Book Review | I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

For fans of legendary pulp author H. P. Lovecraft, there is nothing bigger than the annual Providence-based convention the Summer Tentacular. Horror writer Colleen Danzig doesn’t know what to expect when she arrives, but is unsettled to find that among the hobnobbing between scholars and literary critics are a group of real freaks: book collectors looking for volumes bound in human skin, and true believers claiming the power to summon the Elder God Cthulhu, one of their idol’s most horrific fictional creations, before the weekend is out.

Colleen’s trip spirals into a nightmare when her roommate for the weekend, an obnoxious novelist known as Panossian, turns up dead, his face neatly removed. What’s more unsettling is that, in the aftermath of the murder, there is little concern among the convention goers. The Summer Tentacular continues uninterrupted, except by a few bumbling police.

Everyone at the convention is a possible suspect, but only Colleen seems to show any interest in solving the murder. So she delves deep into the darkness, where occult truths have been lurking since the beginning of time. A darkness where Panossian is waiting, spending a lot of time thinking about Colleen, narrating a new Lovecraftian tale that could very well spell her doom.

***

Ahead of Ian McEwan's literary nasty Nutshell, a fable of infidelity readers will only be able to experience from the perspective of a foetus, I Am Providence proffers a murder mystery narrated in no small part by the victim of that very vicious killing in the moments before his failing brain cracks and crumbles like "a sponge drying in the sun." (p.162)

Panos Panossian is an utterly insufferable author of Lovecraftian lore, so it's either fitting or simply suspicious that he meets his maker on the first day of the annual Summer Tentacular. "Providence's premiere literary conference about pulp-writer, racist, and weirdo Howard Phillips Lovecraft" (p.1) features, funnily enough, "a veritable 'Who's That?' of horror fiction," (p.30) including one Colleen Danzig. A newcomer to mythos mania with just a few short stories to her name, she was set to share a room with Panossian, but when the con goes on despite his death, Colleen decides to determine just whodunnit. After all, "if anything is possible, then yes, an untrained writer could find a murderer." (p.173)

Not just a murderer, but a mutilator too, because to add insult to injury, the killer, whoever he or she may be, purloined poor Panossian's face in addition to his future...

Singularly sickening as the murder this mystery revolves around is, if the truth be told, there's no shortage of suspects in Nick Mamatas' scathing portrayal of Lovecraftian fandom:

The Tentacular was a strangely aggressive environment—writers jockeying for position, people bellowing at one another, men sneering at women out of some abject simultaneous attraction and repulsion. It was high school all over again, except that all the kids with a measure of social intelligence were at the homecoming dance and the kids left behind were the meatheads, glue-sniffers, nerds, and minor league bullies. Geeks who liked to show off their knowledge of esoteric subjects, the more repulsive, the better. (p.74)

That last—"the more repulsive, the better"—may well have been Mamatas' mantra whilst working on I Am Providence, because it is, if not a horrid novel, then a novel of horridness. Almost all of its characters are creeps, not least Colleen, who is so cavalier and careless in her pursuit of the truth that she points the finger at pretty much everyone she meets, such that it's no wonder she hasn't made a great many friends by the end.

Book Review | Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory

Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school.

On Harrison's first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother.

***

Not an author to dare wearing out his welcome in any one genre, Afterparty's Daryl Gregory turns his attention to tentacles in Harrison Squared, a light-hearted Lovecraft lark featuring a friendly fishboy and a ghastly artist which straddles the line between the silly and the sinister superbly.

It's a novel named after its narrator, Harrison Harrison—to the power of five, in fact, but around his mom and his mates, just H2 will do. Whatever you want to call him—and you wouldn't be the first to go with weirdo—Harrison has a paralysing fear of the sea. A hatred, even, and for good reason, because when our boy was a baby, his father—Harrison Harrison the fourth, of course—was swallowed by the waves, one dark day; a day Harrison has forgotten almost completely:

Some images, however, are so clear to me that they feel more true than my memory of yesterday's breakfast. I can see my father's face as he picks me up by my life vest. I can feel the wind as he tosses me up and over the next wave, toward that capsized boat. And I can see, as clearly as I can see my own arm, a huge limb that's risen out of the water.

