H. P. Lovecraft was a consummate bigot. So much is known. What is insufficiently understood is that he was not merely a racist and a xenophobe. To put it bluntly, he hated "inferior" white people just about as much as he hated everyone who wasn't white. His letters to Robert E. Howard, which among many better things are a sickening record of what happens when two bigots find common cause and really get going, are full of a need to classify different white ethnic groups by how close they come to the Anglo-Saxon pinnacle. And, like another American original known by his initials, H. L. Mencken, he was a firm believer in good and bad stock within an ethnicity. Which brings us to "Beyond the Wall of Sleep."
This is a better story technically than what has preceded it, and a good example of what I was talking about when I said it wasn't the style but the quality that I objected to in "The Tomb." Yes, the narrator of this story is incredibly pompous, and yes, his word choice and diction are a little unlikely in the early 20th century, but the flow of the language is much more natural than before: it's a difficult style but not a bad one. And the narrative is well-paced, with evocative hints of Slater's dream-world that are, if anything, better than the whole that is subsequently revealed. This is the first time that Lovecraft manages the gradual revelation of the supernatural that's so central to his modern reputation.
There is, as the guys in The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast point out,
a kind of poignancy in this concept: the communion between two
intellects trapped in frail and insufficient human forms. One thinks of
Lovecraft, who at this time had few if any in-person friends but was
already a great correspondent and a member of the amateur journalism
movement, reaching out and communing as the narrator and Slater's
inhabitant do. Reductive psychobiography is grating, but Lovecraft by
his own account often felt like a man out of his own time.
But of course what draws your attention is the narrator's unbelievable contempt for Joe Slater. I would list all his insulting turns of phrase, but I don't have that kind of time. Here's a flavor of it: "strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock... who correspond exactly to the decadent element of 'white trash' in the South." We get scarcely a sentence in reference to Slater without some demeaning adjective: "debased," "filthy," "inferior," "pitiful," and so on. In a modern story this arrogance would be part of a character study of the narrator, whose own mental state would be called into question. There's no such complexity in "Beyond the Wall of Sleep": we're simply meant to take the narrator's self-regard at face value.
People like to talk about "separating the man from the work" when they deign to address bigotry in classic artists, but this story is as good an indicator as any of how facile that notion is. A person's worldview is not a series of discrete ideologies; it all blends together. The sense of isolation and discontent that powers many of Lovecraft's tales is inextricably bound up with his idea of himself as "unmixed English gentry" and therefore superior to virtually everyone else on the planet. There is of course something inherently defensive about that idea, the claiming of racial superiority to distract from questions of individual merit. The way "The Outsider" reverses this dynamic, making its protagonist the only monster in a world of normal people, suggests certain dualities in Lovecraft's self-conception. But we're drifting toward psychobiography again.
Issues of class superiority also pop up in "The Ash-Tree," an odder story than I had remembered. The guys in The M. R. James Podcast have a bit of a debate about what's happening and why. The problem, I think, is not a lack of explanations but an abundance of possible ones. The strangeness begins in the account of Mrs Mothersole's trial. James does a fair amount of throat-clearing about whether witch trials were entirely an irrational phenomenon, or if there might have been some real witches. This is obviously to do with the tension between his awareness as an intelligent observer that witch trials were horrifying nonsense, and his need as a ghost story writer to have an actual witch. But this hemming and hawing sets an ambiguous tone that will remain throughout the story.
James then goes out of his way to tell us that Mrs Mothersole is "rather better off and in a more influential position" than most accused witches. I imagine this is said to make clear that the kind of social anxieties and power dynamics visible in actual witch trials were not a factor here. And yet you have to wonder about Sir Matthew's evidence. I don't mean that he might be lying; it's perfectly obvious that he's not. But you do wonder about the implications of that night when he went right up to Mrs Mothersole's door and, finding her not obviously engaged in witchcraft, "had no good explanation to offer of his visit." I don't quite believe that James is alluding to more gossipy interpretations that might be placed on these events, but it does niggle. Nor can I quite escape the impression that the description of Sir Matthew's response to the whole affair, with the capper "as any reasonable man must have done," has an air of irony about it, of protesting too much. But perhaps I'm only projecting.
Certainly we're never really invited to sympathize with Sir Matthew, or with Sir Richard. It's easier to feel bad for the cat at the end of the story than for either of the two humans. The immediate follow-up to "they found their master dead and black" is not anything mournful but a brisk "So much you have guessed." (I love that line, by the way. For the way it casually tugs at suspension of disbelief, and for its knowing wink at readers who might have thought they'd outsmarted the writer by guessing his plot twist. The Simpsons once described marriage as "a beautiful thing, but also a constant battle for moral superiority." So too is the reader/writer relationship, with each trying to get one up on the other.) And all we see Sir Richard do is ignore the sensible advice of his social inferiors to form an immediate friendship with a stranger based on ancient family ties.
All this is coincidence, probably. The value of the folk wisdom of the lower classes is a trope in supernatural stories, and James was hardly any kind of revolutionary. But what is on the surface a superficial revenge yarn keeps spinning off questions, if only because James keeps piling up ominous indicators and coincidences without ever stringing them together into a full explanation. Why do Mrs Mothersole and her spiders strike when they do? Were they stirred up by the removal of Mrs Mothersole's grave (not that she was in there)? Were they waiting for a Crome visit, to enhance the overall narrative synchronicity? Could they only get into the room that's right next to the ash-tree (and if so, how were they "rattl[ing] about his window" in the other bedroom)? Never mind. This is a yarn, and while James' stories are in some ways deeper than they appear, we're not going to recover a secret plot underneath the obvious one.
Other stray observations:
This is the first story to show off James' great capacity to mimic period prose. The excerpt from Crome's papers is quite something.
The end of the first paragraph is interesting. Are we to imagine that the actual M. R. James wanted a house like that? He seemed pretty happy at Eton and King's. Or is this simply a picturesque notion, to lull the reader before GIANT HAIRY SPIDERS start poking their limbs in?
I also find myself wondering if Mrs Mothersole's sort-of curse (which implies that she has pretty specific visions of the future) is a conscious echo of Sarah Good's "God will give you blood to drink," or if gallows curses from witches were common enough that James had some other source in mind. Good's reputed words were, of course, an inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables.
I think that's all this time. Next up are "Number 13" and "The Transition of Juan Romero." The latter is a story so dire Arkham House stuck in it an "Early Tales" section at the end of its minor Lovecraft collection Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, alongside "The Street," easily the worst story Lovecraft ever wrote, even though neither is actually all that early. So, um, fortunately "Number 13" is pretty good as I recall.
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
A Tree or a Person or a Wall
It's rare that you can describe literary fiction as "not for the faint
of heart," but Matt Bell's new collection will test your resolve. Bell's
two novels, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods and Scrapper,
are harrowing explorations of human failings and yearnings, but their
endings have a bittersweet quality that balances the bleak intensity.
There are stories here that follow that pattern, but there are also some
that lead the reader not out of but deeper into the darkness. And even
the ones that end hopefully will take you on an uncomfortable journey to
get there. It's not just that Bell is working with disturbing thematic
material. His style is also psychologically intense, its poetic rhythms
drawing the reader into a kind of aesthetic fever that, like a literal
fever, can be exhausting. Moving in and out of that experience seventeen
times, once for each story in this collection, was daunting enough that
it took me a month to read the whole thing, even though Bell is one of
my favorite contemporary authors.
But readers who brave these woods will be amply rewarded. The themes and motifs that drove Bell's novels-- the anxieties of parenthood, the terrible resilience of the human psyche, cycles of abuse and the way they blur the line between predator and victim-- are present here, explored with a tighter focus than the novel form allows. The title story is reminiscent of certain aspects of Scrapper, but with the eerie surrealism of In the House. One of Bell's gifts is a capacity to balance those surreal elements with naturalistic ones in a way that uses the unreal to reinforce the raw emotions of the reality. "Doll Parts" follows a young girl's psychological journey in the aftermath of her brother's disappearance. It's ~almost~ a naturalistic story, but the few unlikely elements and the style, which reflects the fractured yet emotionally coherent logic of a grieving child, give it a mythic quality.
Bell returns frequently to children threatened, damaged, destroyed. "Dredge" is another cycle-of-trauma story that manages to be physically as well as mentally upsetting, while "Wolf Parts" revitalizes the increasingly played-out genre of the reimagined fairy tale by telling the story in dozens of different ways that revitalize the underlying motifs of family relations, victimization, sexual awakening, and hard-won survival. In "The Stations," Bell invokes again the threat of kidnapping and abuse, but in a way that shines light instead on the more common pain of unmet needs within the family. And then there's the novella "Cataclysm Baby," which the writer Karen Russell describes in a blurb as "a baby name book for the apocalypse." These twenty-six vignettes explore parental fears and hopes through an array of worlds that are as twisted and dreamlike as the people who inhabit them. The conceit may hamper the project slightly-- some of the vignettes are better than others-- but on the whole it's an extraordinary piece of work.
The collection ends as it began, with a child in peril. But this time the threat is not from outside but from within: terminal illness. You could bring "A Long Walk with Only Chalk to Mark the Way" down to a familiar metaphor-- hospital as labyrinth-- but that would do an injustice to its portrait of a father coping with unimaginable loss by telling himself a story that will take him down through the labyrinth, and then up and out again. The ending is at once tragic and beautiful in a way that perfectly encapsulates Bell's work.
Throughout the collection Bell jumps genres with gleeful abandon. "The Receiving Tower" is a kind of science fiction, a meditation on memory, identity, and perseverance that would be the most disturbing story in many collections but for Bell is only moderately troubling. "Inheritance" is on the line between science fiction and fantasy, and is one of the few stories in the collection I'm not sure works. Its concept is equal to anything else Bell has come up with, but the metaphors don't strike the heart as they do elsewhere, perhaps because the characters' psychology doesn't feel as central. I had similar issues with "The Migration," a near-future-but-also-present-day story (Scrapper also belongs to this highly hyphenated genre) that addresses some of our most pressing contemporary problems. This is a stylistic triumph, but it works mostly on the level of group rather than individual psychology, which makes its explanations feel facile even when they're basically accurate.
