myself, "did Dake predict Lovecraft?"
Yes. He does. The magical futurism of the Hili-Li and the Old Ones share many similarities.
Heavy Metal is the perfect comparison!
I had forgotten, the baddies in "Den" worship a God who's really Cthulhu spelled backwards.
"Den" is Cthulhu-verse.
It's also more in line with what Poe was going for, and probably would have done himself.
Jules Verne always reined himself in to the scientifically plausible, and eschewed the magical, but Dake goes whole-hog fantasy-sci-fi.
As Poe would have done! Poe was a mystic who thought clairvoyance was a thing!
In ASD, we even get a 10,000 year old man who can remote view through hologram cubes.
Yeah, they're not called that, but they're fucking hologram cubes.
In 1899!!
Poe invented cyborgs; if he'd lived longer, and gotten back to AGP, he would have had hologram cubes.
Verne is the better writer, Dake sequel-izes AGP better.
As an AGP sequel, Dake wins, hands down.
As a generic sea adventure story, Verne wins.
Narrator and his pals were really unnecessary filler.
You could have had one guy taking Dirk's testimony, and have that be it.
But!! AGP had supposedly important characters vanish from the story, and never be mentioned again.
Well, bravo, Charles Dake, for being as weird as Poe when it comes to characters and plot devices.
Even the flaws are Poe-esque.
Truly, ASD is the proper sequel to AGP. 😆👍
The sci-fi of it all is cool when we finally get there, but we have to slog through a lot of shit-shooting in carriage rides and drawing rooms to get there.
But! One of those shit-shoots ends up essentially being a Poe biography podcast in the middle of the book that's better than the intro to "The Complete Tales And Poems Of Edgar Allan Poe".
For that alone, I'm glad to own this book.
Now, to things I'm less glad about.
The racism.
Dake is all over the place, and it's confusing as fuck.
Much like Poe!
Castleton and Bellhop-Arthur say some unfortunate icky shit.
But Castleton is established as an asshole, and Bellhop-Arthur is a knucklehead.
Narrator and Bainbridge are seemingly progressive, but naïve.
Narrator seems to think racism ended with slavery.
Um...the Klan had been around since the 1860's.
Narrator and Bainbridge are classist as fuck.
Outright saying you can't truly live like a human being unless you can afford to live in a city, and have lovely clothes, and lovely books, and la-de-da.
The sci-fi utopia within Dirk's narrative is a white supremacist's wet dream.
But! Dirk (who is not white, but I'll get more into this in the "Pym" review) saves everyone's bacon, and he becomes their Flash Gordon.
But Dirk isn't invited to the little white-boy tea party where Narrator and Bainbridge pour over his story. But it's just as well for poor Dirk, because....well, I get into that in the "Pym" review too.
I'm boiling it down quite a bit, but it's back and forth constantly.
I really think this is the strangest of the four.
In good ways as well as bad ways.
I'm glad I didn't skip it. I'm glad I went the full buffet, and got everything I could get my hands on for this little project.
H.P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness (1936)
This one is public domain, so I read it online.
But!! I dug it enough, I have the physical copy ordered, and on its way.
"Pym" referenced it enough I knew I needed it, so I read it after "Pym".
Here, I put it in chronological order.
So!! From ASD, we jump ahead 36 years in publishing time, and 53 years in story time.
And, we jump to another alt-universe.
It's about 100 years after AGP at this point, so we don't get anymore Arthur and Dirk, but there's enough blatant clues we're in the same world.
Enough so it counts as a real sequel, and not a "loosely based on" like many encyclopedias lazily say and copy off each other.
It's yet another Antarctic expedition.
Now with recognizable 20th century equipment.
Narrator is Dr. William Dyer.
Dyer mentions he's fifty-four.
He's a geologist.
Rest of crew-
Pabodie- engineer, drill guy.
Lake- biologist.
Atwood- physicist/meteorologist.
Plus sixteen assistants.
Seven graduate students, 9 engineers.
