Michel Houellebecq - H.P. Lovecraft - Against the World, Against Life (1991)

 

The initial reason for my reading Michel Houellebecq is the general serving suggestion of my supposed peers that I shouldn't read him; and I'm reading him regardless on the understanding that he and I may not agree on absolutely everything, and may even violently disagree on a couple of things. If you're unable to tell the difference between Houellebecq and Nigel Farage appearing on primetime national television to complain about having been silenced, then not only is that hardly my problem but you're a fucking idiot.

Anyway, this lengthy essay almost counts as a debut novel of sorts, and is among the few things I've read about Lovecraft which isn't revisionary bollocks. Of course, the aspect of Howie which has been most subject to revision has been his racism which tends to be downgraded to him being a man of his time, and anyway he grew out of it - which as a view is probably sustainable if you've never read, just off the top of my head, every single paragraph of The Dunwich Horror; and that was one of the good ones. Houellebecq's thesis is that most of what Lovecraft wrote reads as it does for reasons beyond his being a recluse, or technically naive, specifically that the great texts - and it should be easy enough to work out which of the stories he refers to by that term - are supposed to be that way. Lovecraft's characters tend to be generic because they're there entirely to carry the narrative and because Lovecraft was a misanthrope. His values inform what he wrote, regardless of any consideration of who might be reading or even paying for the privilege.

The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential - that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised.

It's a very convincing argument, and one that would seem to increase one's appreciation of all those squelchy tales of the super spooky space octopus in so much as that it's consistent with what we know - unlike the proposition that Howard had pretty much transformed into Ben Elton by the end of his life.

More shaky is the notion of there being such a thing as a philosophy of the Cthulhu Mythos - if we're to call it that - which works if you don't understand what is meant by the term philosophy, but here refers to an undifferentiated blast of nihilism as the negation of philosophy. In other words, Lovecraft at his best might be deemed the literary equivalent of listening to Ramleh at full volume; which I can see.

In support of this alleged philosophical quality, Houellebecq also offers the continuation of the Cthulhu Mythos by other authors which, if roughly spontaneous and undertaken purely for the sake of the art, I can't really see as being significantly different to kids growing up with the hope of one day writing the Spider-Man comic and so contributing to that universe; or to Perry Rhodan, Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Judge Dredd or whoever else. More likely, it strikes me that the significance and enduring appeal of the Cthulhu Mythos is its presenting a consistent cast of collectible characters rendered in primary colours as a ready-made playbox in which persons who like to make lists of things can indulge themselves, and notably the sort of persons who really, really need their content providers to be on their right side of history.

This edition also reproduces in full both The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness presumably for the sake of comparison; but which unfortunately undermine some of what Houellebecq has written, at least for me. I don't think I've ever been convinced by the telling of The Call of Cthulhu despite that it supports Houellebecq's argument about Lovecraft's structural preferences; and although I found The Whisperer in Darkness effective and reasonably enjoyable, I really have to wonder at my being completely unable to recall having read it before whilst knowing that I read and apparently enjoyed it back in May, 2015. Given that Houellebecq will have read both in French, maybe something was gained in translation. That being suggested, his argument for the carefully directed precision of Lovecraft's narrative structure is surely cast into doubt by The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, produced the same year as Cthulhu and yet reading like the work of a ham-fisted adolescent

Regardless of anything, it's a pleasure and genuinely interesting to read about the man without having to make adjustments for some editorial bias attempting to paint himself as having been just a slightly scarier Lewis Carroll without the kiddy fiddling; and while I don't, for what it may be worth, agree with everything Houellebecq says, he nevertheless makes some fucking great points. In fact, I'm not sure Lovecraft did anything to deserve such a thoughtful and beautifully rendered biography.

A. Merritt - The Fox Woman & Other Stories (1949)

Just for the sake of a recap in the event of your having forgotten who he was - which is understandable given that most of us apparently have - if you're into the weird stuff, then Merritt was probably your favourite author's favourite author. He collaborated with Lovecraft and was a legend in his own lifetime, but a legend which faded with surprising haste, possibly due to the popularity of the sort of thing he wrote having likewise faded. It was fantasy, often drawing on myth and legend but from a twentieth century perspective, and with the influence of H. Rider Haggard very much in evidence. Merritt made a name for himself in the genre with unusually baroque prose which might have verged on the purple had he not applied it with such elegance.

That said, a little sometimes went a long way with Merritt, with the most loquacious application of bon mots suffocating the narrative in ebullient flourishes of topaz more languid than even the silken robes of Lao-Tzu as he rises to greet the crimson morn etc. etc., and his characters can be occasionally somewhat stereotypical. When everything's working as it should, this isn't a problem, but they can't all be classics. Actually, for all those of his books which I've read have going for them, I'm not convinced any of them are truly classics; and I'm not sure about this lot either.