The arm is fat, and gray, the underside covered in pale suckers. It whips across my father's chest, grasping him—and then it pulls him away from me. The tentacle is attached to a huge body, a shape under the water that's bigger than anything I've ever seen. (p.12)

In the lifetime since that nightmarish sight, Harrison has reasoned his strange recollections away. He knows, now, that he imagined the monster:

Yes, we were out on the ocean, and the boat did flip over, but no creature bit through my leg to the bone—it was a piece of metal from the ship that sliced into me. My mother swam me to shore, and kept me from bleeding to death. My father drowned like an ordinary man. (p.12)

Little wonder, really, that Harrison isn't keen on the sea. His marine biologist mother, on the other hand, is obsessed with it—as his father was before her—which is why she and her son have arranged to spend a couple of months in Dunnsmouth: a creepy coastal village where Harrison's mother means to meet Mr. Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni.

(That's a forty-five foot long squid "whose suckers are ringed not only by teeth but sharp, swivelling hooks," (p.22) for those of you who haven't been practising your Latin of late.)

Book Review | Revival by Stephen King

In a small New England town, in the early 60s, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister, Charles Jacobs. Soon they forge a deep bond, based on their fascination with simple experiments in electricity.

Decades later, Jamie is living a nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll. Now an addict, he sees Jacobs again—a showman on stage, creating dazzling 'portraits in lightning'—and their meeting has profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil's devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.

A masterpiece in the great American tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, this rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written.

***

Whether you love his work or loathe it—and there are those who do, difficult as that is for those who don't to discern—you've got to give Stephen King credit, in the first for working so damned hard. Over the forty years of his career, he's written fifty-odd novels, and financially, you have to imagine he'd have been sitting pretty after the first five.

This, then, isn't a man who does what he does for the money. Demonstrably, I dare say, he does it for the fun, and that's a fine thing, I think; after all, to paraphrase Dreamcatcher's central character, doing the same shit day after day does get dull, and dull is the last thing a writer writing recreationally can afford to be. To escape that fate, King has reinvented himself repeatedly in recent years. He's come up with a couple of very credible crime thrillers, commingled conspiracy with the stuff of science fiction and composed love letters to the old days and ways.

In that respect, Revival is a real throwback. A supernatural horror novel of the sort not seen since Duma Key, it's classic King, complete with fantastic characters, a suggestive premise and an ending I'm going to politely describe as divisive.

Revival begins reflectively:

In one way, at least, our lives really are like movies. The main cast consists of your family and friends. The supporting cast is made up of neighbours, co-workers, teachers, and daily acquaintances. There are also bit players: the supermarket checkout girl with the pretty smile, the friendly bartender at the local watering hole, the guys you work out with at the gym three days a week. And there are thousands of extras—those people who flow through every life like water through a sieve, seen once and never again. [...] But sometimes a person who fits none of these categories comes into your life. This is the joker who pops out of the deck at odd intervals over the years, often during a moment of crisis. In the movies this sort of character is known as the fifth business, or the change agent. When he turns up in a film, you know he's there because the screenwriter put him there. But who is screenwriting our lives? (p.1)

There's a lot in this paragraph to unpack: the idea of the illusion of life; the allusion, not unrelatedly, to God as the author of all; and an introduction to the narrative's eventual antagonist, Reverend Charles Jacobs. Let's focus on that last.

Book Review | The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti

Throughout Thomas Ligotti's career as a horror writer, many of his stories have evolved from physical or emotional crises. And so it was with the surgical trauma that led to the stories in The Spectral Link, an event that is marginally mentioned in the first of these stories, 'Metaphysica Morum.' In the second, 'The Small People,' Ligotti returns, although not precisely in the usual fashion, to his fixation with uncanny representations of the so-called human being. Having nearly ceased to exist as he lay on the surgeon's table, the imposing strangeness of the nature and vicissitudes of this life form once again arose in his imagination.

So what project and publications are forthcoming from Thomas Ligotti? As ever, not even he knows.

***

An anachronism in an age when authors are expected to be out there, selling themselves every second, Thomas Ligotti has never been particularly prolific, however he did, for a period of years, publish new short stories on a semi-regular schedule, every one of which represented an event among enthusiasts of his existential efforts.