Redshirts. 😉
Danforth is one of these.
Story takes place in 1930-31.
Ships-
Two.
Ex-whalers, wooden, steam powered.
Arkham- J.B Douglas, captain.
Miskatonic- Georg Thorfinnssen, captain.
Danforth compares a snowy volcano they see to one referenced in the Poe poem "Ulalame".
Danforth also directly references "Arthur Gordon Pym".
They're drilling for cores, and finding fossil snails and trilobites.
A series of fossil clues leads to a cave system, leads to a lost city.
There, they find 9 hibernating alien beings that they mistake for dead.
If I saw these fucking things, I'd leave them alone.
But H.P. Lovecraft just invented the dumb white people who have to investigate everything. 😉
Some men and sled dogs turn up dead like "The Thing".
More dumb white people investigating (from Dyer and Danforth) follows.
The secrets of creation are revealed, as well as more monsters.
Including some 6 foot tall blind albino penguins.
And the thing that eats the penguins like popcorn.
Danforth can't take it, and loses half his marbles.
Where are Arthur and Dirk?
In this alt-universe, either...
1. AGP is pure fiction, but Poe gained cosmic knowledge of the Old Ones through a telepathic dream, and injected it into his fiction.
2. Arthur and Dirk ran afoul of the Old Ones, and barely escaped. Arthur told Poe everything right up to that point, and then Arthur & Dirk took the final knowledge to their respective graves.
Dyer puts forth #1, but I get a bigger kick out of #2.
Basically, ATMOM is AGP/ASD if they were written by a straight up Sith. 😏
I'm stricken by how Poe-like Lovecraft is, yet how more modern and smoother it is to read.
Hmm, come to think of it, while Charles Dake does the most faithful sequel to AGP straight-ahead story-wise, Lovecraft is the best Poe student as far as emulating his style, and taking it to the next step.
And! Left a map to the future!
"Alien" is inspired by ATMOM.
"Alien vs Predator" is inspired by it, even setting it in the Antarctic.
The Engineers in the Prometheus duology are based on the Cthulhu-verse.
The Shoggoth is made of black slime, and the mutation-juice in "Prometheus" is black ooze.
The whole "Alien" saga is just Lovecraft ripping.
Why the big studios just don't do straight ahead Lovecraft movies, I dunno.
So!! Good news!! I need not pine for the lost prequel-sequels that would have filled in up to the original "Alien". Nothing would have been revealed that wasn't already in ATMOM.
There's an alien dissection scene that's both very "Alien" and "Swamp Thing: Anatomy Lesson".
Guillermo del Toro is trying to make the movie for this, and the villain in "Hellboy" is totally goddamned Cthulhu.
Oh!! This also makes me think of "Inhumanoids"!! 😮
"Inhumanoids" are these explorer guys but with super-power suits.
Yeah!! This is 1930's "Inhumanoids"!!!
Heh, Pym sequel; "Inhumanoids" prequel. 😎👍
Davros and the Daleks also draw inspiration from the Old Ones and the Shoggoth.
To my eye anyway, Quintessons and Transformers rips this off too.
Narrator does say on some planets, the Old Ones created more mechanistic forms of living, but found it emotionally unsatisfying.
"Man Of Steel" is Lovecraftian.
The Kryptonian tech, particularly the drones is all tentacle-y.
And the Fortress Of Solitude is found in the arctic.
The monsters from "Stranger Things" are (blatantly) Lovecraftian too.
Stephen King and Clive Barker fanboy on ATMOM.
Part of me wishes other authors after Lovecraft and before Mat Johnson took a crack at AGP sequels, but once AGP brushes against Cthulhu-verse, then everything Cthulhu touches "Kevin Bacons" Pym there.
Like Stephen King's "Gramma".
And "Salem's Lot", "The Stand", "Gunslinger", "Eyes Of The Dragon", and "IT".
There's a shout out to the Conan-verse in here.
Lovecraft also spliced his own "The Colour Out Of Space" into it with a shout-out.
