The Barest Branch

In the late 9th century, Danish fisherman Dagfinn leaves his village to join one of the Viking crews sailing for England to join the great army of Guthrum in the conquest of Wessex. He finds England to be a strange land, and is never quite at home among the English, or indeed among the other Danes. Then, on a tax raid to the coast of East Anglia, Dagfinn and his mates encounter a village with an absurd fortune in gold. Where does it come from and how did they get it, and what price did they pay?

James Holloway is perhaps the greatest, possibly the only, proponent of the Gonzo style of history, which consciously abandons any attempt to portray people in history as basically like us but with better hats. At the same time, Gonzo history embraces the modern vernacular as preferable to coarse or flowery approximations of antique language or the dry language of science.In his own words:

"...fuck all attempts to portray the past in this reassuring light, because your ancestors were not just like you. They were in some ways, but in other ways they were huge fucking weirdoes, and the sooner you begin the process of trying to get your head around that, the smarter you’ll be, especially if you’re able to come to the conclusion that you also are a giant weirdo and half of what you do makes no sense whatsoever."

And that's basically the same approach Holloway's first novel takes, not just to history but to its other influence, the work of HP Lovecraft. Holloway's Vikings are brutal killers and - in some cases - casual rapists, but speak in a rugged modern dialect, while the first person narrative eschews the intellectual asceticism of the Lovecraftian voice in favour of the same tone, while maintaining the thematic hallmarks of alienation, isolation and identity.

While at first glance an axe-happy, weatherbeaten, foul-mouthed Viking sailor seems as far from Johnny Lovecraft-Protagonist as you could get, Dagfinn's origin as a beardless, slave-born bastard set him apart as much as a sense of obsessive historical romanticism, and the early sections of the book in which he contemplates with awe the cyclopaean relics of the Romans (not that Holloway resorts to using any of the touchstone words - cyclopaean, squamous, non-Euclidean) are actually more effective in terms of creeping, cosmic dread than the later sections with the actual monsters, although in the latter he does a good job of maintaining the appropriate sense of desperate futility in the face of armed and physically capable protagonists.

The Barest Branch is not going to be for everyone. It will not appeal to anyone who likes their Vikings pseudo-Shakespearean or their history clean, and it defies both of the predominant classes of Mythos protagonist - the wilting victim and the muscular hero. It is also very seriously not for anyone who has a problem with the word fuck. It could also use a final pass from an editor, but that's the nature of self-publishing. With those provisos, it is a well-written novella which manages to be effective both as Lovecraftian horror and as Gonzo history, and it's only a couple of quid on Amazon or DriveThru.

The Aeronaut's Windlass

With the surface of the world a lethally hostile place, the civilised nations of humanity live in towering spires of imperishable stone while bold aeronauts ply the skies between them. Captain Grim, privateer of Spire Albion, is caught up in the machinations of an ambitious rival Spire when he is retained to transport a team of inexperienced young guards, a cat and a mad Etherialist in search of saboteurs. Unfortunately, war is just the tip of the iceberg, with a swarm of lethal surface monsters and a sinister rival Etherialist manipulating events while being manipulated herself by... something else.

I've read a few of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I quite liked them, but I hit them at the last wind of my paranormal mystery period and there just seemed to be so many of them. The Aeronaut's Windlass is the first book in a new series (like, super new; I had no idea how new and now I'll have to wait if I want to read the next one) so doesn't have the terrifying prospect of trying to catch up with a jillionty titles, which is an advantage. Loosely it's somewhere between actually steampunk and conventionally steampunk, with Spire Albion (Britain) on the brink of war with Spire Aurora (clearly Spain, but also a bit Napoleonic France) in a world of titanic towers and technomagic. Oh, and intelligent, insufferable cats.

There is a lot to like about The Aeronaut's Windlass. Butcher writes good action and has created a neat system of technomagic in the etheric crystals and Etherialists which power the plot. There's a satisfying self-contained plot and plenty of hints at the longer arc story. The aerial combat scenes in particular showed both a deep love of naval extravaganzas and a fair degree of thought as to the implications of taking such a battle to three dimensions. The cats are brilliantly written; insufferable bastards the lot of them, but very convincingly cat, especially in their diplomacy. On the downside, Butcher is a bit patchy on the subject of tea - I will accept a world where the same pot is used for heating and brewing, but the idea of anyone, especially the pseudo-British, putting cream in tea is just wrong - and I began to regret after the first quarter that I wasn't keeping a tally every time someone ground their teeth (I do know that it happened a lot.)