Then, a decade or so ago, Ligotti was laid up with a crippling case of writer's block. Perniciously, this persisted until 2012, when a near-death experience moved him to pick up his pen again. The Spectral Link is the result: a slender collection of novelettes that is no less essential for its relative brevity.

In 'Metaphysica Morum,' the descendent of "degenerate swamp dwellers" (p.40) documents his desire to die. Feeling left behind in life, and utterly unable to relate to reality, our unnamed narrator dreams of release, but cannot bring himself to do the deed.

Book Review | Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

For thirty years, Area X, monitored by the secret agency known as the Southern Reach, has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border—an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness. Eleven expeditions have been sent in to investigate; even for those that have made it out alive, there have been terrible consequences.

Annihilation is the story of the twelfth expedition and is told by its nameless biologist. Introverted but highly intelligent, the biologist brings her own secrets with her. She is accompanied by a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor, their stated mission: to chart the land, take samples and expand the Southern Reach’s understanding of Area X.

But they soon find out that they are being manipulated by forces both strange and all too familiar. An unmapped tunnel is not as it first appears. An inexplicable moaning calls in the distance at dusk. And while each member of the expedition has surrendered to the authority of the Southern Reach, the power of Area X is far more difficult to resist.

***

A biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist venture into Area X.

Sounds like the setup for a joke, doesn't it? Well halt that thought, because Annihilation is no laughing matter. On the contrary: Jeff VanderMeer's first new novel since Finch is a nightmarish narrative about the fungus among us which trades in terror and tension rather than simple titters. It's the award-winning author's most accessible text yet... though there's a very real chance Annihilation will leave you with weird dreams for years.

So what the hell is Area X?

The government's version of events emphasised a localised environmental catastrophe stemming from experimental military research. This story leaked into the public sphere over a period of several months so that, like the proverbial frog in a hot pot, people found the news entering their consciousness gradually as part of the general daily noise of media oversaturation about ongoing ecological devastation. Within a year or two, it had become the province of conspiracy theorists and other fringe elements. (p.94)

But of course, there's more to the story.

At bottom, Area X is an anomaly; a treasure trove of the unknown. Our unnamed narrator—the biologist of the aforementioned four—describes "a pristine wilderness devoid of any human life," (pp.94-95) but this image, like many of the pictures she posits, is imperfect. After all, the Southern Reach has been overseeing trips into this treacherous territory for several decades. Annihilation, in fact, follows the fortunes of the twelfth such expedition to date... or so the agency tells its members.

They are women to a one, and they are represented throughout by their respective roles. "A name was a dangerous luxury here. Sacrifices didn't need names," (p.134) and that is exactly what they are—that is how some of them even see themselves—thus they are not people but purposes. Their mission: to map Area X. To explore and more in service of the Southern Reach's knowledge of the anomaly, though the agency may know more than it's willing to admit.

Book Review | Still Life by Tim Lebbon

Buy this book direct
from Spectral Press

The incursion has been and gone, the war is over, and the enemy is in the land, remote and ambiguous. The village outskirts are guarded by vicious beasts, making escape impossible. The village itself is controlled by the Finks, human servants to the enemy — brutal, callous, almost untouchable. 

Everything is less than it was before... time seems to move slower, the population is much denuded, and life itself seems to hold little purpose. This is not living, it’s existing.

But in a subjugated population, there is always resistance.

For Jenni, the happiest part of this new life is visiting the pool in the woods, seeing her dead husband within, and sharing memories of happier times. It calms her and makes her feel alive.

But the resistance comes to her for help. 

And when her dead husband tells her it is time to fight, Jenni’s life is destined for a shattering change.

***

Jenni and Marc have it all, almost. A relaxed relationship, equal parts attraction, affection and respect. They enjoy their youth to the full, and look forward to growing old together, too — but not before they've made a small army of babies to take care of them later. And what better place to start a family than the idyllic little village they live in? It is "a beautiful, safe place, but sometimes beautiful and safe isn't enough for Marc." Sometimes, sadly, Jenni espies a look in his eyes that speaks of his "need for fear. [His] delight in danger." (p.8) So when one dark day the enemy emerge — whether from the heavens or the earth, even now no-one knows — he's one of the first people to volunteer.

