The Maze Runner

Having watched and reviewed the film adaptation of James Dashner's The Maze Runner a few weeks back, and the first book being available through Kindle Unlimited, I decided to give it a go.

Thomas wakes in a steel box going up and emerges into the Glade, a contained, pastoral subsistence community peopled by amnesiac young men like himself. The Glade is a sanctuary at the heart of the Maze, a vast and shifting complex patrolled by deadly, biomechanical Grievers, but Thomas brings change to this community, and the arrival of a girl, Theresa, triggers the start of an endgame; a deadly new phase of their trials.

The Maze Runner is a book that is not without problems, in particular that the characters are all to one degree or another annoying. On the other hand, they are almost all teenage boys, and in fairness their annoying traits are mostly justified by this. They are moody, aggressive, impatient, awkwardly horny and occasionally very dim. They are also incapable of giving a straight answer to a question or explaining anything in advance of the most dramatic moment, which is a bit less excusable. Dashner's prose is not helpful, being at times repetitive (see below) but the pace is good and the book is a quick and flowing read. The Glader slang is a little forced at first, but feels more natural and fluid later in the book, which is perhaps as it should be.

In comparison to the film, Theresa is a stronger character, at least once she wakes up and stops being the comatose subject of Thomas's obsessive adoration (and when the Gladers aren't calling dibs or otherwise being creepy little dweebs); I could have done with at least one fewer passages mewling over her perfect white skin and vivid blue eyes. She is an active participant in the escape plan and the one who cracks the maze code, and her telepathic bond with Thomas gives her a larger role in a narrative which focuses entirely on Thomas's POV. The boys, on the other hand, are probably weaker. I don't know if it's a flaw, per se; they're probably more realistic, whereas the film versions were more iconic.

The ending is, alas, no more satisfying than that of the film, and still leaves one wondering what can be gained by the bullshit experiments and what is just needless cruelty.

The answer is in books that I would still have to pay for, so watch this space.

World War Z

I deliberately chose a cover without
Brad Pitt on it.

World War Z is subtitled 'An oral history of the zombie wars', and it does exactly what it says on the tin. In a series of semi-overlapping narratives, it describes the rise of the zombie plague, a pathogen originating in China and spread by ambulatory corpses and infected refugees (and via the illegal trade in rapidly harvested organs) through the first hand accounts of more than forty characters interviewed by a UN investigator after the end of the Zombie War.

The book uses its multiple viewpoints to explore the war from as many angles as possible: civilians, survivalists, military personnel of several nations and politicians of varying persuasions. Its focus is American - justified both by the nationality of the investigator and the narratives of other post-war nations, in particular the 'Holy Russian Empire', an expansionist theocratic state - but its scope is global, with the account of the commander of the ISS throughout the crisis one of the most powerful.

By its nature, World War Z is prime material for an audiobook adaptation, and it has had several. The one attached to my kindle edition is pretty damned good, although I am now greatly tempted by the super-plus all-star version with this cast.

I'm incredulous that in adapting this book for the screen anyone didn't think that the best idea was just to cherry pick a couple of these stories and film it as a mockumentary, spliced with 'archive footage' from the zombie wars. How did they not do that? Instead we got a crappy action movie which tried to jam poor Brad Pitt back into the action hunk mould that kept him from achieving his true potential as a talented character actor for so long.

World War Z is a satirical novel, using the zombie war as a lens to examine the nature of human reaction to disaster, both singly and corporately. It takes an unusually even-handed approach, with American isolationism and capitalism taking as many knocks as Soviet collectivism, and paints a vivid picture of a world at and after a war for which it was utterly unprepared. It tells tales of heroism and folly, of great heart and towering cynicism. Governmental incompetence, corporate malfeasance and models of morale are all covered, from the brutal tactics of the Russian leadership to largely uninfected Cuba's switch from faltering Communist casualty to the great boom economy of the war.

It's not a perfect book, and certainly there were a couple of points in the English section where I felt that Brooks had gone awry a little, but it's a satire more than a political assessment and some inaccuracy can be allowed. I can't speak for the effectiveness of the Russian and Chinese sections in particular, but it certainly lacks the triumphal pro-Americanism of, say, the movie. In particular the segregation of 'Unified Palestine' by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities is plagued by violent resistance from both Jewish and Muslim extremists, but isn't overrun with the living dead as soon as an American points out that they're fucked.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - To See the Sea, Dagon's Bell, Only the End of the World Again

And so to the last of the short stories in Stephen Jones' collection.

'To See the Sea', by Michael Marshall Smith, is a melancholy entry in which a man takes his wife to visit the coastal town near which her mother nearly drowned, in an attempt to cure her of her thalassophobia. The village, on the English coast, is as dreary and dismal as Innsmouth, and houses its own shadow; a shadow which calls to the wife.

'Dagon's Bell' is a classic piece of Brian Lumley mythos fiction, in which the cosmic horror of the opening gives way to action and it's shotguns ahoy in the bowels of the Earth to destroy with dynamite a vast and terrible bell the mere sound of which... well, gives people the heebie jeebies, but is disappointingly poor at actually shattering anyone's sanity, even at close range.