In addition to the various forms of science fiction and fantasy, Bell also offers a pair of very strange historical fictions. I got all the way through "His Last Great Gift" without ever imagining that its protagonist was real: he seemed too perfect an encapsulation of overlapping American ideologies of the 19th century. It was only when I got to "The Collectors" and realized it was about the Collyer brothers that I thought, "Well, they were all too real, so maybe..." "His Last Great Gift" is a well-crafted and evocative story, but "The Collectors"... well, if ever there was a writer to do justice to the Collyer brothers Matt Bell has to be it. Their story is inherently unsettling, and Bell cuts right to the heart of it. At first I dreaded reading this story, afraid that I was going to be dragged through their tragedy once more with no fresh insights to show for it, but Bell finds something new, by taking a hard look not at the brothers, but at us.
A Tree or a Person or a Wall is a collection of remarkable stylistic and thematic unity. Bell's language is sometimes more intense and sometimes less so, but its rhythms are constant, as are the topics with which he is most deeply concerned. For some readers this will be limiting, will make the book feel claustrophobic. To my mind, however, the great range of settings and genres, the slide up and down the realism-surrealism scale, produces something that is better called resonant than repetitive. It echoes itself to create a larger music. Make no mistake: by the standards of literary fiction as commodity, the bestselling novels that bloodlessly reproduce upper middle class dysfunction, Matt Bell is a difficult writer. He looks at the traumas of the family through a different lens, he tugs at threads some would prefer to leave hanging. But what he does with those threads once they're pulled loose is extraordinary. This is one of the best books of the year, and well worth any effort it demands of you as a reader.
But readers who brave these woods will be amply rewarded. The themes and motifs that drove Bell's novels-- the anxieties of parenthood, the terrible resilience of the human psyche, cycles of abuse and the way they blur the line between predator and victim-- are present here, explored with a tighter focus than the novel form allows. The title story is reminiscent of certain aspects of Scrapper, but with the eerie surrealism of In the House. One of Bell's gifts is a capacity to balance those surreal elements with naturalistic ones in a way that uses the unreal to reinforce the raw emotions of the reality. "Doll Parts" follows a young girl's psychological journey in the aftermath of her brother's disappearance. It's ~almost~ a naturalistic story, but the few unlikely elements and the style, which reflects the fractured yet emotionally coherent logic of a grieving child, give it a mythic quality.
Bell returns frequently to children threatened, damaged, destroyed. "Dredge" is another cycle-of-trauma story that manages to be physically as well as mentally upsetting, while "Wolf Parts" revitalizes the increasingly played-out genre of the reimagined fairy tale by telling the story in dozens of different ways that revitalize the underlying motifs of family relations, victimization, sexual awakening, and hard-won survival. In "The Stations," Bell invokes again the threat of kidnapping and abuse, but in a way that shines light instead on the more common pain of unmet needs within the family. And then there's the novella "Cataclysm Baby," which the writer Karen Russell describes in a blurb as "a baby name book for the apocalypse." These twenty-six vignettes explore parental fears and hopes through an array of worlds that are as twisted and dreamlike as the people who inhabit them. The conceit may hamper the project slightly-- some of the vignettes are better than others-- but on the whole it's an extraordinary piece of work.
The collection ends as it began, with a child in peril. But this time the threat is not from outside but from within: terminal illness. You could bring "A Long Walk with Only Chalk to Mark the Way" down to a familiar metaphor-- hospital as labyrinth-- but that would do an injustice to its portrait of a father coping with unimaginable loss by telling himself a story that will take him down through the labyrinth, and then up and out again. The ending is at once tragic and beautiful in a way that perfectly encapsulates Bell's work.
Throughout the collection Bell jumps genres with gleeful abandon. "The Receiving Tower" is a kind of science fiction, a meditation on memory, identity, and perseverance that would be the most disturbing story in many collections but for Bell is only moderately troubling. "Inheritance" is on the line between science fiction and fantasy, and is one of the few stories in the collection I'm not sure works. Its concept is equal to anything else Bell has come up with, but the metaphors don't strike the heart as they do elsewhere, perhaps because the characters' psychology doesn't feel as central. I had similar issues with "The Migration," a near-future-but-also-present-day story (Scrapper also belongs to this highly hyphenated genre) that addresses some of our most pressing contemporary problems. This is a stylistic triumph, but it works mostly on the level of group rather than individual psychology, which makes its explanations feel facile even when they're basically accurate.
In addition to the various forms of science fiction and fantasy, Bell also offers a pair of very strange historical fictions. I got all the way through "His Last Great Gift" without ever imagining that its protagonist was real: he seemed too perfect an encapsulation of overlapping American ideologies of the 19th century. It was only when I got to "The Collectors" and realized it was about the Collyer brothers that I thought, "Well, they were all too real, so maybe..." "His Last Great Gift" is a well-crafted and evocative story, but "The Collectors"... well, if ever there was a writer to do justice to the Collyer brothers Matt Bell has to be it. Their story is inherently unsettling, and Bell cuts right to the heart of it. At first I dreaded reading this story, afraid that I was going to be dragged through their tragedy once more with no fresh insights to show for it, but Bell finds something new, by taking a hard look not at the brothers, but at us.
A Tree or a Person or a Wall is a collection of remarkable stylistic and thematic unity. Bell's language is sometimes more intense and sometimes less so, but its rhythms are constant, as are the topics with which he is most deeply concerned. For some readers this will be limiting, will make the book feel claustrophobic. To my mind, however, the great range of settings and genres, the slide up and down the realism-surrealism scale, produces something that is better called resonant than repetitive. It echoes itself to create a larger music. Make no mistake: by the standards of literary fiction as commodity, the bestselling novels that bloodlessly reproduce upper middle class dysfunction, Matt Bell is a difficult writer. He looks at the traumas of the family through a different lens, he tugs at threads some would prefer to leave hanging. But what he does with those threads once they're pulled loose is extraordinary. This is one of the best books of the year, and well worth any effort it demands of you as a reader.
Sunday, September 4, 2016
James and Lovecraft: "The Mezzotint" and "Polaris"
Here's a thing M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft have in common: editors fiddling around with their paragraphing. It happened to Lovecraft in the 1930s, when pulp editors cut down his long paragraphs to fit the expectations of a pulp audience. James was spared until just a few years ago, when the great horror anthologist Stephen Jones chose to muck about with paragraphing and punctuation for his edition of the complete James, Curious Warnings.
Jones justified this meddling in an editor's note that jumps rather wildly among explanations. It starts off by calling James "not much of a stylist," then tries to soften this blow with the patronizing correction, "Well, he was a stylist -- but he wrote in a unique style that was very much all his own." (One can't help wondering what James would have made of being edited posthumously by someone who could put into print a sentence of such thudding redundancy.) Then there's some waffle about changing languages, with the implication that kids these days can't read long paragraphs anymore and chopping James up into the rhythms of an action thriller is the only way to get him read. This would be easier to believe if James weren't still in print in many other editions containing his original versions, a fact to which Jones alludes in an "if you don't like what I've done, go and read them!" aside.
We're also told that because James initially wrote these stories to be read aloud and "more than likely" never edited them for their formal publication, they had probably "never really been properly edited before." Anything is possible, but I think Jones is confusing James' habitual modest and lighthearted self-presentation with actual indifference. Certainly James was involved in editing his first collection; he wrote in a letter to his father about the interesting prospect of correcting proofs of something so different from his academic work.
But to be frank I doubt Jones cares all that much about James' level of editorial involvement or about what modern audiences will put up with. He plainly thinks he is improving James' work. "No longer are his wit, erudition or pleasing terrors lost amongst pages and pages of unbroken print, complicated sentences and protracted paragraphs." I can only reply that I don't think those things were ever lost. Millions of people had been finding them for over a century before Jones entered the picture. Yes, there are some very long paragraphs in James that could be split without much loss. But I don't believe anyone can look at the extent of Jones' changes and feel that they are in line with James' style. Paragraphs of two or three sentences create a rhythm very different from the restrained gradualism of the antiquarian ghost story. Writers use paragraph breaks to control the flow of the narrative; they don't and shouldn't stop every fifty words or so in case someone's attention is flagging.
You may wonder why I'm banging on about this in a blog post that's supposed to be about "The Mezzotint." Well, first of all I had to get it off my chest. Jones is a first-rate editor of contemporary horror fiction, but his approach to Curious Warnings ruined, from the perspective of the fusty James enthusiast, the only mass-market edition to include the fragments and the children's novel The Five Jars. (That Curious Warnings is already out of print and traditional editions of James are not is one of the ironies of the situation.)
And I don't think it's fair to suggest James was indifferent to things like paragraphing. In places, perhaps, but there are other places where he is plainly using paragraph breaks to create specific effects. In "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" you have, following the very long paragraph describing the sacristan's home and the book itself, the one-sentence paragraph " 'If monsieur will turn on to the end,' he said." A short, sharp hint that something ominous is coming. There's an even better example in (yes, finally) "The Mezzotint." Setting the sentence "Williams had not noticed it before" off as its own paragraph draws the reader up, letting her know that this is no mere inattention but a plot point, a hint of the supernatural, something to send that first delicate shiver up the spine.