I've caught a few fairly so-so audiobook readings, but Euan Morton (you may know him as the male Sith inquisitor in SWtOR) did an excellent job with this one.

I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd's Crown

In 'I Shall Wear Midnight', Tiffany Aching is the fledgling witch of the Chalk, but the ancient revenant of hatred known as the Cunning Man is stalking to her. Born of twisted zeal and thwarted desire, the Cunning Man is the malevolent spirit of the witch hunt and hatred and strife follow in his wake. He brings the burning, and Tiffany will have to learn not to fear the fire and how not to fear the fire if she is to defeat him. And in 'The Shepherd's Crown', the death of a friend leaves Tiffany with too much to do and an old enemy pressing at the walls of reality trying to get in.

There's something decidedly melancholy about the conclusion of the Tiffany Aching series. Released in 2010, some suggested at the time that 'I Shall Wear Midnight' had something of the goodbye about it, but 'The Shepherd's Crown' is the farewell. It's Terry Pratchett's last completed novel - although the afterword notes that 'completed' is a strong term and it does feel as if Sir Terry had yet to perform the final pass at the last - and, taken with the later volumes in the main Discworld series, ushers in the last stages of a sea change on the Disc, the final transition from its roots as high fantasy parody in The Colour of Magic to something more akin to Downton Abbey with wizards. Cohen the Barbarian never met Granny Weatherwax, but it's certainly hard to think that his brand of unstoppable masculine senility would cut much ice with Tiff.

It's almost as if the Discworld has at last grown up, which is perhaps ironic for books aimed at younger readers, or perhaps not. The faeries are gone, the vampires have all taken the pledge and the barbarians are dealing with their problems like grownups. It's not just the setting either. 'I Shall Wear Midnight' opens with Tiffany intervening to prevent first the lynching and then the suicide of a man who has beaten his pregnant daughter so hard that she miscarried. The Discworld of Tiffany Aching is a tough, earthy place and Tiff is a tough, earthy girl.

And then 'The Shepherd's Crown' deals a great deal with loss, and in its way with the loss of its own author. The death which begins the novel leaves a gaping hole in the Discworld, as if the whole crazy place can't sustain without a rational centre, and it probably couldn't.

Am I rambling? Perhaps so. Perhaps I don't want to finish this review, because it feels so final. Perhaps I don't want to say that I felt that the rough edges showed a little too much in 'The Shepherd's Crown', or perhaps I only felt that way because I wanted it so much to be something sublime and it was only good.

Acolytes of Cthulhu - 'The Dunstable Horror', 'The Crib of Hell', 'The Last Work of Pietro De Opono', 'The Eye of Horus', 'The Cellar Room' and 'Mythos'

It's like an extreme version of ninjas vs. pirates.

Another batch from Acolytes of Cthulhu, this time mostly from the 1960s.

'The Dunstable Horror' (1964) by Arthur Pendragon follows a palaeontologist looking for the written records of a Native American tribe and running into an ancient smallpox rape-revenge curse. It's a feature of Lovecraft's work that humans are essentially helpless before the enormity of the universe. Very rarely is the author of a supernatural horror human, and for that to be the case rather diminishes the cosmic horror aspect. Fear of the mysterious powers of wronged Native American shamans is somehow less potent than fear of an unknowable, alien intelligence. The accessibility of 'you raped my wife and wiped out my people with smallpox' as a motive makes it less monstrous, be the vengeance ever so supernatural.

'The Crib of Hell' (1965), also by Arthur Pendragon, is more of a kind, with a family secret lurking in a sealed room and growing slowly to monstrous maturity. While the threat is more alien and lurks beneath the veneer of normality, there is a distance here, and in 'The Dunstable Horror', in that the narrators are mere observers, rather than finding the alienness in their own family. A point of interest is that Pendragon sets both stories in the same fictional area of New England, the rural equivalent of Lovecraft's Arkham County.