The final story, 'Only the End of the World Again', is Neil Gaiman's offering, in which a werewolf detective faces off against the Deep Ones in an oddly populous Innsmouth. It's not a bad story, but for my money it's not great mythos, as the monstrous protagonist lacks the necessary sense of alienation in the face of indescribable cosmic malevolence.

So there we have it. There are two more collections, but I'll leave those for another time. I'm a bit Mythossed out for the time being; I'm going to read about zombies instead.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - The Innsmouth Heritage, The Homecoming and Deepnet

In 'The Innsmouth Heritage', by Brian Stableford, a geneticist sets out to map the genomic cause of the Innsmouth look, but finds that the true curse of the town is something less visible and definable than scaly skin or genetic markers. This is also something of an Innsmouth love story, as the narrator's love interest draws away from him over the course of his project due to her eponymous heritage. In a manner true to Lovecraft the central theme of the story is the futility of human endeavour, but in this case the endeavours that come to nothing are cerebral and romantic.

Nicholas Royle's 'The Homecoming' takes the imagery of Innsmouth and makes it an allegory for Romania under the Ceausescu regime. The dismal atmosphere of Lovecraft's port town is not a poor analogue to the grey and fear-drenched streets of Communist Bucharest, but the allegory is forced in places (Ceausescu's palace as Devil's Reef and the Securitate as the Deep Ones) and ultimately I don't think it works.

'Deepnet', by David Langford, is another partially successful allegory, in which forced mutation via VDU radiation replaces inbreeding and Deepnet Communications of Innsmouth (an East Coast analogue of Microsoft) spreads its insidious tentacles via the medium of commercial software. The snippets of Deepnet advertising are a little too broadly parodic for this to work entirely, and it ends for some reason with the narrator expressing lust for his mutated and apparently mentally handicapped ten year old daughter, so on a great many levels this story can just fuck off for that.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - Down to the Boots, The Church in High Street, Innsmouth Gold, Daoine Domhain, A Quarter to Three and The Tomb of Priscus

Same collection, different cover.

Another set of short stories from Stephen Jones' Shadows Over Innsmouth, and this time we begin with 'Down to the Boots', a short short by D. F. Lewis. High on mood, short on action, this is the tale of an Innsmouth woman whose husbands are forever going to the dogfish, whether transformationally or digestively is not completely apparent.

Ramsey Campbell's 'The Church in High Street' once more brings the action, such as it is, to England, for a tale of dank cellars, hidden catacombs and dungeon dimensions. Cambell is one of the seminal modern Mythos authors (contributing the Great Old One Gla'aki to the canon, such as it is) and as might be expected manages the creeping horror aspects of the story with aplomb. Overall, however, this entry suffers from a certain familiarity (protagonist searches for a friend, is warned off the same thing the friend was warned off, goes anyway and encounters mind-shattering evil), and in context from a total lack of connection to Innsmouth.

That criticism at least can not be leveled against 'Innsmouth Gold' by David A Sutton, in which a fortune hunter ventures into the blighted and abandoned wreck of the town in search of a horde of Deep One treasure supposedly buried and lost by the federal agents who raided it in the 20s. This is a pretty good opening pitch, although sadly the story ends up in the same wild flight from a gibbering mob as so many other Innsmouth interpretations.

'Daoine Domhain' by Peter Tremayne takes us to Ireland, and an entirely different Deep One-haunted community. It's a fair effort as far as it goes, although the use of a naval officer as the primary narrator-protagonist makes the fatalism common to Mythos narratives a little odd. One might expect a military man to express more preparedness to fight when anticipating the arrival of a (lone) abductor than the fatalism shown here, even if such efforts were proven futile. In addition, there is little of actual horror in the story, neither in fact or in implication, leaving the impression that the narrator is more likely delusional than demon-hounded.

'A Quarter to Three' is the second Kim Newman offering, under his own name. It is a very short short, and primarily - by the author's own admission - exists as an excuse for a bad play on the words of an old Sinatra number. So it goes.

Finally this time, 'The Tomb of Priscus' by Brian Mooney takes us into the territory of the muscular Mythos, name-dropping Brian Lumley's god-punching Titus Crowe and featuring an honest to Cthulhu cavalry moment. Prior to that it's a pretty good offering, with a secret tomb and dark offerings (although again, as a follow-up to 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' it takes rather too many liberties with the nature of the Deep Ones and their hybrids.)

Six more stories. The last is the Gaiman, but I'm getting less tolerant with each passing tale*; let's see how we go along.

* Whatever else, I am not planning to go straight on to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - The Big Fish, Return to Innsmouth and The Crossing

It looks like the original and the Copper stories are the longest in Shadows Over Innsmouth, so we should rattle through them at a good pace now.