So is there anything good about "The Mezzotint" besides those six words? Sure. I'm not quite sure why it used to be my favorite, but the evolution of the engraving is a model of how a James story unfurls its supernatural presence. And the use of the present-day observers to tell the story of the ghostly kidnapping reflect James's careful manipulation of narrative distance. His stories are told at a remove. They happened to a friend of a friend, or were unearthed in old papers. The narrator is not personally implicated, and can describe characters and places with an ironic detachment, and without the profuse descriptions of confusion and terror that a first-person narrator would provide. To place the kidnapping of the Francis heir by Gawdy's ghost in the foreground would be a bit gruesome even for James, who softened the horror of the murdered children in "Lost Hearts" by making them such malevolent spirits. In fact this is a pretty light story all things considered; the nature of the frame narrative means there's no real climax, no "crumpled linen" or "odious writhings of a wasp."
This is the first story to really feature James' gentle satire of academics. It's amusing, especially the bits about golf. I suppose I should mention Mr Filcher, the servant who is, even more than Mrs Bunch, James' first full-on working class character or caricature. James is sometimes called a master of dialect, but I have to say he may over-egging the pudding here. Every quirk of language in isolation is no doubt accurate, but I doubt they often came as thick and fast as they do in Filcher's speech. Yes, this is exaggeration for comic effect, but James can make dons funny in a subtler, less condescending way.
Speaking of transitions, I don't have one to lead us toward "Polaris." According to S. T. Joshi, this is "a quiet little triumph of prose-poetry, its incantatory rhythm and delicate pathos sustaining it in spite of its brevity." I have the greatest respect for Joshi, but, you know, come on. I don't think Lovecraft ever wrote anything that featured "delicate pathos," and the heavy-handed mournfulness of this story is certainly not it.
I can see what Lovecraft was going for with the repetition of names and phrases, but the effect doesn't quite come off, although the last line makes for a pleasingly bleak final image. It doesn't help that he has no gift for fantasy nomenclature. Robert E. Howard and Lord Dunsany (who was not, despite what you might think, an influence on this story; Lovecraft hadn't read him yet) could put together evocative names that suggested an, and were often borrowed or tweaked from the actual, ancient world, but here we have stuff like Zobna and Kadiphonek that sounds silly in its own right and doesn't feel like it comes from any single invented language.
Lovecraft racism watch: the Inutos are "squat, hellish, yellow fiends" who "knew not the scruples of honour." They turn out to be the ancestors of the Inuit, or as Lovecraft calls them, using an old-fashioned spelling I've always loved, the Esquimaux.
I feel like I'm giving James a lot more space than Lovecraft in these posts, but then, as I've said before, James' early stories are his best, most representative work, while Lovecraft's are part of a great casting-about for style and substance. "Polaris," like "Dagon," is a story that could stand to be longer, to show the narrator's discovery and exploration of Olathoe in direct narration, so that the city's wonders are more clear and the loss of it resonates properly. And also like "Dagon," this is a story that's mostly interesting as a foreshadowing of what would come: in that case of the "Cthulhu Mythos," in this case of the "Dream Cycle." Neither of those things really exists as such, hence the scare quotes, but they do reflect certain broad currents in Lovecraft's work. "Polaris" points the way toward a lot of stories that, while not well regarded or widely discussed, are among my favorites in the Lovecraft canon. I hope I'll find more to say about them.
Jones justified this meddling in an editor's note that jumps rather wildly among explanations. It starts off by calling James "not much of a stylist," then tries to soften this blow with the patronizing correction, "Well, he was a stylist -- but he wrote in a unique style that was very much all his own." (One can't help wondering what James would have made of being edited posthumously by someone who could put into print a sentence of such thudding redundancy.) Then there's some waffle about changing languages, with the implication that kids these days can't read long paragraphs anymore and chopping James up into the rhythms of an action thriller is the only way to get him read. This would be easier to believe if James weren't still in print in many other editions containing his original versions, a fact to which Jones alludes in an "if you don't like what I've done, go and read them!" aside.
We're also told that because James initially wrote these stories to be read aloud and "more than likely" never edited them for their formal publication, they had probably "never really been properly edited before." Anything is possible, but I think Jones is confusing James' habitual modest and lighthearted self-presentation with actual indifference. Certainly James was involved in editing his first collection; he wrote in a letter to his father about the interesting prospect of correcting proofs of something so different from his academic work.
But to be frank I doubt Jones cares all that much about James' level of editorial involvement or about what modern audiences will put up with. He plainly thinks he is improving James' work. "No longer are his wit, erudition or pleasing terrors lost amongst pages and pages of unbroken print, complicated sentences and protracted paragraphs." I can only reply that I don't think those things were ever lost. Millions of people had been finding them for over a century before Jones entered the picture. Yes, there are some very long paragraphs in James that could be split without much loss. But I don't believe anyone can look at the extent of Jones' changes and feel that they are in line with James' style. Paragraphs of two or three sentences create a rhythm very different from the restrained gradualism of the antiquarian ghost story. Writers use paragraph breaks to control the flow of the narrative; they don't and shouldn't stop every fifty words or so in case someone's attention is flagging.
You may wonder why I'm banging on about this in a blog post that's supposed to be about "The Mezzotint." Well, first of all I had to get it off my chest. Jones is a first-rate editor of contemporary horror fiction, but his approach to Curious Warnings ruined, from the perspective of the fusty James enthusiast, the only mass-market edition to include the fragments and the children's novel The Five Jars. (That Curious Warnings is already out of print and traditional editions of James are not is one of the ironies of the situation.)
And I don't think it's fair to suggest James was indifferent to things like paragraphing. In places, perhaps, but there are other places where he is plainly using paragraph breaks to create specific effects. In "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" you have, following the very long paragraph describing the sacristan's home and the book itself, the one-sentence paragraph " 'If monsieur will turn on to the end,' he said." A short, sharp hint that something ominous is coming. There's an even better example in (yes, finally) "The Mezzotint." Setting the sentence "Williams had not noticed it before" off as its own paragraph draws the reader up, letting her know that this is no mere inattention but a plot point, a hint of the supernatural, something to send that first delicate shiver up the spine.
So is there anything good about "The Mezzotint" besides those six words? Sure. I'm not quite sure why it used to be my favorite, but the evolution of the engraving is a model of how a James story unfurls its supernatural presence. And the use of the present-day observers to tell the story of the ghostly kidnapping reflect James's careful manipulation of narrative distance. His stories are told at a remove. They happened to a friend of a friend, or were unearthed in old papers. The narrator is not personally implicated, and can describe characters and places with an ironic detachment, and without the profuse descriptions of confusion and terror that a first-person narrator would provide. To place the kidnapping of the Francis heir by Gawdy's ghost in the foreground would be a bit gruesome even for James, who softened the horror of the murdered children in "Lost Hearts" by making them such malevolent spirits. In fact this is a pretty light story all things considered; the nature of the frame narrative means there's no real climax, no "crumpled linen" or "odious writhings of a wasp."
This is the first story to really feature James' gentle satire of academics. It's amusing, especially the bits about golf. I suppose I should mention Mr Filcher, the servant who is, even more than Mrs Bunch, James' first full-on working class character or caricature. James is sometimes called a master of dialect, but I have to say he may over-egging the pudding here. Every quirk of language in isolation is no doubt accurate, but I doubt they often came as thick and fast as they do in Filcher's speech. Yes, this is exaggeration for comic effect, but James can make dons funny in a subtler, less condescending way.
Speaking of transitions, I don't have one to lead us toward "Polaris." According to S. T. Joshi, this is "a quiet little triumph of prose-poetry, its incantatory rhythm and delicate pathos sustaining it in spite of its brevity." I have the greatest respect for Joshi, but, you know, come on. I don't think Lovecraft ever wrote anything that featured "delicate pathos," and the heavy-handed mournfulness of this story is certainly not it.
I can see what Lovecraft was going for with the repetition of names and phrases, but the effect doesn't quite come off, although the last line makes for a pleasingly bleak final image. It doesn't help that he has no gift for fantasy nomenclature. Robert E. Howard and Lord Dunsany (who was not, despite what you might think, an influence on this story; Lovecraft hadn't read him yet) could put together evocative names that suggested an, and were often borrowed or tweaked from the actual, ancient world, but here we have stuff like Zobna and Kadiphonek that sounds silly in its own right and doesn't feel like it comes from any single invented language.
Lovecraft racism watch: the Inutos are "squat, hellish, yellow fiends" who "knew not the scruples of honour." They turn out to be the ancestors of the Inuit, or as Lovecraft calls them, using an old-fashioned spelling I've always loved, the Esquimaux.
I feel like I'm giving James a lot more space than Lovecraft in these posts, but then, as I've said before, James' early stories are his best, most representative work, while Lovecraft's are part of a great casting-about for style and substance. "Polaris," like "Dagon," is a story that could stand to be longer, to show the narrator's discovery and exploration of Olathoe in direct narration, so that the city's wonders are more clear and the loss of it resonates properly. And also like "Dagon," this is a story that's mostly interesting as a foreshadowing of what would come: in that case of the "Cthulhu Mythos," in this case of the "Dream Cycle." Neither of those things really exists as such, hence the scare quotes, but they do reflect certain broad currents in Lovecraft's work. "Polaris" points the way toward a lot of stories that, while not well regarded or widely discussed, are among my favorites in the Lovecraft canon. I hope I'll find more to say about them.
Thursday, September 1, 2016
James and Lovecraft: "Lost Hearts" and "Dagon"
In his introduction to the anthology Ghosts and Marvels, M. R. James discussed the elements of a successful ghost story. His preference for a a placid atmosphere slowly disturbed and a setting only slightly remote are well-known; what interests me today is a more equivocal piece of advice slipped in between those two recommendations. "It is not amiss sometimes to leave a loophole for a natural explanation; but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable." I'm not sure James really does this himself, unless we take "not quite practicable" as a form of ironic understatement, but he comes as close as possible in today's story, "Lost Hearts." Lovecraft's "Dagon" is also technically susceptible to a natural explanation, but again, not a convincing one.