'The Last Work of Pietro De Opono' (1969) by Steffan B. Aletti is a standard 'don't read the manual' tale, in which an inquisitive student delves into the wrong historical manuscript and accidentally turns himself into the vampiric thrall of a demonic entity and rues the absence of white magicians in a world of reason. Also by Aletti, 'The Eye of Horus' (1968) is a mummy's curse yarn packed with killer hawks. Both of these have a protagonist in the thick of things, although the threat is once again external.

A third Aletti, 'The Cellar Room' (1969), concerns spiritualism and the threat of things beyond mortal ken, and 'Mythos' (1961), by John Glasby, continues that thread, as an archaeologist probes into the mythology of Easter Island looking for the prehistoric origins of the maoi and finding more than he bargained for. In fact, it's an aspect which appears in all of these stories; it's not an uncommon theme in Lovecraftian fiction, but it seems to have been especially popular in the 60s. Most of these stories also employ the theme of the civilised world against a more primitive one that knows secrets, but unlike Lovecraft they tend to romanticise the earlier cultures; Lovecraft had almost a horror of past civilisations.

Acolytes of Cthulhu - 'Out of the Jar', 'The Earth-Brain', 'Through the Alien Angle', 'Legacy in Crystal', 'The Will of Claude Ashur' and 'The Final War'

See. Generic.

It's time for a second round of stories from Acolytes of Cthulhu (2014 revision).

'Out of the Jar' (1940) by Charles R. Tanner is a book number, with the narrator recounting the story of a friend who bought a mysterious jar, only for another friend to open it and release a djinn, which definitely didn't net him three wishes. It taps the theme of 'what you think you know is not what you think it is' that pervades much of Lovecraft's work, and which is pretty much the mantra (probably in catchier form) of all cosmic horror history and prehistory.

'The Earth Brain' (1932) by Edmond Hamilton is on the surface a boreal answer to Lovecraft's own 'At the Mountains of Madness', being an account of an Arctic expedition to explore the interior of an ice-covered mountain (being the 1930s, no-one had yet established definitively that the Arctic has no mountains, nor land of any kind,) but it is distinguished by the scale of the threat in both directions. The explorers pierce the chamber of the brain of the Earth itself, and as a result the Earth unleashes a series of devastating quakes in pursuit of the surviving explorer. The combination of worldwide destruction and a very personal beef from the cosmic is unusual, and in many ways makes the cosmic explicable in a fashion which significantly reduces the horror of it.

'Through the Alien Angle' (1941) by Elwin G. Powers is another book number, by which I mean that it is a classically Lovecraftian tale the point of which seems to be solely to be Lovecraftian. A palaeontologist is lured into a trap by the promise of rare volumes, hypnotised and sent through an unnatural angle in the corner of a room. Arriving in an alien city, he strays into the territory of a shoggoth, which pursues him back through another angle to Earth. It has a certain commonality with Lovecraft's 'The Dreams in the Witch-House', but seems almost in a rush to get its weird in and get done.

Next up is a little oddity called 'Legacy in Crystal' (1943), by James Causey. A grasping woman inherits from her dying cousin, but his crystal signet ring brings a strange curse. I call it an oddity because this particular entry reads less like a Mythos story and more like an episode of The Price of Fear or The Man in Black. The cousin's chattels are reclaimed by Satan - like, the actual Satan - and the familiar in the ring is repelled by the name of God. It's not a bad story, but not very Lovecraftian.

'The Will of Claude Ashur' (1947) by C. Hall Thompson on the other hand is hella Lovecraftian, being the last statement of a man who claims to not be who people think he is, but to be trapped in the leprous body of his diabolical brother. There's more romance than the average... than pretty much the sum of all Lovecraft's works, but like hope and goodness it comes to naught in the end.

And then there is 'The Final War' (1949) by David H. Keller MD, in which Cthulhu, God-Warlord of Saturn, gloats over his plans to invade Earth, but is thwarted when some dude deciphers an ancient prophecy and persuades the UN to arm a fleet of airships and build a giant crushy hand to squish Cthulhu's ultimate sexy femme fatale form. I shit ye not. It's about as cosmic horror as Radar Men from the Moon.

