Two Recent

The Wind in the Snottygobble Tree (1971) by Jack Trevor Story is a bizarre book.  Travel agent Harry Marchmont amuses himself by pretending to be a spy.  Or is he pretending? He’s certainly taken for one by the various parties chasing him and trying to kill him.  Somehow he becomes involved with a plot to replace the Pope with a fake Pope, only in the end to learn that the current Pope is already a fake, who is glad to be replaced and thus retire.  Meanwhile Marchmont exercises his libido in a manner which reads like a parody of James Bond as written by Edward Whittemore.  Typographically this is also an odd production—the font in this edition (published by Allison & Busby) is not right-margin justified, and in the second half of the book, there are a number of sentences or paragraphs which for no apparent reason have words sprinkled with dashes:  e.g., “Ir-ma al-so lik-ed the i-dea of the pun-ish-ment and es-pec-ially the thought of this new young he-ro ad-min-ist-er-ing it” (p. 104).  This is unnecessarily distracting, in a book already strange enough to range along the limits of boredom. The novel was serialized in four parts in New Worlds, from November 1969 through February 1970. 

The Colour Out of Darkness (2006) by John Pelan is a riff on Lovecraft, part of a series of novellas published by Cemetery Dance (this is number 17, but what the other titles might be I cannot say—there are no mentions of any of them in this book).  Basically, this is a tale of the resurgence of the Old Ones among modern Seattle’s disaffected youth, with an extra helping of sexually graphic torture-porn prose. It’s better written than I expected, but it is structured awkwardly, and the plotting is predictable. As Lovecraftian fiction, it’s mediocre at best.

Two Again

Dagon (1968) by Fred Chappell is a short novel, mixing elements of the southern gothic, with the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. The Lovecraftian elements are minor, at least until the conclusion, and most of the novel moves at a slow pace with unlikable characters doing unspeakable things to each other. It starts out with the minister Peter Leland and his wife Sheila taking up the house and four hundred acres that Peter has inherited from his grandparents.  There he plans to work on his theological book on Dagon, a forgotten ancient pagan god who is mentioned in the Book of Samuel. Peter finds a bizarre family of squatters who have lived on the property for generations, and some strange torture implements in his attic that seems to relate to his father’s mysterious death decades ago. So far, so good, but the story abruptly shifts, as Peter brutally murders his wife, and takes up with the young girl of the family of squatters, who keeps him supplied with moonshine and uses him for occasional sex, eventually taking him and her other boyfriend on a road trip with a predictable result. Much of this novel feels like unnecessary padding, and it would probably have been more successful for this reader at a much shorter length.  

The Craft of Writing (1979), by William Sloane, was put together five years after its author’s death by his widow. Though Sloane had published two science-fictiony horror novels, he was mostly known as a publisher, and he was one of the main people behind the annual Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for a quarter of a century. This slim book collects materials from some of his Bread Loaf lectures as well as from his correspondence. It has some real wisdom in it, but it doesn’t really hang together as a book on the craft of writing. Here are a few kernels:  “Let the material dictate the form” (p. 20). “Art cannot be taught . . . What can be taught is technique, craft, method, understanding of the medium” (p. 27). “People are not the principal subject of fiction; they are its only subject” (p. 81). “I urge those of you who are writing fiction to shun the impulse that diminishes the tension inside you while you are writing. Don’t talk about your novel to other people” (pp. 106-7). The sections on “Scene” (Chapter 5) and on “The Nonfiction Writer” (chapter 8) are the least effective in the book.

 

Two More

The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires (1996) by Brian Stableford is a strange work.  The title might make one expect a lurid modern vampire story, but that’s not what you get with this novel.  Instead you get characters (real people and imagined ones) meeting up in London in January 1895 to hear on Edward Copplestone relate his experiences of astral projection to the distant future while on some special drug. One of the listeners, Mr. Wells, is concerned with the similarities to a story he has written and published serially.  Oscar Wilde finds the whole story a glorious lie.  Other listeners and commentators include the scientist and spiritualist Sir William Crookes, president of the Society for Psychical Research, and a medical doctor and his detective friend who lives on Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes could not be named in a story in 1996 for copyright reasons). Copplestone’s narrative tells of the triumph of vampiric beings over normal men in the future.  It’s an interesting tale, but not what I was expecting.  

Teaching the Dog to Read (2015) by Jonathan Carroll.  Have I just read too much Jonathan Carroll that the magic is gone? His recent novels have left me pretty cold, and for the first time ever I stopped reading his last one in the middle.  In his earlier books, there was a modulated relationship between realism and fantasy, and that worked out very well. His recent stories have tended to throw in too many elements of fantasy.  That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but when the elements just don’t fit together it is.  In Teaching the Dog to Read, Tony Areal is divided into two Tonys, Tony Day and Tony Night, the latter of whom helps arrange the night-time dreams of Tony Day. They switch places, and one of the Tony’s falls in love, and collapses of a heart attack.  From there we meet  the previous incarnation of Tony, and then the first incarnation in the form of a caveman; and it all becomes too much.  Carroll’s shorter works are frequently problematic.  He definitely works better at novel length. If you’ve never read Carroll before, skip this novella and grab The Land of Laughs or Bones of the Moon.