I said yesterday that "Lost Hearts" had never been a favorite of mine. Actually it was the first James story I ever read. When I was young I had a copy of a children's horror anthology with the admirably direct title Ghosts, which brought together a bunch of public domain classics in an oversize volume with a handsome binding and very nice artwork by Walt Sturrock. The story didn't particularly catch my attention at the time, but I must have read it, because I remember associating Stephen's vision of the ghost in the disused bathroom with an abandoned bathroom in my grandparents' house. It wasn't much like the bathroom in the story-- just an old toilet-- but it was at the top of the relatively narrow and dark stairs. Was I slightly scared of it before I read the story? I don't know. I was also nervous around the bathroom in my aunt's apartment, which for some reason was up a half-flight of stairs that turned a corner, so it was out of sight in the darkness. The bathroom in the mobile home where I grew up wasn't scary, though I did have dreams where I would go in there and be addressed by a godlike voice that was, I think, assigning me tasks at which I was always found wanting. I was an odd child. What were we talking about?
Oh, right, "Lost Hearts." I really liked it this time around. It's a fairly traditional story by Jamesian standards, one of the few where the hostile presence is definitely the ghost of a person rather than a demon or unclassifiable spirit. It also has a revenge motif, which is part of why it used to leave me cold. I find the ghost story of revenge unsatisfying because it muddies the darkly numinous with petty human life, leaving a moralizing taste that's antithetical to genuine eerieness. To be truly scary, a haunting must be unfair. James' typical protagonist may be over-curious, greedy, a little pompous, but these are not failings that warrant having a demon set on you. Murderers and thieves, on the other hand, deserve what they get. And so one can never really feel implicated in a revenge story. James suggested in the preface to one of his collections that he wanted to make the reader say, "If I'm not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!" But most of us are in no danger of inadvertently becoming Mr Karswell, George Martin, or Mr Abney.
(Well, perhaps "no danger" is putting it too strongly. I can't remember who remarked that James' scholarly protagonists exist along a sliding scale that runs from the impetuous curiosity of Parkins or Paxton toward the likes of Karswell and Mr Humphreys' uncle. Certainly the quote from Mr Abney's papers, with its arrogant, pedantic description of horrors-- "the libellous phrase employed by the author of the Clementine Recognitions," "to employ a word repugnant in the highest degree to my feelings"-- are a viciously ironic commentary on scholarly self-regard and single-mindedness.)
The reason "Lost Hearts" works anyway is that its protagonist is not Mr Abney but Stephen Elliott, who has certainly done nothing to deserve what he gets. It is easy, reading this story through the lens of other tales of ghostly revenge, to imagine that the spirits of Giovanni and Phoebe have come back to save Stephen from Mr Abney's dark design. But, as C. E. Ward observes in his essay "A Haunting Presence," on closer reading that doesn't make much sense. The boy's "appearance of menace and of unappeasable hunger and longing," and his attack on Stephen's door and nightdress, make it clear that he doesn't care whose blood he draws. While Mr Abney ends up the physical victim, the mere encounter with such creatures, and the discovery of his cousin's ruthless cruelty, will surely take a psychological toll on Stephen himself. The title may have a more than literal meaning. (Readers interested in a similar story that foregrounds those psychological effects should seek out Reggie Oliver's novella "A Child's Problem," which has several echoes of "Lost Hearts" that I'm sure aren't accidental.)
If James inverts the revenge story by focusing not on the deserving victim but on an object of collateral damage, he inverts the traditional ghost by giving it a more forceful physical presence. Vengeful ghosts tend to get what they want by indirect means, as befits a shade. They scare people to death, manipulate them into falling off buildings or jumping into rivers. They force crimes into the light, as in "Martin's Close," the most genuinely traditional story James ever wrote. Perhaps they manage to do some actual violence of a delicately unspecified type. What they don't do is use "fearfully long," translucent nails to leave "a terrible lacerated wound, exposing the heart." Giovanni is more a monstrous presence than a classically ghostly one.
Another way "Lost Hearts" successfully diverges from James' usual approach is in its emphasis on the atmosphere of the surrounding landscape. James doesn't do much with nature; his hauntings take place indoors, or in outdoor settings where the focus is on the ghost and not the world through which it moves. But here we have the "pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an evening in early autumn" with which the story opens, and then by contrast the "windy, noisy day, which filled the house and the gardens with a restless impression," the "strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers," of the fateful night of March 24th. It's all so subtly done that isolated quotes can't capture the overall sense of a countryside in ceaseless, mournful motion.
James himself didn't particularly like this story. It isn't clear why. All we know is that he didn't think it was worth including in his first collection, saying breezily "I don't care much about it." It was used anyway to pad out the volume. Was it too conventional for him? Too bleak? I'm sorely tempted to speculate, but I'll resist projecting anything onto the author.
Then there's "Dagon." Did I say yesterday that there was a long, tortuous evolution from the likes of "The Tomb" to the recognizably Lovecraftian story? Well, never mind that, because here is the Lovecraftian distilled into six pages. Monstrous creature mistaken for a god? Check. Horrible knowledge that has destroyed the protagonist's mind? Check. Scientific rather than supernatural framing? Check. Sense of humanity's puniness within the cosmos? Check. All that's really missing is the slow, deliberate unfolding of plot that would come in the longer stories. It's positively staggering that, having laid out his innovations in miniature here, Lovecraft would go nearly a decade before producing another story so obviously his own.
I think I had a little less fun with "Dagon" than with "The Tomb." It's the same almost-but-not-quite issue James had with "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book." "The Tomb" is derivative, lurid hokum, but it knows exactly how to be derivative, lurid hokum, and "Dagon" doesn't know how to be innovative science fiction/horror.
For one, thing it's too short. This means it lacks the accumulation of scientific, geographic, or anthropological detail that contributes so much to the major works: imagine what the Lovecraft of the early 1930s might have done with that "unprecedented volcanic upheaval." The 1917 Lovecraft just tells us "It was gross-- lots of fish parts," and then moves on. There's no time either for the gradual revelation that builds anticipation. In a longer story "they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion to their scenic background" would be a sly hint coming well ahead of the climactic discovery, but here it's all of one paragraph later that the narrator discovers how correct those proportions are.
Let's talk about the narrator. His diction, while not so tangled as the conscious antiquarianism of Jervas Dudley in "The Tomb," is not really credible for a supercargo in about 1914. (That is, when "the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation." Stay classy, Howard.) In his Lovecraft biography S. T. Joshi draws a distinction between "density of idiom" and "archaism of idiom." (Am I alone in thinking that "archaism of idiom" is right up there with "agenbite of inwit" as far as the poetry of five-dollar words goes?) That's useful up to a point, but bits like "Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery" are not merely dense. Later work like At the Mountains of Madness manages density without that whiff of archaism, but here Poe has not been completely shaken off.
The ending is also limp. Obviously the narrator is hallucinating, although the prospect of Dagon squeezing its orcine bulk into a hotel hallway and knocking on the door is pretty amusing. (This opens the possibility that the whole thing has been a hallucination; there's that loophole I mentioned so many paragraphs ago.) But it's a pretty lame hallucination compared to the narrator's earlier prolixity. It distracts from rather than complementing the vision that immediately precedes it, of the nameless sea-things rising to dispossess a ravaged humanity. The transition at the end of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" has always been too rapid for my liking, but it's much better handled than this.
And again, all that notwithstanding I did get a kick out of this one. There's stylistic excess here, but I like the chill simplicity of "...and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then." Right from the start Lovecraft liked him some slimy, decaying, pulpy (in both senses of the word) horrors. He punctured the largely psychological melancholy of Poe with the literary and metaphorical visceral, much as James tore open the delicacy of the Victorian ghost story with Giovanni's long fingernails.
That's all today, I hope. Next up are "The Mezzotint," once my favorite James story, and "Polaris," which, um, is definitely a thing that exists. Until then, don't visit your cousin when it's past your bedtime, and if some Germans capture you, maybe just stay on the sea-raider with them.
I said yesterday that "Lost Hearts" had never been a favorite of mine. Actually it was the first James story I ever read. When I was young I had a copy of a children's horror anthology with the admirably direct title Ghosts, which brought together a bunch of public domain classics in an oversize volume with a handsome binding and very nice artwork by Walt Sturrock. The story didn't particularly catch my attention at the time, but I must have read it, because I remember associating Stephen's vision of the ghost in the disused bathroom with an abandoned bathroom in my grandparents' house. It wasn't much like the bathroom in the story-- just an old toilet-- but it was at the top of the relatively narrow and dark stairs. Was I slightly scared of it before I read the story? I don't know. I was also nervous around the bathroom in my aunt's apartment, which for some reason was up a half-flight of stairs that turned a corner, so it was out of sight in the darkness. The bathroom in the mobile home where I grew up wasn't scary, though I did have dreams where I would go in there and be addressed by a godlike voice that was, I think, assigning me tasks at which I was always found wanting. I was an odd child. What were we talking about?
Oh, right, "Lost Hearts." I really liked it this time around. It's a fairly traditional story by Jamesian standards, one of the few where the hostile presence is definitely the ghost of a person rather than a demon or unclassifiable spirit. It also has a revenge motif, which is part of why it used to leave me cold. I find the ghost story of revenge unsatisfying because it muddies the darkly numinous with petty human life, leaving a moralizing taste that's antithetical to genuine eerieness. To be truly scary, a haunting must be unfair. James' typical protagonist may be over-curious, greedy, a little pompous, but these are not failings that warrant having a demon set on you. Murderers and thieves, on the other hand, deserve what they get. And so one can never really feel implicated in a revenge story. James suggested in the preface to one of his collections that he wanted to make the reader say, "If I'm not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!" But most of us are in no danger of inadvertently becoming Mr Karswell, George Martin, or Mr Abney.
(Well, perhaps "no danger" is putting it too strongly. I can't remember who remarked that James' scholarly protagonists exist along a sliding scale that runs from the impetuous curiosity of Parkins or Paxton toward the likes of Karswell and Mr Humphreys' uncle. Certainly the quote from Mr Abney's papers, with its arrogant, pedantic description of horrors-- "the libellous phrase employed by the author of the Clementine Recognitions," "to employ a word repugnant in the highest degree to my feelings"-- are a viciously ironic commentary on scholarly self-regard and single-mindedness.)