The 5th Wave and The White Tree

First wave: Lights out
Second wave: Surf's up
Third wave: Pestilence
Fourth wave: Silencer

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Cassie Sullivan feels far from fine. When the aliens came, they didn't send ships that could be shot down, didn't land an army of war machines that could be overcome by plucky rebels or exposure to the common cold. Instead, they just parked in orbit and began to take over. First they killed the power, then they dropped massive projectiles into the oceans and drowned the coasts; then came the plague, and once there were just a few handfuls of survivors, the Silencers. Now, there is a 5th wave, and it might well be the last.

Rick Yancey's novel The 5th Wave takes as its first principle that alien invaders are smart; that humanity will never be able to go toe-to-toe with anyone with the capability to travel between stars. At the start of the story - the first part of a trilogy - no human has ever even seen an alien, just the mothership that has slaughtered billions from afar. The narrative is divided between Cassie (voiced by Phoebe Strole) and her unknowing high school crush, Ben Parrish (Brandon Espinoza.) Cassie is a lone survivor, desperate to find her lost brother and forced to trust Evan Walker, a stranger with abnormally dreamy eyes. Ben - aka Zombie - is a child soldier in the last army of resistance, who must question whether he can rely on his messianic CO Colonel Vosch.

The 5th Wave is a pretty creepy book, with Walker setting new standards for creepy behaviour even post-Twilight and both Cassie and Ben forced to become something far darker and colder than their youth should demand. The child army is especially grim. The earliest sections of the book, juxtaposing Cassie's recollection of the first four waves with her struggle to survive, are the most effective, although Ben's part of the narrative plays well with the reader's expectations for alien invasion. Overall, it's a good set up for the rest of the trilogy, although it is sometimes hard to feel for the characters, so shock-hardened have they become.

The book has been optioned for a film. The fact that Liev Schrieber has been cast as Vosch tells you most of what you need to know about Vosch, while the fact that a Nordic blonde has been cast as the specifically Asian child-soldier Ringer tells you as much as you might care to know about Hollywood.

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The White Tree is the first volume of The Cycle of Arawn and tells the story of Dante Galland and Bleys Buckler, a young scholar struggling with a strange power and his swordslinging bessie struggling with a rather silly name*. Dante has stolen a book, 'The Cycle of Arawn', and through its philosophical and religious discourses learned to manipulate the shadow-force of creation, the Nether. With the outlawed worshippers of Arawn fomenting rebellion, Dante and Bleys are directed to travel to the dead city of Narrashtavik** in order to bring down the head of the order and prevent the release of the god himself from his celestial imprisonment.

The White Tree escalates fast, with Dante in particular going from sneak thief to major player on the world stage in the space of about five months. It's a self-consciously 'ordinary' fantasy narrative, replete with coarse language and common concerns, and its strongest point is the friendship between the two boys (although given the absence of any other female protagonists - the only female character of any note is the antagonist - I was disappointed when the beardless, oddly young looking yet surprisingly well coordinated for his age Bleys didn't turn out to be a slightly older girl in drag.) The reader, Tim Gerard Reynolds, manages the dry humour very well indeed, although its hard to escape the conclusion that both Dante and Bleys are borderline sociopaths who leave a procession of corpses in their wake with only occasional twinges of anything approaching conscience.

Many on Goodreads have criticised the use of modern colloquialisms in a fantasy setting, but I figure what the hell; it's not like they're speaking English. On the other hand, there are a few references to specifically primary world things - most glaringly the Olympic games - which are a bit jarring.

* No, really; it's part of the narrative, not me being snarky.
** Having only the audiobook, I can not swear to the spelling.

Acolytes of Cthulhu - 'Doom of the House of Duryea', 'The Seventh Incantation', 'From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy', 'The Jewels of Charlotte', 'The Letters of Cold Fire' and 'Horror at Vecra'

This cover is adorable. The one on my Kindle edition is so much more
generic.

So, given that we had the anniversary of HPL's birth a few weeks ago, I figured I'd review some more Yog Sothery. As I was still tapped out on 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' type stories, I opted for Acolytes of Cthulhu, another multi-generational collection, with the stories bearing copyrights from 1932 to 2014 (the date of the updated and slightly altered Kindle reissue.) It's not particularly concerned with Cthulhu himself, the title rather referring to 'acolytes' of Lovecraft's work.

