R'lyeh Review 001

R'LYEH REVIEW

Issue 001

Some of my favorites in the spooky field, recently read or reread:

'Salem's Lot --- Stephen King. This was my introduction to the King. I had supposed the author to be a hack catering to the garish tastes of the masses. Either I found out different, or I discovered I was one of the masses! Usually I flinch at books that are over four hundred pages, but King sustained my interest by his convincing characterizations and his meticulous patience in setting the stage and building the mood. By the time the action began, I was already interested in Ben Mears and company in their own right. And when the action did begin, King pulled it off expertly. He was able to take a hackneyed theme ("I vant to suck your neck!") and make it believable in a nonfantasy world. Matt Burke briefs the hit squad, "In most vampire fiction, Hollywood and otherwise, the staked vampire mortifies almost instantly into dust. This may not happen in real life" (pp. 320-321). The care taken up to this point to make the narrative realistic is enough to make you forget that this is another piece of vampire fiction!

Remember how Lovecraft said that musty old New England towns were the perfect setting for horror? King has isolated the secret in his idea of "subtext", a subliminal evil or fear from real life that is magnified and mythologized into supernatural horror. Stagnant towns hiding their pet depravities behind their crumbling quaintness are the real horror-model beneath the surface of 'Salem's Lot, the Maine town with vampires in the root cellars. King shows his hand in Father Callahan's soliloquy on "evil" vs. "Evil" (p. 303). The real-life "e" variety is the hidden bite in the fictional "E" variety.

Without the former, the latter would seem simply fabulous, not horrific. The point is the same in the case of HPL's own Arkham, Dunwich, Kingsport, and Innsmouth, all towns where real fears of hell and sins of incest are reflected as fictional monsters and semihuman races. I am happy to nominate the town of 'Salem's Lot, Maine, as the fifth stop on any horror tour of New England.

The Omen --- David Seltzer. This is not your usual novelization, since it is based on Seltzer's own screen play, and thus has some literary integrity. The style is good, and the implied theology is even worth discussing. But I have discussed it in an article I hope will soon appear in a sci-fi magazine you'll probably see. Suffice it to say that Seltzer has captured the ancient and medieval dread of the End of the World, an inexorable "Doomsday" descending like the headsman's axe on humanity. As the clock ticks away, the reader feels with foreboding that nothing can avert the deadly triumph of Antichrist.

Seltzer has also packed a potent punch in his portrayal of Father Tassone, the renegade priest who had been "initiated into the dogma of Hell", a nihilistic libertine society of Satanists. Seltzer revives the paranoid myth of the "Illuminati" for the occasion. The idea is that many of the world's ills are the result of conscious plotting by a worldwide underground of evil (. . . oops, I mean Evil). In depicting this society of terror, Seltzer sends the reader a depressing flash of truly Promethean sin (more about which, see our feature article). Anyone who dismissed this book as another cheap thriller missed a lot.

"God's Devil: A Ghost Story with a Moral" --- John Warwick Montgomery. This story is to be found in the same author's collection of essays on the history of the occult, Principalities and Powers [Note]. The whole volume merits reading both for its comprehensive erudition and its balanced tone. But this story, the only fiction in the collection, is especially enjoyable. The fact that it is at heart a theological polemic does not prevent its author from spinning a good yarn. A young liberal seminarian finds himself assigned to preach at a certain "St. Paul's" church. He can discover almost nothing about it in the files, except that it supposedly burned to the ground several years before. When he arrives the next Sunday, he finds that the name of the church is really short for "St. 'Pollyon's". Gulp. Montgomery proceeds to conjure an atmosphere wherein you are afraid you see only too well what is wrong. Yet you are still not exactly sure what the danger is. The climax is sort of a striptease rather than a revelation. Let's hope for more fiction from this guy.

"Fear" --- L. Ron Hubbard. (I read this story in Fear and the Ultimate Adventure, but it is now available in Fear and the Typewriter in the Sky.) An anthropology professor writes an article ridiculing belief in demons. The demons decide to show him the error of his ways, and the man's life is ruined. The key thing in this story is mood. Hubbard first makes you relish the contentment of the professor, so as to sense all the more keenly the loss of his security and happiness. And the atmosphere of the subsequent narrative is literally nightmarish. With the protagonist, you feel hopelessly trapped in a maze that is as puzzling as it is oppressively threatening. There is no relief; when you wake up, reality turns out to be worse than the nightmare.

Amid the current flood of fun-but-usually-junky Cthulhoid fiction, one now and then finds a story worth remembering. Here are three.

"Black Man with a Horn" --- T. E. D. Klein (in Campbell's New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos). In this tale, the narrator is the last survivor of the "Lovecraft Circle". The Mythos, he admits, is all fiction, just plain and nothin' but. Who's in a better position to know? At least until he finds himself in the position of the game pursued by savage Tcho-Tcho tribesmen. Klein scores a surprising double victory. First, he actually manages to mention Lovecraft without shattering the suspension-of-disbelief needed to make the story plausible. Second, he is able to make something of the Tcho-Tcho people, one of HPL's less memorable creations. Up to now the most frightening thing about them was trying to pronounce their name!

"More Light" --- James Blish (in McCaffrey's Alchemy and Academe). The premise is that, while HPL refused to write the Necronomicon for fear it would be anticlimactic, R. W. Chambers did risk writing The King in Yellow (i.e., the play mentioned in Chambers's stories, not the Ace Books collection under that title). This story offers the text of the nefarious drama. HPL had sent a copy of it to a young fan who finally reads it years later. Can the play have the unsettling effects Chambers claimed for it? Yes, but not for the reasons you think. . . .

"Jerusalem's Lot" --- Stephen King (in his Night Shift). The first two stories were so good because they used the Mythos in original ways. This one's strength lies in its being a Lovecraft pastiche, but (believe it or not) a damn good one! Like Dracula, the story is a collection of letters. The protagonist, newly returned to his ancestral home, recounts his discovery that he is hated by the locals because of what his forebears did in the nearby ghost town of Jerusalem's Lot. He decides to investigate and finds that the memories of evil are more than memories. Mythos bibliographers will want to note King's effective use of Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis in the story.

By the way, lemme applaud Zebra Books and Lin Carter for their two latest projects, the revival of Weird Tales in paperback book form, and a new series of collections of all the Mythos stories of one writer. The first is Robert Bloch's Mysteries of the Worm. (Now if only you could actually find copies of these books! . . . )

Note: Available from Bethany Fellowship, Inc., 6820 Auto Club Road, Minneapolis, MN 55438