He doesn't come home a hero, however. He doesn't come home at all. Hardly anyone does. The enemy are a wholly overwhelming force, thus this and every single instance of resistance since has proved to be brutal, and in the final summation futile. Indeed, you could measure the cost of man's defiance in disemboweled bodies; each action has only added to the enemy's ever-lengthening otherworldly wonder: the Road of Souls. Which is made of mooshed human.

All Jenni has of Marc when Still Life begins is his memory, though this takes a strange shape in the milieu of Tim Lebbon's immensely messed-up new novella: at a local plunge pool, formerly a favourite spot of theirs, his reflection still watches from the water. She often goes there to gaze at it... to lose herself in the blessed memories his image brings.

Jenni doesn't know if it's normal, now, for the dead to appear to the living like this. It could be, conceivably; most everything else has been different since the incursion. She'd ask, perhaps, but she's afraid to, for though the enemy are certainly present, no-one can say with any certainty what they are, or where. As Jenni reflects, "in truth, no one really knew what the enemy wanted, where it had come from, or why. Sometimes not knowing made everything so much worse." (p.12)

Music, if I may, to this reader's ears!

In any case, the enemy — and that's all Lebbon calls them — the enemy, then, leave it to their embedded agents to ensure the obedience of the surviving villagers. These Overseers — or Finks, if not to their faces — are merely evil people, keen to flaunt their newfound power, thus trust has become a rare commodity in this subjugated community.

But as the synopsis says, "in a subjugated population, there is always resistance," and a plan is being fashioned to kill the Finks: merely a small step to pave the way for more significant strides, yet if Jenni refuses to play her pyromaniacal part, the entire village could be crushed — and initially, at least, she is unwilling. However when Marc's mirror image urges her to fight back for once, she realises — too late, I dare say — that there may be a better way.

With a Star Wars novel, two volumes of his YA series Toxic City, Coldbrook for Hammer Horror, a collection of short stories and The Heretic Land all published since 2012, Tim Lebbon has been particularly prolific in recent years, but Still Life is his first novella for quite a while, and I think it's no coincidence that it is the finest thing he's written since Echo City. In part this is because it doesn't, at 80 pages, overstay its welcome, as to my mind a number of the author's full-on novels have. Its lesser length also allows Lebbon to establish an atmosphere, create a compelling character and elaborate his narrative without falling into that dastardly dark fantasy trap of explaining the inexplicable into insignificance.

Now it's not without fault. I'm afraid there isn't a great deal of depth to Jenni's relationship with her late, lamented lover — would that their pairing had been a little less picture perfect — and parts of the piece lack polish: one last pass could have made Lebbon's prose all the prettier, which may have made the bubble our protagonist exists in to begin with that much more convincing.

But by and large, this is bloody good stuff, with no paucity of plot — Still Life reads like a short novel rather than a long short — an admirable unwillingness to undermine the unknowable nature of the enemy, and, in the Road of Souls, the single most horrific idea anyone has had in years.

I've had my ups and downs with the tales Tim Lebbon has told in recent years, but Still Life is undoubtedly one of the former sort, to the point that I wish this edition weren't so strictly limited — to just 225 copies in toto for the time being — particularly considering Jim Burns' fantastic cover art. To wit, dark fantasy fans would be well advised to order Still Life direct from Spectral Press before it's gone for good.

***

Still Life
by Tim Lebbon

UK Publication: November 2013, Spectral Press

Buy this book direct
from Spectral Press

Recommended and Related Reading

Guest Post | "Giants, Gods and Deep Time" by A. J. Smith

I had my problems with The Black Guard — see Monday's review for more on those — but at its best it struck me as the beginning of an "ambitious, engrossing and positively action-packed" fantasy saga reminiscent of the work of Brent Weeks and Brandon Sanderson.

What I didn't get to talk about in the review I wrote, because I'm careful not to give too much of any tale away, was how very different the latter part of the inaugural volume of The Long War is from the former. I rather not get into it here either, but suffice it to say the sinister subjects of the guest post below are indicative of what so sets The Black Guard apart.

Here, then, is the owner of 24 goblins — evidently one too many — on "Giants, Gods and Deep Time."

***

Geological time is a mind-numbingly difficult thing to understand; the time scale in which tectonic plates move, mountains rise, coastlines erode and continents form. Alternatively called deep time, it’s a scale measured in millennia, ages, strata and other things I struggle to comprehend. 