The reason "Lost Hearts" works anyway is that its protagonist is not Mr Abney but Stephen Elliott, who has certainly done nothing to deserve what he gets. It is easy, reading this story through the lens of other tales of ghostly revenge, to imagine that the spirits of Giovanni and Phoebe have come back to save Stephen from Mr Abney's dark design. But, as C. E. Ward observes in his essay "A Haunting Presence," on closer reading that doesn't make much sense. The boy's "appearance of menace and of unappeasable hunger and longing," and his attack on Stephen's door and nightdress, make it clear that he doesn't care whose blood he draws. While Mr Abney ends up the physical victim, the mere encounter with such creatures, and the discovery of his cousin's ruthless cruelty, will surely take a psychological toll on Stephen himself. The title may have a more than literal meaning. (Readers interested in a similar story that foregrounds those psychological effects should seek out Reggie Oliver's novella "A Child's Problem," which has several echoes of "Lost Hearts" that I'm sure aren't accidental.)
If James inverts the revenge story by focusing not on the deserving victim but on an object of collateral damage, he inverts the traditional ghost by giving it a more forceful physical presence. Vengeful ghosts tend to get what they want by indirect means, as befits a shade. They scare people to death, manipulate them into falling off buildings or jumping into rivers. They force crimes into the light, as in "Martin's Close," the most genuinely traditional story James ever wrote. Perhaps they manage to do some actual violence of a delicately unspecified type. What they don't do is use "fearfully long," translucent nails to leave "a terrible lacerated wound, exposing the heart." Giovanni is more a monstrous presence than a classically ghostly one.
Another way "Lost Hearts" successfully diverges from James' usual approach is in its emphasis on the atmosphere of the surrounding landscape. James doesn't do much with nature; his hauntings take place indoors, or in outdoor settings where the focus is on the ghost and not the world through which it moves. But here we have the "pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an evening in early autumn" with which the story opens, and then by contrast the "windy, noisy day, which filled the house and the gardens with a restless impression," the "strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers," of the fateful night of March 24th. It's all so subtly done that isolated quotes can't capture the overall sense of a countryside in ceaseless, mournful motion.
James himself didn't particularly like this story. It isn't clear why. All we know is that he didn't think it was worth including in his first collection, saying breezily "I don't care much about it." It was used anyway to pad out the volume. Was it too conventional for him? Too bleak? I'm sorely tempted to speculate, but I'll resist projecting anything onto the author.
Then there's "Dagon." Did I say yesterday that there was a long, tortuous evolution from the likes of "The Tomb" to the recognizably Lovecraftian story? Well, never mind that, because here is the Lovecraftian distilled into six pages. Monstrous creature mistaken for a god? Check. Horrible knowledge that has destroyed the protagonist's mind? Check. Scientific rather than supernatural framing? Check. Sense of humanity's puniness within the cosmos? Check. All that's really missing is the slow, deliberate unfolding of plot that would come in the longer stories. It's positively staggering that, having laid out his innovations in miniature here, Lovecraft would go nearly a decade before producing another story so obviously his own.
I think I had a little less fun with "Dagon" than with "The Tomb." It's the same almost-but-not-quite issue James had with "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book." "The Tomb" is derivative, lurid hokum, but it knows exactly how to be derivative, lurid hokum, and "Dagon" doesn't know how to be innovative science fiction/horror.
For one, thing it's too short. This means it lacks the accumulation of scientific, geographic, or anthropological detail that contributes so much to the major works: imagine what the Lovecraft of the early 1930s might have done with that "unprecedented volcanic upheaval." The 1917 Lovecraft just tells us "It was gross-- lots of fish parts," and then moves on. There's no time either for the gradual revelation that builds anticipation. In a longer story "they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion to their scenic background" would be a sly hint coming well ahead of the climactic discovery, but here it's all of one paragraph later that the narrator discovers how correct those proportions are.
Let's talk about the narrator. His diction, while not so tangled as the conscious antiquarianism of Jervas Dudley in "The Tomb," is not really credible for a supercargo in about 1914. (That is, when "the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation." Stay classy, Howard.) In his Lovecraft biography S. T. Joshi draws a distinction between "density of idiom" and "archaism of idiom." (Am I alone in thinking that "archaism of idiom" is right up there with "agenbite of inwit" as far as the poetry of five-dollar words goes?) That's useful up to a point, but bits like "Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery" are not merely dense. Later work like At the Mountains of Madness manages density without that whiff of archaism, but here Poe has not been completely shaken off.
The ending is also limp. Obviously the narrator is hallucinating, although the prospect of Dagon squeezing its orcine bulk into a hotel hallway and knocking on the door is pretty amusing. (This opens the possibility that the whole thing has been a hallucination; there's that loophole I mentioned so many paragraphs ago.) But it's a pretty lame hallucination compared to the narrator's earlier prolixity. It distracts from rather than complementing the vision that immediately precedes it, of the nameless sea-things rising to dispossess a ravaged humanity. The transition at the end of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" has always been too rapid for my liking, but it's much better handled than this.
And again, all that notwithstanding I did get a kick out of this one. There's stylistic excess here, but I like the chill simplicity of "...and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then." Right from the start Lovecraft liked him some slimy, decaying, pulpy (in both senses of the word) horrors. He punctured the largely psychological melancholy of Poe with the literary and metaphorical visceral, much as James tore open the delicacy of the Victorian ghost story with Giovanni's long fingernails.
That's all today, I hope. Next up are "The Mezzotint," once my favorite James story, and "Polaris," which, um, is definitely a thing that exists. Until then, don't visit your cousin when it's past your bedtime, and if some Germans capture you, maybe just stay on the sea-raider with them.
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
James and Lovecraft: First Stories
I bought an iPad recently, and because of that I've started listening to a bunch of different podcasts. (Yes, I know there are other ways than the misery that is iTunes to get podcasts. But this is the one that's convenient enough to overcome my laziness about tracking, downloading, and listening to things.) Two of them are The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast and The M. R. James Podcast, which pretty much do what they say on the tin. Each episode focuses on a particular work, though the Lovecraft podcast has long since exhausted him and moved and to other weird writers (and a subscription model), and the James podcast seems headed that way. Both podcasts are fun. The early episodes at least are more casual, jokey, and um, less fully informed than those who emulate the subjects' pedantry might prefer, but after all, these are podcasts, not symposia.
Anyway, I've decided to reread the stories as the podcasts cover them, and blog about them until the impulse fails (i.e. after I hit publish on this post). Both podcasts begin with their authors' first mature work. The most obvious difference between "The Tomb" and "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" is that the latter shows an author whose style is already fully-formed and essentially at its finest, while the former is both minor and derivative. Lovecraft famously wrote in 1929 that he had created "Poe pieces" and "Dunsany pieces" but had never managed any "Lovecraft pieces." Certainly "The Tomb" is a Poe piece, and not even a terribly good one.
I don't think I've mentioned here that I'm not exactly a Lovecraft fan anymore. I admire some aspects of his work technically-- the mastery of narrative structure, the cosmic pessimism-- but it's been a while since I've been able to take a lot of pleasure from it. It's the style on a sentence-by-sentence level that I can't relate to these days. Not the lugubriousness, the antiquated diction, but the fact that Lovecraft does them badly. For all his 18th-century affectations, he can't write a 19th-century pastiche. He has a tin ear for the kind of Gothic rhythm that Poe understood instinctively.
Poe piles up febrile adjectives, nouns, and the odd adverb the way Lovecraft does. In the first paragraph of "The Fall of the House of Usher" alone you have dull, dark, soundless, oppressively, singularly dreary, melancholy, insufferable gloom, sternest, desolate, terrible, bleak, vacant, rank, decayed, utter depression, bitter, hideous, iciness, sinking, sickening, unredeemed dreariness... look, I'm only halfway through the paragraph, can I stop now? I'm not going to claim this isn't excessive, teetering on the edge of ridiculousness, but I still think it works. Poe isn't aping a past diction that is different from his own natural mode; he's writing contemporary language in an elevated poetic style. A phrase like "an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart" is as indicative of the intended effect as "the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn."
In "The Tomb" Lovecraft makes the mistake that many of his own imitators have made: assuming that the best way to do homage is to soak every sentence in the past master's language, failing to recognize that sometimes verbal gymnastics detract from atmosphere rather than enhancing it. There's nothing wrong with describing mundane actions and plot points in simple language. Take a phrase like "the unexpected genealogical discovery that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly extinct family of the Hydes." Genealogical is superfluous, and "possessed a link" is stilted. "Maternal ancestry" is passable, but what on earth would be wrong with say, "the unexpected discovery that I was descended, upon my mother's side, from the supposedly extinct" etc? That's closer to how an actual 19th-century writer might have put it.
And yet I have to say I enjoyed "The Tomb" a lot more than I expected to. As is so often the case with Lovecraft, the style recedes when the plot has drawn you in. Looking back at Poe gives you a greater appreciation of how close Lovecraft comes to successfully emulating him. It's a sign of authentic talent, as the almost-there clunkiness of Ramsey Campbell's Lovecraft pastiches was a foreshadowing of his brilliance. And, while the manner is undoubtedly Poe, the details-- the bookish, reclusive narrator, the obsession with ancestry and the historical past, the sense of a terrible beauty in the natural world, the hints of graveyard grue-- show that Lovecraft's preoccupations were already in place in his first mature work.
"Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" is a better story than "The Tomb," and yet I got less pleasure out of this reading of it. That's partly down to simple familarity: I still enjoy James, so I've reread his canon more recently than Lovecraft's, though not all that recently. The other thing is that "The Tomb" is far enough from Lovecraft's distinctive mode that I approached it without expectation. "Scrap-Book," by contrast, is so close to first-rate James that its minor imperfections are all the more evident.