R’lyeh from "Call Of Cthulhu" also gets a shout-out.
The Necronomicon gets multiple shout-outs.
This thing's a cosmic Swiss Army Knife!
Holy shit!! It just totally clicked!!!
Le Guin's Hainish-verse is totally the good-guy opposite flip of ASD/ATMOM starting with Rocannon, and radiating out. Y'know what? I'm gonna do a whole third blog about this to rabbit-hole it in detail.
Anyway! Yeah. Like I said, ATMOM is AGP/ASD as written by a Sith.
But, like Poe and Verne, the racist bastard can write.
And I owe him Richard Matheson, and Stephen King.
And Dan O'Bannon. And John W. Campbell. And Alan Moore, And, and, and...
My whole 80's horror childhood/teenhood comes out of this one goddamned book.
It's fucked up to consider how far ahead of its time it is in its historical context.
Like, 3 years after this comes out, the Judy Garland "Wizard Of Oz" comes out.
Mind-blowing.
Like I hinted above, H.P. Lovecraft is a foaming racist.
No overt bite-you-on-the-ass racism in ATMOM.
Lovecraft openly demonstrates his racist bona-fides in "Herbert West: Re-Animator".
But!! The Shoggoth are slaves that revolt. So yeah.
Sigh.
Goddamn America and it's fucked up history.
But, if I plug my ears and hum, I'm not better than Fox News and PragerU.
Heh, way I look at it, my journey through AAM, ASD, and ATMOM mirrors the ATMOM characters dissecting the monsters. 😏
Mat Johnson: Pym (2011)
Finally! We jump ahead 75 years in both publishing and real time.
And, to another alt-universe.
One that treats AGP as both fiction and reality, and the other sequels as pure fiction.
AAM and ATMOM get direct shout outs.
Not so much ASD.
So, the intro is just like AGP; with the narrator/protagonist saying he dictated it to Mat Johnson, and they're pretending it's fiction.
Narrator/protagonist is Chris Jaynes, a black literature professor.
He gets canned for trying to be a regular lit professor, instead of just exposing white kids to black books.
THEN!! At his seeming lowest point, his book dealer finds for him "a lost slave narrative".
But not really.
It's "The True And Interesting Narrative Of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written By Himself".
Springfield Illinois, 1837.
He's black, and not a slave! And he's real! So, AGP is real! Jaynes wants to find the Tsalal (the black native race from AGP) now!!
Jaynes wastes no time getting into the main plot.
Unlike Charlie Dake who fiddle-dicks along. 😏
Ship = The Creole.
Creole crew-
-Captain Booker Jaynes; Chris's cousin.
-Garth Frierson; Chris's buddy since elementary school.
-Jeffree; a Youtube adventure seeker.
-Carlton Damon Carter; Jefree's lover, and fellow adventure seeker.
-Angela Latham; Chris's ex.
-Nathaniel Latham; Angela's husband.
They very quickly and accidentally find an underground civilization of Yeti-like "Ice Honkeys" and crazy stuff happens.
Yup. Ice Honkeys. Not Hili-li. Not magnetic Sphinxes. Not Old Ones and Shoggoth.
Ice Honkeys. The racial satire flies fast and furious.
I won't spoil it further. Except to note that Little Debbie cakes play a diabolically important role to the plot.
It's not Verne's 59 years, but Johnson pecked away and re-re-re-wrote "Pym" for 9 years.
Again, my book's gestation pales by comparison.
If "Antarctic" is AGP:TNG, this is AGP:Lower Decks in all the best ways.
Yep, this is the easy favorite.
Absolutely spectacular.
We get Easter eggs for AAM and ATMOM as well as "Moby Dick".
There's what I think are Easter eggs for ASD.
I may be wishing it into being, but I don't think so.
Okay. I promised it, so here it is.
Dirk Peters.
In AGP, Poe says he's "a halfbreed". A half white half Native American man.
BUT!! He describes him like a weird racist cartoon of a black man.