In our own world it’s the province of the hardcore geologist. In a fantasy world it’s the province of a writer obsessed with myth and legend, for anything can happen in the endless obscurity of deep time. Cultures and entire civilisations could have had their moment in the sun and died out. Unknowable beasts and monsters could have been dominant and then non-existent. With no scientific tools or sophisticated dating techniques, you are left only with legend and this, my dear readers, is what I do comprehend. 

What whispers yet remain? What corners of the world still harbour remnants of a bygone age? What can the endless past teach the present in the blink of an eye it occupies? The events I write about take place as a mere cough in deep time, a momentary point where vast forces converge. The protagonists may feel differently, they may think they are at some kind of nexus point where their actions do have meaning. To know and understand the reality – that individual endeavour means nothing in the grand scheme of things – is too nihilistic a concept for most fantasy heroes to accept. 

The few beings that bridge the gap – Giants in my world – are as unknowable as the timescale they occupy. And yet their influence and motivations echo throughout time. They guide actions, start and end wars, reach across boundless millennia to twist the short-lived protagonists into their own schemes. For this reason the Giants are seen as gods, when, in fact, they are merely older, wiser and more alien than the beings that worship them. The Giants don’t care about kings, countries and politics – it’s doubtful they even understand them – they have lived in and beyond the world since before these concepts emerged, since before humans appeared, since before the continents moved into their current positions. Why should they care about a few sentient apes that choose to build temples and invoke their names? 

Put simply: they care because they are playing their own game, fighting their own war with their own rules and their own conditions of victory. The Giants and their chief servants call it The Long War, the Dokkalfar call it The Slow Pain. The humans have no name for it and huddle in the shadow of their gods, hoping that they matter, all the time oblivious to the dance of birth and extinction that they are a part of. When you have a life-expectancy of seventy or eighty years (hopefully without accident or injury hastening the inevitable), you can’t be expected to grasp the infinite or appreciate your own insignificance; you look at the world around you – the towns, cities, churches, structures – both social and literal – and you hope that they matter, all the time fearing that they might not. 

And the ultimate curse of deep time? The war can never be won, for geological time never stops, never stands still, has no mercy or personality and exists only as a force of change. It’s scary, humbling, nihilistic, but, in my opinion, deeply fascinating. Civilizations, seemingly as strong as mountains, will eventually crumble to dust. Others will be built on their ruins, using the legends of a bygone age to structure their own society, until, once again, the inevitable roll of the ages crushes them.

***

Many thanks, A. J., for what must be the most epic guest post I've had to pleasure to publish here on TSS.

Now I don't believe he blogs — you what?! — but for more information, you can find A. J. Smith on Twitter, and he's a user of Goodreads too.

Now then: has anyone read The Black Guard yet? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Video Game Review | Amnesia: The Dark Descent, dev. Frictional Games

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is without a doubt the scariest game I have ever played.

This honour used to belong to the second Silent Hill, but Frictional Games' latest and greatest makes that touchstone of terror look like clowning around by comparison.

You are Daniel, and that's all you know at the start of this unforgettable six- to eight-hour experience.

When you awaken in the dark somewhere in the underbelly of Brennenburg Castle, for some reason, you have amnesia. What else to do but follow the strange trail of bleeding red petals that leads from your position into the indefinable distance?

This is easier said than done. Most of the castle's heavy oak doors are shut tight, meanwhile many of its corridors have collapsed, so for the moment there's only one way to go... but it's so incredibly dark that you can hardly see one foot to put in front of the other. Almost immediately, Daniel's fear begins to get the better of him, and we are with him every tentative step of the way: after all, almost anything could be biding its time in the next room, and lacking illumination, we wouldn't know till it was too late.

To make matters worse, it becomes clear that there is someone, or something, hot on our heels. A shadow of some sort. An embodiment of the darkness which seems to mean Daniel harm.

So we grab all the tinderboxes we see, light all the candles that there are, and every wall sconce we come upon. This does little to brighten the castle's horrid halls, but at least it calms Daniel down. Failing this, he simply faints away.