And they are minor, though given the delicate balance of a ghost story small blemishes can stand out. I don't remember who pointed out that "Good God! a hand like the hand in that picture!" is a terrible piece of dialogue at the worst possible point in the story for such a failure, but they were quite right. And the descriptions of the demon, both there and earlier, are overlong. The Jamesian haunting works by quick impressions-- "crumpled linen"-- rather than by this accumulation of almost zoological detail. How much more effective "It was drawn from the life" would be if it followed a much shorter description, one that made you feel the narrator actually despaired of conveying the image's effect in words. (I had never noticed before the echo of the "drawn from the life" line in "Pickman's Model." As likely to be coincidence as homage, but one wonders.)
The humor is slightly off as well. "I had no notion they came so dear," is in context really quite funny, but "an unbearably henpecked husband" and "a more formidable persecutor even than a termagant wife" are rather less subtly expressed than James' other forays into sexist humor. This isn't just about nitpicking. James' stories work by creating a placid atmosphere into which horrors insinuate themselves, almost gently at first, then with greater and greater force. Bland social comedy is part of that placidity, and "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" doesn't spend enough time generating the normal world before dispelling it. We're introduced to the sacristan's unease at the end of the first paragraph. The sense of exquisite progression that marks James' best work is absent.
And yet this is, indisputably, James. Not only the surface elements (the over-curious scholar, the casual erudition, the "ghost" that is actually a demon), but also and more significantly the sense of how to write what would come to be called a Jamesian story, is immediately evident. There's none of the long evolution, through homage and past traditional supernaturalism, of what would come to be called the Lovecraftian. That doesn't make James a better writer, obviously. This is a case where the destination does actually matter more than the journey. And the downside of emerging fully-formed is that you have nowhere to go but down. I have a great fondness for "A Vignette," but that's more for its apparent autobiographical elements than for its artistic merit. There won't be a "Last Stories" post in this series, both because I'll have given up and because I'll run out of James before I run out of Lovecraft, but the contrast between "A Vignette" and "The Haunter of the Dark" would be much less kind to James than the contrast between the current stories is to Lovecraft. (Yes, I know, "In the Walls of Eryx" and "The Night Ocean." Never mind.)
So that's the beginning. Next will be "Lost Hearts," never a favorite of mine, and "Dagon," of which I remember very little. Until then, don't buy any old books that are going too cheap, and stay away from locked but ajar tombs.
Anyway, I've decided to reread the stories as the podcasts cover them, and blog about them until the impulse fails (i.e. after I hit publish on this post). Both podcasts begin with their authors' first mature work. The most obvious difference between "The Tomb" and "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" is that the latter shows an author whose style is already fully-formed and essentially at its finest, while the former is both minor and derivative. Lovecraft famously wrote in 1929 that he had created "Poe pieces" and "Dunsany pieces" but had never managed any "Lovecraft pieces." Certainly "The Tomb" is a Poe piece, and not even a terribly good one.
I don't think I've mentioned here that I'm not exactly a Lovecraft fan anymore. I admire some aspects of his work technically-- the mastery of narrative structure, the cosmic pessimism-- but it's been a while since I've been able to take a lot of pleasure from it. It's the style on a sentence-by-sentence level that I can't relate to these days. Not the lugubriousness, the antiquated diction, but the fact that Lovecraft does them badly. For all his 18th-century affectations, he can't write a 19th-century pastiche. He has a tin ear for the kind of Gothic rhythm that Poe understood instinctively.
Poe piles up febrile adjectives, nouns, and the odd adverb the way Lovecraft does. In the first paragraph of "The Fall of the House of Usher" alone you have dull, dark, soundless, oppressively, singularly dreary, melancholy, insufferable gloom, sternest, desolate, terrible, bleak, vacant, rank, decayed, utter depression, bitter, hideous, iciness, sinking, sickening, unredeemed dreariness... look, I'm only halfway through the paragraph, can I stop now? I'm not going to claim this isn't excessive, teetering on the edge of ridiculousness, but I still think it works. Poe isn't aping a past diction that is different from his own natural mode; he's writing contemporary language in an elevated poetic style. A phrase like "an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart" is as indicative of the intended effect as "the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn."
In "The Tomb" Lovecraft makes the mistake that many of his own imitators have made: assuming that the best way to do homage is to soak every sentence in the past master's language, failing to recognize that sometimes verbal gymnastics detract from atmosphere rather than enhancing it. There's nothing wrong with describing mundane actions and plot points in simple language. Take a phrase like "the unexpected genealogical discovery that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly extinct family of the Hydes." Genealogical is superfluous, and "possessed a link" is stilted. "Maternal ancestry" is passable, but what on earth would be wrong with say, "the unexpected discovery that I was descended, upon my mother's side, from the supposedly extinct" etc? That's closer to how an actual 19th-century writer might have put it.
And yet I have to say I enjoyed "The Tomb" a lot more than I expected to. As is so often the case with Lovecraft, the style recedes when the plot has drawn you in. Looking back at Poe gives you a greater appreciation of how close Lovecraft comes to successfully emulating him. It's a sign of authentic talent, as the almost-there clunkiness of Ramsey Campbell's Lovecraft pastiches was a foreshadowing of his brilliance. And, while the manner is undoubtedly Poe, the details-- the bookish, reclusive narrator, the obsession with ancestry and the historical past, the sense of a terrible beauty in the natural world, the hints of graveyard grue-- show that Lovecraft's preoccupations were already in place in his first mature work.
"Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" is a better story than "The Tomb," and yet I got less pleasure out of this reading of it. That's partly down to simple familarity: I still enjoy James, so I've reread his canon more recently than Lovecraft's, though not all that recently. The other thing is that "The Tomb" is far enough from Lovecraft's distinctive mode that I approached it without expectation. "Scrap-Book," by contrast, is so close to first-rate James that its minor imperfections are all the more evident.
And they are minor, though given the delicate balance of a ghost story small blemishes can stand out. I don't remember who pointed out that "Good God! a hand like the hand in that picture!" is a terrible piece of dialogue at the worst possible point in the story for such a failure, but they were quite right. And the descriptions of the demon, both there and earlier, are overlong. The Jamesian haunting works by quick impressions-- "crumpled linen"-- rather than by this accumulation of almost zoological detail. How much more effective "It was drawn from the life" would be if it followed a much shorter description, one that made you feel the narrator actually despaired of conveying the image's effect in words. (I had never noticed before the echo of the "drawn from the life" line in "Pickman's Model." As likely to be coincidence as homage, but one wonders.)
The humor is slightly off as well. "I had no notion they came so dear," is in context really quite funny, but "an unbearably henpecked husband" and "a more formidable persecutor even than a termagant wife" are rather less subtly expressed than James' other forays into sexist humor. This isn't just about nitpicking. James' stories work by creating a placid atmosphere into which horrors insinuate themselves, almost gently at first, then with greater and greater force. Bland social comedy is part of that placidity, and "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" doesn't spend enough time generating the normal world before dispelling it. We're introduced to the sacristan's unease at the end of the first paragraph. The sense of exquisite progression that marks James' best work is absent.
And yet this is, indisputably, James. Not only the surface elements (the over-curious scholar, the casual erudition, the "ghost" that is actually a demon), but also and more significantly the sense of how to write what would come to be called a Jamesian story, is immediately evident. There's none of the long evolution, through homage and past traditional supernaturalism, of what would come to be called the Lovecraftian. That doesn't make James a better writer, obviously. This is a case where the destination does actually matter more than the journey. And the downside of emerging fully-formed is that you have nowhere to go but down. I have a great fondness for "A Vignette," but that's more for its apparent autobiographical elements than for its artistic merit. There won't be a "Last Stories" post in this series, both because I'll have given up and because I'll run out of James before I run out of Lovecraft, but the contrast between "A Vignette" and "The Haunter of the Dark" would be much less kind to James than the contrast between the current stories is to Lovecraft. (Yes, I know, "In the Walls of Eryx" and "The Night Ocean." Never mind.)
So that's the beginning. Next will be "Lost Hearts," never a favorite of mine, and "Dagon," of which I remember very little. Until then, don't buy any old books that are going too cheap, and stay away from locked but ajar tombs.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Books and magazines read, 2015
This is my reading list for 2015. An asterisk means I was re-reading a book rather than reading it for the first time.
Once again I didn't read as many books by women as I'd intended to, just 31 out of 86. 86 is a sharp decline from last year's 132, but in April I bought a PlayStation 4 and in September I got a smart phone, so the surprising thing is that the count isn't lower.
I've added quick notes at the end of each month on certain books from the first half of the year. A lot of these books were review copies; you can read my reviews on Amazon here.
January
1. Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America
2. Laurie R. King, The Moor
3. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
4. Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem
5. Sharma Shields, The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac
6. Laurie R. King, Justice Hall
The Mary Russell novels aren't exactly any good, but they're very readable, and there's a certain fascination in how staggeringly implausible a character Mary is, how obviously she's a hybrid of a plausible apprentice for Sherlock Holmes and an author surrogate for Laurie R. King. Frankly, the books would be more plausible and more enjoyable if King dropped the Holmes baggage and wrote about a globe-trotting theologian.
I can't say I was blown away by Cloud Atlas. The nested narratives are appealing, yes, and Mitchell writes competently in a variety of styles. But he's not quite breathtaking in any of them, and the narratives don't connect or illuminate each other except in incidental or trivial ways. I'm sympathetic to the larger humanist message, but the play with genre conventions means that none of the characters feel grounded enough to make that message more than a platitude. This is snobbish to say, but if they can make a blockbuster movie that fully captures what's going on in your novel, it's probably not a work of great profundity.