Jack 'Kim Newman' Yeovil's 'The Big Fish' is a Lovecraftian weird tale filtered through the lens of a wartime noir detective thriller, and yet feels as if gets 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' better than Copper's self-consciously cosmic effort. This is not to say that it is perfect Lovecraftiana, but more that it makes no attempt to be and yet catches the actual menace of the original; infiltration and weird religion more than miscegenation. A minor guest role for recurring vampire Genevieve is a bit of distraction, but most people who know me know that I'm a sucker for noirised retellings, so... yeah; I liked this one.

I've also read it before in a different collection.

'The Return to Innsmouth' by Guy N. Smith is very short, and mostly consists of a narrator replaying the events of the middle section of the original story as he tries to exorcise his nightmares about the town he has never visited. The attempt on his life may in fact be all in his mind, and the shortness of the tale and the high level of repetition from the original detract from the horror of madness which is the primary potential of the offering.

Finally, for this time, Adrian Cole's 'The Crossing' extends the grip of Innsmouth to the Devon coast, as a man learns that his estranged trawlerman father may not only have been trawling for fish. This one is a better length to capture and hold a mood and a tension, although it lacks the pervasive air of revulsion that makes the original so effective. In addition, there is something less horrifying about the Deep Ones if their business is merely sacrifice.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Beyond the Reef

Shadows Over Innsmouth is a collection of short stories by various authors, edited by Stephen Jones. All but the first story in the collection are inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' (the first story is 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth').

'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' was not one of Lovecraft's favourite stories, although it is widely rated as one of his best, and certainly best known works today. It holds a core place in the wider body of weird fiction known as the Cthulhu Mythos for its combination of elements from the earlier short stories 'Dagon' and 'The Call of Cthulhu', and for the introduction of the amphibious fish-frog-men known as the Deep Ones. It is the story of the narrator, who visits the eerie and decrepit New England town of Innsmouth, intending merely to pass through and look at the architecture, but finds himself exposed to and then threatened by the repulsive secret history of the town and its strangely degenerate inhabitants.

Lovecraft's writing style is circuitous and self-consciously vague, the author having realised early on that hinting at indescribable horror was by definition more effective than describing it. The horror is thus primarily in the mental effect of the events and terrors of the tale on the narrator. In many cases, the bulk of a Lovecraft story is taken up not with current events but with the uncovering of the unsettling truth of past events, and so it is here. It's not everyone's cup of tea, and it is far more effective in the quiet seclusion of a teenager's bedroom than on a crowded train, but 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' is a good example of the form.

The first of the following tales is 'Beyond the Reef' by Basil Copper, a writer with a long history not with Lovecraft himself but with his (possibly self-styled) literary executor, August Derleth. It is a direct sequel to 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', set a few years after the raid on the town and the torpedoing of Devil's Reef reported in the original. The action is moved to nearby Arkham, where an academic, a pathologist, a detective and a surveyor walk into a bar... I mean, encounter a plot by Innsmouth ancient, aquatic patrons to extend their influence to the university city.

'Beyond the Reef'... is really bad. It's bad as a sequel, and it's also bad as a short story in its own right.

As a sequel it fails to adhere even to the hinted facts about the Deep Ones in the original. My friend James often criticises what he calls the collector tendency in many Lovecraft fans, which he explains as the urge to codify and catalogue the creatures and events in the stories to produce a coherent universe and bestiary. For myself, I don't see this as a bad thing necessarily, but it is certainly not an approach supported directly by the text (rather like trying to create a definitive chronology of classic Doctor Who). It was primarily Derleth who coined the phrase 'Cthuhu Mythos' and imposed a kind of order on it.

That being said, a sequel ought to take note of the original text, but 'Beyond the Reef' replaces fish-frog-men who interbreed with humans to produce hybrid offspring who eventually transform and join their immortal parents in the oceans with amorphous beasts capable of transforming humans into their own degenerate kind, and the locally powerful Esoteric Order of Dagon and its allies with an inhuman psychic force which appears to be practically all-knowing and all-encompassing. Instead of infiltrating by stealth, inbreeding and the offering of monetary gain and good fishing, the faceless antagonists now burrow beneath Arkham, and are basically unrecognisable as the Deep Ones of the original short story.

It also refers to an earlier period of civic expansion in the city most famously described (in 'The Dreams in the Witch House') as "changeless, legend-haunted Arkham", which just isn't trying.

I would take less issue with all of this, I suspect, were the story itself better. It opens with a monologue from a character preparing to give his statement to a group of men including the Chief of Detectives and the local ME, but then cuts into a third person narrative most of which the original speaker could not possibly know and much of which concerns only the Chief of Detectives and the ME. It also makes a point of describing the speaker in embarrassingly glowing terms. The style of the writing is stilted and somewhat repetitive, and the evocation of cosmic horror nowhere near as effective as Lovcecraft's, despite the more insidious and overtly horrific threat.

After the strong opening provided by 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', 'Beyond the Reef' is a real disappointment (although a lot of Amazon reviewers seem to have loved it.) Still, there are fifteen more stories in here, including two by Kim Newman and one by Neil Gaiman; although admittedly there's also a Brain Lumley, and having read either two or three of the Necroscope novels (I seriously have no idea if it was two or three, that's the impression that they made) I'm not looking forward to that so much.