It is not far from The Dark Descent's starting point to Daniel's first destination, but the going is slow - progress through these oppressive spaces is excruciatingly incremental - so it takes some time to find the first piece of the puzzle: on a writing desk surrounded by glowing roses, a note addressed to you, and signed by the same. In it, you command yourself to forgo your fears, the better to descend to the Inner Sanctum in the castle's deepest reaches, where we are instructed to kill the Baron, Alexander.

Next to this letter, a lantern.

For the duration of The Dark Descent, oil for this delightful device and the aforementioned tinderboxes are our only defense against the darkness, and all that lives within it. We cannot fight back. We can only hide. Thus, it seems sensible to hoard such supplies — to push yourself through ill-lit areas without wasting the contents of your meager inventory. For a few hours, this attitude adds to the unbearable sense of tension that is The Dark Descent's most remarkable aspect, but by then I had such a surplus that I wondered where Daniel was stashing all my items. Heck, by the end of the game, I could have opened a small store!

Scarcity, then, is only an issue in The Dark Descent if you're too afraid to scrounge for supplies, or insist on lighting every candle you come across. Still, this speaks to the game's biggest issue: as it goes on - as one gets a sense of the story, and with it the various systems in play - we come, in kind, to know the unknown. It dawns on us that the monsters roam in preset patterns, and are easily avoided. That Daniel's sanity can be managed with a few simple tricks.

All that's left of The Dark Descent then is a physics-based adventure game, or perhaps a first-person puzzler.

Luckily, the puzzles are involving, and the solutions not so obscure that they beggar belief in the mode of most point and click candidates. To get to the Baron you often need some needful thing: an explosive mixture, for instance. To make it, you must explore a number of new areas to find its component parts, then combine these items using the proper apparatus. It's all very satisfying.

All the more so because the developers have little interest in holding our hands. Somewhat counter-intuitively, that's to the good, because the more we know, the less there is be fearful of; the firmer our footing, the less terrifying The Dark Descent. And terror is this game's stock in trade.

Ultimately, the first in the Amnesia series - soon to be succeeded by A Machine For Pigs, which Frictional Games are co-creating with thechineseroom, who updated Dear Esther earlier this year - The Dark Descent is undoubtedly at its most effective at the outset, which is sure to reduce even the hardiest stalwarts of horror to a bundle of bloody nerves. Even after this sustained state ebbs away it remains a game worth playing, but I have never known such fear as I experienced in the beginning.

Thank the dark ones for that!

Book Review: Kraken by China Mieville

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"Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

"For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he’s been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it’s a god. 

"A god that someone is hoping will end the world."

***

 

The single most surprising thing about Kraken is that, when you get right down to it, it's a comedy. Of course there's more to the latest from multiple award-winning author China Mieville than a wicked sense of humour and some canny wordplay - truly, a great deal more - but when all is said and done, Kraken is an elaborate, endlessly imaginative joke topped off with a punch-line that will take your breath away.

Meet Billy Harrow. An unremarkable curator in London's world-renowned Natural History Museum, Billy's crowning glory is the preservation of a particularly impressive giant squid. Guiding an excited tour-group around the facility one afternoon, he makes a mind-boggling discovery: the nine-metre giant squid, encased in a tank containing thousands of litres of Formalin, has vanished. His first thought, having come upon an ominous absence where the museum's star attraction stood only moments before, echoes the utter bafflement of all those who clamour around the scene of the crime. "What the hell?" indeed.

The guards know nothing; Billy's fellow employees haven't a clue; nor do the police have a scooby as to how someone could possibly have disappeared such a monstrous specimen. Only when the FSRC - the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime unit - pressgang Billy into an unsettling interview does the unlikely hero of Kraken begin to understand how very different London is from the city he thought he knew. The cult squad are a bunch of crazies themselves, but whatever Billy's qualms about Kath, Baron and Vardy, they serve to start him on an apocalyptic journey into the capital's hidden underworld; a journey which takes in all the darkly fantastic sights anyone who's read Mieville in the past will be familiar with.

Which isn't to say that Kraken represents the same old Mieville with a few new tricks. Certainly it treads on ground that the noted New Weird author's devoted readership will recall from the likes of King Rat and Un Lun Dun, literally in the first instance - Mieville does love his London, and in Kraken, London is the world - but also figuratively insofar as Mieville mines such customary subjects as politics, religion and revolution. But he excavates in those very metaphorical mines some extraordinary new material: an astonishing array of cultures and creeds easily the equal of those which made his trilogy of Bas-Lag books so beloved. And the London of Kraken is a city distinct from those Londons Mieville has surveilled in the past.