February
1. Peter Carey, Amnesia
2. Judith Claire Mitchell, A Reunion of Ghosts
3. Kirker Butler, Pretty Ugly
4. Dave Barry, Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster)
5. K. J. Parker, Academic Exercises
K. J. Parker really is rather good, and the short stories are an accessible introduction to his sensibility. "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong" is a small masterpiece of ironies and moral turnabouts, which are Parker's specialty; under a broad sense of humor (he also writes comic fantasy under his real name, Tom Holt), he has as cynical a view of human nature as any writer of "grimdark."
March
1. Daniel Handler, We Are Pirates
2. Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread
3. Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife
4. Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
5. Kerry Howley, Thrown
6. David Gates, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
I love Daniel Handler's work in general, both under his own name and as Lemony Snicket, but We Are Pirates didn't work for me. One of its narrative strands felt like a generic male-inadequacy narrative, for which I have limited patience, and the other went to dark and unusual places but then fizzled out in a weirdly pat resolution.
Thrown is a very amusing piece of "creative nonfiction" that simultaneously satirizes and expands the academic study of violent sports, and also offers an insightful and melancholy portrait of the mysterious isolation of driven athletes.
April
1. Brian W. Aldiss, Finches of Mars
2. Chris Beckett, Mother of Eden
3. K. J. Parker, Sharps
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Parts 1-3)
4. Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
5. P. D. James, The Children of Men
6. Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble
I was on a dystopian kick at the end of April, apparently. Station Eleven is a lovely and sad novel, Shakespearean in more ways than one, layered with coincidence and irony, tragedy and rebirth. Not perhaps a work of great thematic complexity, but it's one of those case where the execution gives it great emotional impact all the same.
I don't know quite what to say about The Children of Men. Honestly, my clearest recollection is of how pointless and distracting the shifts between first-person and third-person narration were. The concept is compelling, and the first half gets the melancholy of a defeated world quite right, but it peters out into a chase narrative that's well-executed but meaningless.
World of Trouble is a great conclusion to a great trilogy. They're all tightly-constructed, but only the first in the series really worked as a mystery; the real subject of the series is the portrait of the stages of grief of a doomed planet, and of a man whose need for order persists even in the face of something that will shatter all theories of meaning.
May
1. Sue Grafton, E is for Evidence*
2. Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game*
3. Stephen King, Revival
4. Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 4)
5. Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide
6. Mary Rickert, The Memory Garden
7. Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Lovers on All Saints' Day
8. Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass
9. Lyndsay Faye, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson
10. Stephen and Joyce Singular, The Spiral Notebook: The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth
11. Sophie Jaff, Love is Red
The Karen Joy Fowler collection is seriously good stuff, and will surprise those who only know her from more accessible and straightforward work like The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
June
1. Robert Aickman, The Strangers and Other Writings
2. George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 5)
3. Thomas Mallon, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years
4. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors
5. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
6. Edwidge Danticat, Untwine
7. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
The Mallon novel is great, cynical and gossipy yet never cheap, researched but never dry. I have no idea if it's accurate or realistic or whatever other label, but regardless of how well it captures Washington, it expresses something real about how people can be vastly yet casually self-centered.
July
1. Thomas Mallon, Watergate
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 6)
2. Gregory Maguire, After Alice
3. Joe Abercrombie, Half the World
4. Joe Abercrombie, Half a War
5. Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver*
6. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
7. Lucius Shepard, The Dragon Griaule
Shepard's stories about the Dragon Griaule are extraordinary metaphors for obsession, or fate, or social control, or all three. Either way they're peerless examples of a kind of psychologically dense, atmospheric weird fiction.
August
1. Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord
2. Harry Turtledove, We Install and Other Stories
3. Robin Hobb, Fool's Quest
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 7)
4. Lauren Redniss, Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future
5. Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat
September
1. Linda Nagata, The Red: The Trials
2. See the Elephant, Issue One
3. Clifford D. Simak, I am Crying All Inside and Other Stories
4. William Boyd, Sweet Caress
5. Patrick Modiano, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood
6. Sue Grafton, F is for Fugitive*
7. Matt Bell, Scrapper
8. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 8)
9. K. J. Parker, Colours in the Steel
10. Deanna Raybourn, Silent on the Moor
11. John Banville, The Blue Guitar
12. Tessa Hadley, The Past
October
1. Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
2. Umberto Eco, Numero Zero
3. Tom Hart, Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir
4. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy
5. Colum McCann, Thirteen Ways of Looking
6. William H. Gass, Eyes: Novellas and Stories
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 9)
7. David Mitchell, Slade House
8. Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs
9. Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling
10. Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale
November
1. Patrick Ness, More Than This
2. Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 10)
3. Judd Apatow, Sick in the Head: Conversations about Life and Comedy
4. Daniel Handler, The Basic Eight*
December
1. China Mieville, This Census-Taker
2. D. G. Hilton, Biddy Debeau Rides for His Life
3. Louise Penny, Still Life
4. Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 11)
5. Anne Perry, The Cater Street Hangman
6. John Donvan and Caren Zucker, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism
7. Peter Dickinson, The Yellow Room Conspiracy
Once again I didn't read as many books by women as I'd intended to, just 31 out of 86. 86 is a sharp decline from last year's 132, but in April I bought a PlayStation 4 and in September I got a smart phone, so the surprising thing is that the count isn't lower.
I've added quick notes at the end of each month on certain books from the first half of the year. A lot of these books were review copies; you can read my reviews on Amazon here.
January
1. Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America
2. Laurie R. King, The Moor
3. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
4. Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem
5. Sharma Shields, The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac
6. Laurie R. King, Justice Hall
The Mary Russell novels aren't exactly any good, but they're very readable, and there's a certain fascination in how staggeringly implausible a character Mary is, how obviously she's a hybrid of a plausible apprentice for Sherlock Holmes and an author surrogate for Laurie R. King. Frankly, the books would be more plausible and more enjoyable if King dropped the Holmes baggage and wrote about a globe-trotting theologian.
I can't say I was blown away by Cloud Atlas. The nested narratives are appealing, yes, and Mitchell writes competently in a variety of styles. But he's not quite breathtaking in any of them, and the narratives don't connect or illuminate each other except in incidental or trivial ways. I'm sympathetic to the larger humanist message, but the play with genre conventions means that none of the characters feel grounded enough to make that message more than a platitude. This is snobbish to say, but if they can make a blockbuster movie that fully captures what's going on in your novel, it's probably not a work of great profundity.
February
1. Peter Carey, Amnesia
2. Judith Claire Mitchell, A Reunion of Ghosts
3. Kirker Butler, Pretty Ugly
4. Dave Barry, Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster)
5. K. J. Parker, Academic Exercises
K. J. Parker really is rather good, and the short stories are an accessible introduction to his sensibility. "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong" is a small masterpiece of ironies and moral turnabouts, which are Parker's specialty; under a broad sense of humor (he also writes comic fantasy under his real name, Tom Holt), he has as cynical a view of human nature as any writer of "grimdark."
March
1. Daniel Handler, We Are Pirates
2. Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread
3. Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife
4. Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
5. Kerry Howley, Thrown
6. David Gates, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
I love Daniel Handler's work in general, both under his own name and as Lemony Snicket, but We Are Pirates didn't work for me. One of its narrative strands felt like a generic male-inadequacy narrative, for which I have limited patience, and the other went to dark and unusual places but then fizzled out in a weirdly pat resolution.
Thrown is a very amusing piece of "creative nonfiction" that simultaneously satirizes and expands the academic study of violent sports, and also offers an insightful and melancholy portrait of the mysterious isolation of driven athletes.
April
1. Brian W. Aldiss, Finches of Mars
2. Chris Beckett, Mother of Eden
3. K. J. Parker, Sharps
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Parts 1-3)
4. Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
5. P. D. James, The Children of Men
6. Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble
I was on a dystopian kick at the end of April, apparently. Station Eleven is a lovely and sad novel, Shakespearean in more ways than one, layered with coincidence and irony, tragedy and rebirth. Not perhaps a work of great thematic complexity, but it's one of those case where the execution gives it great emotional impact all the same.
I don't know quite what to say about The Children of Men. Honestly, my clearest recollection is of how pointless and distracting the shifts between first-person and third-person narration were. The concept is compelling, and the first half gets the melancholy of a defeated world quite right, but it peters out into a chase narrative that's well-executed but meaningless.
World of Trouble is a great conclusion to a great trilogy. They're all tightly-constructed, but only the first in the series really worked as a mystery; the real subject of the series is the portrait of the stages of grief of a doomed planet, and of a man whose need for order persists even in the face of something that will shatter all theories of meaning.
May
1. Sue Grafton, E is for Evidence*
2. Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game*
3. Stephen King, Revival
4. Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 4)
5. Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide
6. Mary Rickert, The Memory Garden
7. Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Lovers on All Saints' Day
8. Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass
9. Lyndsay Faye, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson
10. Stephen and Joyce Singular, The Spiral Notebook: The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth
11. Sophie Jaff, Love is Red
The Karen Joy Fowler collection is seriously good stuff, and will surprise those who only know her from more accessible and straightforward work like The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
June
1. Robert Aickman, The Strangers and Other Writings
2. George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 5)
3. Thomas Mallon, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years
4. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors
5. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
6. Edwidge Danticat, Untwine
7. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
The Mallon novel is great, cynical and gossipy yet never cheap, researched but never dry. I have no idea if it's accurate or realistic or whatever other label, but regardless of how well it captures Washington, it expresses something real about how people can be vastly yet casually self-centered.
July
1. Thomas Mallon, Watergate
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 6)
2. Gregory Maguire, After Alice
3. Joe Abercrombie, Half the World
4. Joe Abercrombie, Half a War
5. Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver*
6. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
7. Lucius Shepard, The Dragon Griaule
Shepard's stories about the Dragon Griaule are extraordinary metaphors for obsession, or fate, or social control, or all three. Either way they're peerless examples of a kind of psychologically dense, atmospheric weird fiction.