The Fox Woman itself is a mostly elegant excursion into Chinese mythology which surely didn't need to be fifty pages; and perhaps may not have been in an ideal world, given that it's an unfinished piece published posthumously, along with a couple of other sketchy fragments featured here. Three Lines of Old French is one of those deals where some saucy bint you meet in a dream sends you a letter through the actual real world postal system, and it features a line describing military casualties as dregs of a score of carryings to the red-wine press of war, which is probably overdoing it a bit. Two of the stories are related by groups of chaps sat smoking cigars by the fireside, each consecutively out-doing the previous guy's tale of strange animal transformations, concluding with some bloke turning into a bee. You really get the impression that it was written in full confidence of this expression being welded firmly onto the reader's face for the duration.

In Merritt's favour, the ideas are nice and the imagery is often vivid even where they amount to less than the sum of the parts. Through the Dragon Glass and The Women of the Wood are decent, as is The Last Poet and the Robots which succeeds if only through the sheer force of its own weirdness, notably seeming very much a potential precursor to Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. So that's a thumbs up even if I seem to be pulling a face.

When the Sleeper Wakes

H.G. Wells When the Sleeper Wakes (1903)
This was written as a serial and published in the Graphic, whatever that was, between 1898 and 1903. I assume it's therefore different to Herbert's 1910 revision as the novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which I haven't read. I gather Wells was dissatisfied with the serial version and took the opportunity to iron out a few of the creases, which I understand because I too am dissatisfied with the serial version.

The story follows a man called Graham who sleeps for a couple of centuries, wakes to a futuristic society which has come to regard him as a near God-like figure for no immediately credible reason, and who then comes to take a dim view of the aforementioned futuristic society. It's a dystopia and is thus ancestral to more or less an entire genre, although Wells' version of the future foreshadows that of Aldous Huxley more than it does Orwell's 1984, particularly with the babble machines feeding the populace a steady diet of complete bollocks in a spirit we have come to associate with Fox News. Science-fiction has a generally poor track record for predicting the future which, to be fair, isn't always the intent so much as passing comment on emergent trends of the time in which it was written - which is the point that poor old Hugo Gernsback seemed to miss. Sleeper, unfortunately, doesn't even seem to say a whole lot about the nineteenth century aside from its characteristic obsession with aviation. Also the race thing is a little uncomfortable, with an imported black police force here serving for the brutal nightstick of the state. Nevertheless, the term savage is used just once so far as I noticed and it would be unfair to castigate Wells for having grown up in colonial Victorian society. Certainly his attitudes seem mild in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs dog-whistling the Klan or Lovecraft inserting the phrase let's go, Brandon into every other tale.

Wells wrote some astonishing books, but I've found the ground tough going once you're past the hits. In the Days of the Comet is mostly decent, but I found The War in the Air pretty thin and The Food of the Gods borderline unreadable; and Sleeper probably isn't as good as even The Food of the Gods which at least had jokes, or tried to crack jokes. It's not terrible, but it's a bit of a chore because there's not much to be said once we're done with how the times have changed. I ended up skimming the last thirty or so pages just in case anything happened, and nothing did apart from Graham crashing his plane. Wells just about communicates his loosely socialist views along with a well founded suspicion of anything calling itself a revolution, but it's all bogged down in the humourless drone of Graham's protracted sighing about the state of the world and how everything used to be better, albeit with some justification.

I suppose I may one day take a shot at the revised version should I happen upon a copy, but I'm not in a hurry to seek it out.

Essential Defenders volume one

Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema & others

Essential Defenders volume one (1974)

My guess would be that someone at Marvel noticed all those extraneous superheroes they had laying around making the place look untidy and decided to hoover a few of them up into brand new superteams, just like the Avengers, so as to maximise something or other. Then a couple of years later they reprinted this one in black and white weekly instalments in a UK comic called Rampage. I'd recently experienced something of an epiphany for the form, having discovered 2000AD just a few months earlier. I'd always felt well disposed towards Marvel from afar, but there were too many titles and most of them had been going for yonks. Rampage therefore represented an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Each week featured half an issue of the Defenders plus reprints from the Nova comic book. It was pretty great as I recall, but went monthly after less than a year, changed format and lost me to the extent that I almost forgot all about it - which was weird. When John Byrne introduced Xemnu the Titan to his run on She-Hulk at the end of the eighties, I knew the guy looked sort of familiar but had no idea where I'd seen him.

So I picked this up partially as an experiment to see how much I could remember forgetting, if you see what I mean, and partially because I'm a middle aged man who is screened for colon cancer to a yearly schedule so it seems only natural that I should be purchasing seventies superhero comics aimed at twelve-year old boys.