Of all the author's storied back-catalogue, Kraken most resembles a real-world Perdido Street Station in its unrelenting urban environs - even the sea, you will see, is encased in concrete - though to call Mieville's latest urban fantasy is to do it a grave disservice given the lamentable misappropriation of the term in recent memory. In its thematic concerns and narrative progression, too, Kraken is most similar to the Bas-Lag books: hardly a chapter goes by without a fascinating potted history of one invented faith or race or another - be it the union of magical familiars, the legion of Londonmancers, an embassy of the sea. Some will surely revolt at the notion of a story interrupted for an infodump apropos of apparently nothing, but in time Mieville wraps up each and every one of his demented inventions into the novel's narrative tissue with a deft touch and a fiendishly sinister sense of humour.

Muster up the concentration to penetrate Mieville's characteristically dense prose and you'll find your efforts amply rewarded, but patience is, as ever, a requirement when reading the work of this master craftsman. And yet, outside of Un Lun Dun, Kraken is without a doubt Mieville's most accessible novel to date - though there's no single thing you can point to as conclusive proof of its somewhat commercial sensibilities. Rather, it is a cunning conjunction of forces which work, in coalition, to render Kraken a more approachable narrative: the veracity of its vivid setting, a city whose boundaries are drawn in blood and stone and ink; the popular Lovecraftian connotations of its be-tentacled subject matter; the refinement of Mieville's powerful prose over the years.

Not to mention the author's fiendishly sinister sense of humour, and the whimsical tone with which he tells the tale. A man wearing a Gundam T-shirt practices extreme origami; a body "listlessly [humps] the stony shoreline with the slap-slap of the water"; the Lolcats make an appearance which I won't spoil; while characters discuss the notion of "squid pro quo" and the "squiddity" of how "martyrs [might] emerge from martyrdom's other side." Mieville's is a wit quite without equal. Pointed and gleefully profane, culturally aware but not for a second restrained by mere reality, his narrative turns on misunderstanding, on literal trickery, but none of Mieville's capricious play robs Kraken of its sophistication.

In its way, it is, for all its revelry, as impactful an experience as The City and The City, together with which this novel marks a startling new chapter in the continuing evolution of both the New Weird and its most powerful proponent, Mieville himself. There is nothing stagnant about these waters. Poetic, demented, surprisingly approachable and seething with intelligence, Kraken is a cracking read, no doubt about it.

***

Kraken

by China Mieville

May 2010, Macmillan

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IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

I'm not at all sure how much crossover there is between readers and gamers. Since I launched The Speculative Scotsman in January I've met a few fellow bloggers here and there who indulge in both media in their free time - the lovely Aidan from A Dribble of Ink, for one, and Mark Chitty, the Walker of Worlds himself, for another - but the various video-game related posts I've put up here on the blog haven't attracted much attention at all.

So consider this a call to arms: if you're a gamer, active on either PSN or Xbox Live, give me a shout at thespeculativescotsman [at] googlemail [dot] com or in the comments with your gamertag. Perhaps at some point, we'll get together and talk about our favourite books while we shoot some dudes. Wouldn't that be nice?

Speaking of nice, a trailer for Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet popped up on Kotaku last night - and it's incredible. Here, have a gander:

Lovecraft, anyone? Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, coming to Xbox Live Arcade at some indeterminate point in the future, looks like Cthulhu does the charming art-style of Patapon and LocoRoco. From the trailer, Fuelcell's game looks pretty far along, so with a little luck we'll all be able to drop some spacebucks on it sooner rather than later.

In fact, I'm going to call it. Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Geometry Wars 3 and Hydrophobia - another very promising indie game coming to a console near you - will all be part of Microsoft's third annual Summer of Arcade. Anyone care to offer me odds against?

Book Review: The Mall of Cthulhu by Seamus Cooper

[Buy this book on Amazon
in the UK / in the US]

"A decade ago, college student Laura Harker was saved from a fate worse than death at the hands (and fangs) of a centuries-old vampire priestess and her Satanic minions. Her rescuer, an awkward, geeky folklore student named Teddy, single-handedly slew the undead occupants of the Omega Alpha sorority house, spurred into heroic action by fate itself, inexorably intertwining his and Laura's destinies. After navigating her way through law school, Laura is now a junior FBI agent assigned to the Bureau's Boston office.