We begin with 'Doom of the House of Duryea' by Earl Pierce Jr (1936), a neat inversion of Lovecraft's beloved 'you are not whom you thought you were' trope, in which the last heir of the House of Duryea discovers that everything he ever heard about his family is true. Separated by his father for years, when they are reunited he binds his father against the slightest risk of the family curse - that alternate generations turn into somnambulant serial killers around their relatives - being true, only to discover that he is the cursed one. It is in the third person, which seems odd, as a first person narrative in the form of a confession would probably have conveyed the horror more effectively.

'The Seventh Incantation' by Joseph Payne Brennan (1963) is the opposite of the preceding story, instead depicting an outcast seeking power through the old ones, but thwarted in his dark designs by the frailty of cattle. It's a more direct cautionary tale than is usual in Lovecraftiana, perhaps equally influenced by the likes of Dennis Wheatley's satanists with its propitiatable but fickle deities.

'From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy' by Hugh B Cave and Robert M Price (2014) replaces 'Black Noon' by Lovecraft contemporary C.M. Eddy Jr in this reissue of the collection. It's an oddity, beginning with an anthropologist being offered a glimpse at the rituals of a secret subsubculture within the slightly wider faith of Haitian Voudun, only to find himself initiated into a cult of the old ones. His local guide admits that he is to be initiated into the deeper mysteries, which apparently involves being chopped up with a machete, so I don't know if the priests are supposed to have gone through that or what. It then goes a little off the boil, leading to the cult being slain by an army of machete-wielding zombie-ghosts led by the deceased guide and the anthropologist becoming a full-blown white saviour as he leads the - apparently - innocent children of the cultists out of the swamp. Our 'hero' never really does anything however (apart from engaging in morally dubious intercourse with a woman in a trance state) which may be a comment on his intention to participate in a bloodthirsty ritual merely as an observer and expecting to be untouched. As a result, this story is uncharacteristically upbeat for the mythos, and the protagonist more than usually irritating.

Next up is another early offering. 'The Jewels of Charlotte' by Duane Rimel (1935) is a simple tale. The nameless narrator is caught up by chance in the pursuit of two criminals into his decrepit rural holiday spot. The fugitives seek the grave of the eponymous Charlotte, to deprive her of her eponymous jewels, but seemingly fall victim to the mysterious guardian of her grave site, as heralded by an unearthly chime. In the best traditions of the genre, it never seeks to explain what happened and the narrator wisely punks out.

Quite the opposite is true of 'The Letters of Cold Fire' by Manly Wade Wellman (1944), a tale of devil-puncher extraordinaire John Thunstone. Thunstone is a colossus of a man, a playboy and a scholar who battles evil with strength, will and occult know-how, then goes home and shags a countess; admired by men and desired by women, and about as far from any of Lovecraft's protagonists as it is possible to get without spending his entire life playing uneventful rounds of golf. In this story, Thunstone seeks out and defeats a sorcerer who has stolen the graduation book from the super-secret anti-Hogwarts* he previously washed out from. The book allows the man to bend the universe to his will, but Thunstone defeats him with a cigarette lighter.

Wellman was a pulp writer, contributing among other works to the ouevre of Captain Future, and more than anything 'The Letters of Cold Fire' reminds us that Lovecraftian fiction was born in the same crucible as Doc Savage and Conan the Barbarian. While more recent contributions to the muscular mythos are often viewed as missing the point, Wellman is really just doing his own thing here. The only solid Lovecraftian link is a passing reference to the Necronomicon, rather than Thunstone casually giving the finger to cosmic horrors.

'Horror at Vecra' by Henry Hasse (1943) is more in keeping with the traditions of HPL's own canon, and more obviously and directly influenced by him. The narrator and his chum Bruce Tarleton visit a remote hamlet, ostensibly by accident but actually so that Bruce can pry into things that man was not meant to wot of. He wots, and is got, and thot's thot, with the narrator fleeing after Bruce is lured into a catacomb and incorporated into a gestalt thing of appropriately nebulous and unexplored nature.

* Magical schools are so hard to take seriously these days.