August
1. Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord
2. Harry Turtledove, We Install and Other Stories
3. Robin Hobb, Fool's Quest
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 7)
4. Lauren Redniss, Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future
5. Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat
September
1. Linda Nagata, The Red: The Trials
2. See the Elephant, Issue One
3. Clifford D. Simak, I am Crying All Inside and Other Stories
4. William Boyd, Sweet Caress
5. Patrick Modiano, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood
6. Sue Grafton, F is for Fugitive*
7. Matt Bell, Scrapper
8. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 8)
9. K. J. Parker, Colours in the Steel
10. Deanna Raybourn, Silent on the Moor
11. John Banville, The Blue Guitar
12. Tessa Hadley, The Past
October
1. Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
2. Umberto Eco, Numero Zero
3. Tom Hart, Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir
4. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy
5. Colum McCann, Thirteen Ways of Looking
6. William H. Gass, Eyes: Novellas and Stories
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 9)
7. David Mitchell, Slade House
8. Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs
9. Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling
10. Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale
November
1. Patrick Ness, More Than This
2. Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 10)
3. Judd Apatow, Sick in the Head: Conversations about Life and Comedy
4. Daniel Handler, The Basic Eight*
December
1. China Mieville, This Census-Taker
2. D. G. Hilton, Biddy Debeau Rides for His Life
3. Louise Penny, Still Life
4. Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
-. K. J. Parker, The Two of Swords (Part 11)
5. Anne Perry, The Cater Street Hangman
6. John Donvan and Caren Zucker, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism
7. Peter Dickinson, The Yellow Room Conspiracy
Monday, December 21, 2015
The "I don't have to have a topic" show: Bloodborne edition
I couldn't come up with a real topic for a post today, and I spent so much time tonight playing Bloodborne that I don't have the energy to write a real one anyway. So here is a description of what I did in Bloodborne tonight.
I started off at the Nightmare Church lamp in the expansion, because I took a few first shots at Ludwig last night. What a miserable fight that is: the size of a giant boss and the speed of a hunter. His combos keep killing me before I can do anything. Eventually I'll have to learn some actual strategies, but for tonight I put that aside in favor of stuff from the main game.
I had gotten to the area before Mergo's Wet Nurse and hadn't really expected to fight it any time soon, since I still have the expansion and some miscellaneous collecting and grinding to do before I want to be forced into New Game +, and I figured once I started the final chain of bosses I'd decide to finish despite that. But then I found out they'd added the Blood Rock to the Insight shop, and I really wanted to +10 my Holy Blade. I used the one you find in the Nightmare of Mensis to +10 my Saw Cleaver, because it had been my main weapon for most of the game and I'm fond of it, but at my current level the Holy Blade is objectively a better option. And you can only buy Blood Rocks with Insight after you defeat the Wet Nurse, so the choice was clear.
I was talking about the game with a friend at work today and he told me it was an easy fight. I thought, Well, maybe for you, because I tend not to do well with giant enemies. But no, he was right: it's surprisingly easy. I have no idea why the official guide lists it as an S-ranked fight. Those melee combos are vicious, but it's so slow that getting behind it and hacking like mad is no problem. I died once because I tried to attack while the clone was out instead of just dodging (and because I still had my triple-stacked Moon runes on instead of the defense and HP boosters I use on bosses), but the next time it went down without much trouble. It only even used Nightmare Veil once. Which makes sense, as something that blinds you more than it does your enemy is a terrible attack. I almost felt bad for it watching it flail around halfway across the room.
So after the fight I went directly to the Insight Shop, bought the Blood Rock, and perfected my Holy Blade. Then I used all my collected Coldblood items to augment the 72,000 echoes you get from the Wet Nurse, and leveled up three times to reach Level 100. (Yes, I am kind of overleveled. I like it that way.) For a long time I was doing a very balanced physical build, with equal amounts of Vitality, Endurance, and Strength, moderate Skill, and low Bloodtinge and Arcane. But the more I used the Holy Blade, the more helpful extra Skill became, and lately I've started thinking it might be nice to use the Threaded Cane in New Game +. So I've started boosting Skill as well. Right now my Vitality, Endurance, and Skill are around 30, while my Strength is 36. Bloodtinge and Arcane are all the way down at 11. I keep wanting to add some, but by now it's like, what's the point?
Then I approached Gehrman, in theory just to watch the cutscene and get a sense of how he moves. But I was able to do so much damage with each combo that I thought, Maybe I could win this tonight, and in fact I did just that on my third try, the first in which I took him past phase one. It was a close thing, though: I had no vials and about 20% HP when he took the final hit. In some ways, the first phase was actually the hardest for me: it's tough to gauge when he's using that hook maneuver, and those combos are brutal. When he pulled out the gun I thought, I'm doomed. But while I got hit a lot (I don't know how to dodge bullet spreads in this game), it never did much damage or delayed me while I was close enough for him to attack. And his forward rolls kept putting him in an ideal position for me to get off a nice combo. The third phase was brutal: I never worked out how to dodge the midair attack, so if he'd used that after I ran out of vials I would have died. But at the end he stuck to basic melee attacks, and while he staggered me twice I had just enough time to dodge away before he could hit me with a visceral. Also, I just kept hitting him while he built up that area of effect attack, not even bothering to dodge, and while I took a lot of damage that way, I could heal and he couldn't.
So Gehrman died, and I quit out immediately before the Moon Presence could kill me and take my Echoes. Which turned out not to exist. I didn't realize the game withheld the ones Gehrman drops until you kill the Moon Presence, although it makes a lot of sense. I didn't try the Moon Presence at all, because I definitely don't want to get caught up in fighting it, win, and wind up in New Game + before I'm ready to be there.
I did some other, less interesting stuff tonight, including checking out how boring it was to grind for Blood Stone Chunks using the Scourge Beasts in the Upper Cathedral Ward (answer: very). But this post is already long enough, and of no interest to most of you anyway. So I think I'll just call it a night.
I started off at the Nightmare Church lamp in the expansion, because I took a few first shots at Ludwig last night. What a miserable fight that is: the size of a giant boss and the speed of a hunter. His combos keep killing me before I can do anything. Eventually I'll have to learn some actual strategies, but for tonight I put that aside in favor of stuff from the main game.
I had gotten to the area before Mergo's Wet Nurse and hadn't really expected to fight it any time soon, since I still have the expansion and some miscellaneous collecting and grinding to do before I want to be forced into New Game +, and I figured once I started the final chain of bosses I'd decide to finish despite that. But then I found out they'd added the Blood Rock to the Insight shop, and I really wanted to +10 my Holy Blade. I used the one you find in the Nightmare of Mensis to +10 my Saw Cleaver, because it had been my main weapon for most of the game and I'm fond of it, but at my current level the Holy Blade is objectively a better option. And you can only buy Blood Rocks with Insight after you defeat the Wet Nurse, so the choice was clear.
I was talking about the game with a friend at work today and he told me it was an easy fight. I thought, Well, maybe for you, because I tend not to do well with giant enemies. But no, he was right: it's surprisingly easy. I have no idea why the official guide lists it as an S-ranked fight. Those melee combos are vicious, but it's so slow that getting behind it and hacking like mad is no problem. I died once because I tried to attack while the clone was out instead of just dodging (and because I still had my triple-stacked Moon runes on instead of the defense and HP boosters I use on bosses), but the next time it went down without much trouble. It only even used Nightmare Veil once. Which makes sense, as something that blinds you more than it does your enemy is a terrible attack. I almost felt bad for it watching it flail around halfway across the room.
So after the fight I went directly to the Insight Shop, bought the Blood Rock, and perfected my Holy Blade. Then I used all my collected Coldblood items to augment the 72,000 echoes you get from the Wet Nurse, and leveled up three times to reach Level 100. (Yes, I am kind of overleveled. I like it that way.) For a long time I was doing a very balanced physical build, with equal amounts of Vitality, Endurance, and Strength, moderate Skill, and low Bloodtinge and Arcane. But the more I used the Holy Blade, the more helpful extra Skill became, and lately I've started thinking it might be nice to use the Threaded Cane in New Game +. So I've started boosting Skill as well. Right now my Vitality, Endurance, and Skill are around 30, while my Strength is 36. Bloodtinge and Arcane are all the way down at 11. I keep wanting to add some, but by now it's like, what's the point?
Then I approached Gehrman, in theory just to watch the cutscene and get a sense of how he moves. But I was able to do so much damage with each combo that I thought, Maybe I could win this tonight, and in fact I did just that on my third try, the first in which I took him past phase one. It was a close thing, though: I had no vials and about 20% HP when he took the final hit. In some ways, the first phase was actually the hardest for me: it's tough to gauge when he's using that hook maneuver, and those combos are brutal. When he pulled out the gun I thought, I'm doomed. But while I got hit a lot (I don't know how to dodge bullet spreads in this game), it never did much damage or delayed me while I was close enough for him to attack. And his forward rolls kept putting him in an ideal position for me to get off a nice combo. The third phase was brutal: I never worked out how to dodge the midair attack, so if he'd used that after I ran out of vials I would have died. But at the end he stuck to basic melee attacks, and while he staggered me twice I had just enough time to dodge away before he could hit me with a visceral. Also, I just kept hitting him while he built up that area of effect attack, not even bothering to dodge, and while I took a lot of damage that way, I could heal and he couldn't.
So Gehrman died, and I quit out immediately before the Moon Presence could kill me and take my Echoes. Which turned out not to exist. I didn't realize the game withheld the ones Gehrman drops until you kill the Moon Presence, although it makes a lot of sense. I didn't try the Moon Presence at all, because I definitely don't want to get caught up in fighting it, win, and wind up in New Game + before I'm ready to be there.
I did some other, less interesting stuff tonight, including checking out how boring it was to grind for Blood Stone Chunks using the Scourge Beasts in the Upper Cathedral Ward (answer: very). But this post is already long enough, and of no interest to most of you anyway. So I think I'll just call it a night.
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