Marketing aside, the premise of the Defenders was the assemblage of supertypes who otherwise tended to go it alone - Dr. Strange, Prince Namor, and the Hulk for starters, meaning a lot of what transpires is usually the other two trying to explain things to the big green thickie in hope that he'll thump someone. This big fat paving slab additionally kicks off with issues of solo comics which foreshadow events in the initial run of the Defenders, and it makes for a surprisingly satisfying and thematically consistent whole. Additionally, it's all quite revealing in terms of what made Marvel tick in the early days, or at least what made it so much more appealing than all those frowning boy scouts and hall monitors over at the distinguished competition. Marvel's roots, at least on the evidence of this lot, seem to lay with all those horror comics that Wertham had pulled from the shelves. Marvel's superheroes always seemed to have a bit more texture to me, and it seems because they're mostly Gods and monsters, misfits who could never have held down normal jobs as mild-mannered reporters; and thus do we open with a sixties issue of Dr. Strange which quotes H.P. Lovecraft and introduces the Nameless One, a two-headed extra-dimensional tosspot who seems very clearly descended from the weird fiction of the twenties and thirties. In fact, even once we fully ease into the era of men in tights, or at least the era of a percentage of those men present wearing the same, the Defenders remains satisfyingly odd and quite difficult to predict.

The art is mostly top shelf, and is particularly striking in black and white, and Ross Andru and Bill Everett's work on A Titan Walks Among Us! from Marvel Feature #3 is downright gorgeous even aside from being the place where I obviously first met Xemnu - and boy, some of those panels leapt right off the page to kiss me in the centre of the forehead.

Additionally we have the Avengers-Defenders war, which drags on a bit, but is probably significant in foreshadowing all those headachey multi-title and allegedly sense shattering crossovers of the eighties, Secret Crisis and all that; despite which, this thing is still very much to be recommended. I thought it would probably be at least an interesting curiosity, but it's fucking magnificent for the most part.

Dwellers in the Mirage

 

Abraham Merritt Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)
This is my third Merritt, and possibly my last depending upon how charitable I'm feeling should I happen across any of the remaining five in a used book store. While there's much to recommend Abe, of those I've read, this is the third of his novels to feature what is more or less the same story which, in case you can't be arsed to skip back to September, I've already summarised thus:

...belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra.

 

As with both The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss, Dwellers in the Mirage gets off to a frankly astonishing start before settling into a hundred or so pages of people running around with swords, and people who seem to have crept into the book while you weren't looking so it's anyone's guess who the hell they're supposed to be.

Merritt writes beautifully, like a grown man version of that to which Lovecraft aspired but never really quite achieved. His characters are fascinating and the set ups and situations into which they stumble are genuinely bizarre, and additionally spiced by the author pulling off some fairly detailed and hence plausible scientific explanations for the weirder aspects of his tale. Here we have a man who finds himself sharing a body with the personality of some mythic warrior from antiquity, and who then discovers a lost civilisation of pygmies living beneath a remote lake, except what appears to be a lake is actually some peculiar atmospheric effect concealing a Carboniferous landscape. The first half reads a little like Asimov turning his hand to sword and what may resemble sorcery but is actually a perfectly logical scientific phenomenon.

And I reflected, now, that science and religion are really blood brothers, which is largely why they hate each other so, that scientists and religionists are quite alike in their dogmatism, their intolerance, and that every bitter battle of religion over some interpretation of creed or cult has its parallel in battles of science over a bone or rock.

Unfortunately, the second half seems to be grunting fights, and I lost track of who was fighting who or how it started. In fact our man seems to have switched sides at some point, and I still have no idea why, or who Dara was supposed to be, so it became quickly exhausting. This is a shame because Merritt's Khalk'ru is essentially Lovecraft's Cthulhu written by a man with a solid understanding of physics and who isn't crippled by a pathological fear of foreigners.

Bugger. There's so much that's good about this one that maybe I should give him another chance. I guess we'll have to see.

The Moon Pool

 

Abraham Merritt The Moon Pool (1919)
To recap the salient points from the previous review, Merritt was huge in his day - in terms of reputation and sales rather than actual physical volume - but seems to have pretty much sunk from view in recent years. This was his first novel and is the second I've read, and is probably better than The Face in the Abyss in some respects while being more or less the same sort of deal, belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra. I'm drawn to Merritt specifically because he was a major influence on not only Robert Moore Williams, but also Richard Shaver; and for what it may be worth, the influence on H.P. Lovecraft - with whom he additionally collaborated at one point - is difficult to miss, particularly on the likes of The Dream Quest of Unreadable Kadath. In fact, it's probably fair to say that The Moon Pool amounts to Lovecraft with better planning and less Nigel Farage. I've seen it claimed that Merritt's writing was unfortunately of its time, usually meaning openly racist, but if so - leaving aside certain creaking stereotypes - actual xenophobia doesn't seem to feature in this one so far as I noticed.