He's Arthur's buddy, and saves the day with his super strength on many an occasion, but he's treated like an intelligent dog.
In AAM, again, he's got super strength, saves the day, is technically a hero, but Verne dumps "halfbreed" on him like it's "and" or "the".
And this iteration of Dirk looks up to Arthur like he's his doggy owner even more than in AGP.
It's fucked up.
In ASD, as I mentioned, he's Den meets Flash Gordon.
He's a full-on superhero.
But then Narrator and Bainbridge talk about him behind his back like he's a prize racehorse. Trying to discern the source of his strength from his anatomical deformities.
Deformities Poe gave him as a racist stereotype.
It's pretty gross.
And Dake doesn't realize it's gross; he's like a geek kid trying to figure out how warp drive works.
But dammit, Dake, it's fucking gross.
Jesus Christ!!
Mat Johnson takes note of all of this.
He points out passages where Poe has the same weird descriptions for black people who are black.
So Johnson's Dirk is black.
No more of this "halfbreed" crap.
But no more deforming him either.
Well, physically.
Johnson does point out there were indeed black people in the 18th-19th centuries who pretended to be other races to "pass".
Native American was a popular one.
So Johnson's Dirk is...well...a race traitor.
Well, Johnson flat out uses the term "Uncle Tom".
By 2011, Dirk is just a burlap sack of his disinterred bones, but we get an alive Dirk in flashbacks through his diaries.
These flashbacks are very "if I laugh, I'll go to Hell".
At one point, Dirk meets Edgar Allan Poe, and Johnson is merciless to Poe. 😏👍
If Charles Dake drops a Poe butt-kiss podcast right in the middle of his book, Chris Jaynes's/Mat Johnson's author-asides and 4th wall breaks are a Poe-critical podcast sprinkled throughout.
Jaynes/Johnson even calls Poe "a drunken antebellum madman" at one point. 😆
An elderly Dirk even meets Jules Verne, and Jaynes/Johnson brings up that creepy bit about "shallow and frivolous negroes". I'll leave the rest of that for you to discover. 😉
When I was ordering the books, I got this one almost as a silly afterthought, but you really need it to finish the whole thing off.
Do not even attempt this climb without "Pym".
Just as westerns desperately needed the piss taken out of them by "Blazing Saddles" Poe needs "Pym".
When you splice in the Lovecraft of it all, it's even kind of the "Spaceballs" too.
Lovecraft inspired "Alien" and the Xenomorph is spoofed in "Spaceballs" so the comparison is perfect.
"The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe" is 1020 pages.
This quadrilogy was 1032 pages all together.
So, it all really is "Poe 2: Electric Boogaloo".
Another layer I found: and this ties in to Poe, Dirk Peters in-universe, and now Ma's memory now that she's gone, of continuing on someone's story after they're gone.
Of being the torchbearer of legacy.
I'm suddenly very aware of that. Not that I was oblivious, but its shone a strong UV lamp on it.
But again, I'm going to do a sequel post just for Ma, and how her sci-fi/horror fandoms connect to all of this.
Okay!! Final ranking!!
By quality-
1. Pym
2. At The Mountains Of Madness
3. An Antarctic Mystery
4. A Strange Discovery
By fidelity to Poe-
1. Pym
2. A Strange Discovery
3. An Antarctic Mystery
4. At The Mountains Of Madness
And, that's all of that!!!
Phew!! And I thought Earthsea was a beast!!
Yeah, this journey didn't give me the same "warm the cockles of your heart" feeling as Le Guin's stuff, but it was fascinating in an archeological dig sense.
The progression of Poe and the authors he influenced doesn't encompass all of American literature, but it is a damned good MRI slice of it.
Picking the right slice of that slice to serve up here was tricky as Hell.
Like I said up top, it fought me.
But, I seem to have won.
Now!! Stay tuned for three sequels!
The arrival of the physical copy of "Mountains Of Madness".
My extrapolation of the similarities between the Lovecraft-verse and the Hainish-verse.
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