"Unfortunately, she finds her job involves more paperwork than adventure. When Ted stumbles onto a group of Cthulhu cultists planning to awaken the Old Ones through mystic incantations culled from the fabled Necronomicon, he and Laura must spring into action, traveling from Boston to the seemingly-peaceful suburbs of Providence and beyond, all the way to the sanity-shattering non-Euclidian alleyways and towers of dread R'lyeh itself, in order to prevent an innocent shopping center from turning into... the Mall of Cthulhu!"

***

Ted and Laura have had an unlikely life. Having narrowly survived an onslaught of hot college vampires, they've clung desperately to one another during the decade that passes between the off-the-wall prologue of The Mall of Cthulhu and the first chapter proper. They're not an item, much as Ted would like them to be - Laura's particular sexual proclivities have seen to that - but bound together as the only living witnesses to the unspeakable horror of that fateful night in the Omega Alpha sorority house, they've come to rely on one another. When ten years later we pick up on them, they're both young adults in thankless employment: one slings the perfect latte for an interminable chain of coffee houses and the other trolls through ATM footage in search of an as-good-as invisible criminal. But at least they've seen their fare share of the supernatural.

So when Ted comes across a Lovecraftian cult planning to subjugate humanity under the many-tentacled horror of a rebirthed Cthulhu, he thinks to himself, could lightning have really struck him twice? Well, it has. He and Laura will soon be doing their utmost to put an end to the dastardly cult's designs before they seize the chance to realise them in a non-descript mall somewhere in Providence.

I'll admit, I had my reservations about The Mall of Cthulhu. As I said in the sophomore edition of The BoSS, "I do enjoy a bit of clever wordplay from time to time, but to structure an entire novel around a Lovecraftian pun seems a bit much." Thankfully, my worries have proven groundless, and I certainly won't be docking any points from what I gather must be Seamus Cooper's first novel for its somewhat dubious title. From the moment it gets going, which is to say immediately, The Mall of Cthulhu is fun, frivolous and outright freaky. I've never laughed so hard at mythos fiction as I did during the hours I devoted to reading this.

The plot is clearly a bit of nonsense; hardcore, humourless Lovecraft fans coming for their fix will, I fear, be disappointed. Luckily, I'm just about as familiar with that author as Laura, who after doing a little reading observes that "Lovecraft was apparently some sort of horror writer from the twenties who wrote a lot about gigantic octopus-headed creatures from other dimensions that he called 'The Old Ones' and their nameless horrible horror, and bad geometry. Or something like that." It's precisely the sort of wit embodied in that passage that makes The Mall of Cthulhu such an unadulterated pleasure.

In any case, there's enough genuine intrigue from the get-go to keep readers turning pages until they come to know, and inevitably love, the double-act at the heart of The Mall of Cthulhu. Putting to one side all the wacky supernatural goings-on, Ted and Laura are such utterly human characters, each as flawed as the other and foundering in lives they hadn't imagined they'd live, that they appeal effortlessly; the pair have such an honest, down to earth rapport, such genuine feeling for one another that it's hard not to buy into their dire derring-do.

Cooper communicates it all with lively dialogue and some genuinely electric exposition. Hiding in a dumpster from the cult, Ted "thought about opening the laptop and playing some Minesweeper or something, but then he remembered he was hiding from very bad people who told him they'd had him begging for death - correction, for the sweet mercy of death, and he thought maybe being bored might not be so bad."

The Mall of Cthulhu can be verbose on occasion, certainly, and the finale is perhaps a little anti-climactic, but by and large, Cooper's first novel is a great, break-neck read, with a tight-knit cast of appealing, charismatic characters and a narrative packed full of whimsy and darkly fantastic wonders. Equal parts comedy, horror and action as madness and mythos intertwine, Seamus Cooper has created in The Mall of Cthulhu a book that's hard to beat in terms of its sheer energy and exuberance.

***

The Mall of Cthulhu

by Seamus Cooper

October 2009, Night Shade

[Buy this book on Amazon
in the UK / in the US]

Recommended and Related Reading