In its favour, The Moon Pool gets off to an astonishing start, albeit one which quite clearly betrays the influence of Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, promising weird fiction filtered through a semi-scientific lens of such focus as to foreshadow Asimov during certain passages.

 

'I know how hard it is, Larry,' I answered. 'And don't think I have any idea that the phenomenon is supernatural in the sense spiritualists and table turners have given that word. I do think it is supernormal; energised by a force unknown to modern science—but that doesn't mean I think it outside the radius of science.'

Thus do we venture forth into the depths of a lost underground and formerly advanced civilisation - identified as Muria but probably referring to Lemuria - ruled by the Silent Ones, who clearly aren't human, and at the mercy of the terrible Dweller, the inhabitant of the moon pool of the title and who may or may not be made of moonlight; which Merritt admirably attempts to describe in approximately sciencey terms of sufficient conviction as to facilitate suspension of disbelief. So, as I already implied, it reads not unlike Lovecraft but without the drippy overwritten mysticism.

Unfortunately though, aside from our eminently likeable narrator, we also have his cosmopolitan band of adventuresome guys to contend with, comprising Olaf, Marakinoff, and Larry. The main point of Olaf seems to be the occasional comment about how something or other seems a bit like something from Norse myth. The Russian scientist Marakinoff doesn't really get to do much more than Olaf and never quite delivers on the promise of being the scheming bad guy. Larry O'Keefe, on the other hand, never shuts up, and barely a fucking page passes without our being reminded of just how Irish he is, which gets seriously tiresome.

'Sainted St. Patrick!' O'Keefe gazed ruminatively at his automatic. 'An' he expected me to kill that with this. Well, as Fergus O'Connor said when they sent him out to slaughter a wild bull with a potato knife, Ye'll niver rayilize how I appreciate the confidence ye show in me!'

Everything that happens reminds O'Keefe of something Irish and we get to hear all about it, and eventually I forgot what I was reading beyond having a vague impression of it occurring underground. I don't recall any specific mention of O'Keefe wearing a green bowler hat or carrying a pig under his arm, but my concentration wasn't all it could have been during a few of his more extended observations.

Additionally, as we come to the inevitable conclusion in an underground war, I couldn't help but notice misty-eyed eulogies to those making the ultimate sacrifice - which struck me as a little peculiar for something written in 1919; and Merritt mumbles darkly when referring to the Russian revolution, as possibly embodied by Marakinoff. Neither detail necessarily leaves a taste anything like so unsavoury as any of Lovecraft's odes to Tommy Robinson, but it doesn't help after all the greenface we've had to wade through in order to get to the actual fucking story. In terms of novels wherein adventuresome types discover underground civilisations, The Moon Pool could have been one of the best had Larry spent a lot less time banging on about Leprechauns and Brian Boru.

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
Purchased back in simpler times when, gripped by a sudden realisation of my having a reading age of about twelve, I thought I'd give this a go because it was the novelisation of Apocalypse Now. You can probably see why I found it a bit chewy first time around.

To be fair to the younger version of myself who probably actually would have considered reading charity novelisations [facetious reference to drivel withheld], I knew Heart of Darkness wasn't the novelisation of Apocalypse Now, and even now that I'm marginally less stupid, I still find it a bit on the chewy side. This is probably down to the method of its telling, narrated to the author rather than by him as an anecdote of improbable length which forms a distinctly impressionist version of events dictated by meaning rather than any conventional sequence, so we flash back and forth - as doubtless would an oral account - examining characters before we've met them or even been told who they are as a sort of narrative cubism; but to settle for a definitive painterly analogy, Francisco Goya seems the closest fit with his sepulchral canvases where night and fog conceal the more tangible horrors.

Anyway, for anyone who still cares, despite having been transposed to Vietnam in the sixties, Coppola's adaptation retains almost all of the details which matter with surprising fidelity - even Dennis Hopper. Kurtz here is an ivory trader who has spent just a little too long gazing into the abyss and by whom Conrad's views on colonialism - amongst other evils - are given voice. Kurtz goes into the night, and then becomes the night which, to expand it beyond just the colonial aspect, seems to have been Conrad's view of the headlong rush of progress which gripped his milieu, not as a refutation of its supposed benefits, but representing its casualties from a fully humanist perspective - the minds, bodies, and even cultures sacrificed in our eagerness to embrace the new century.

Heart of Darkness has been dismissed as racist in certain quarters and its true that it reduces Africa to a dark continent of savage and unimaginable horrors, but in its defence, this is from a colonial perspective, and that's our subject here. The reduction of the Congo to something monstrous says more about the intruders than about the Congo itself, so I would argue that the racist flag might be better planted elsewhere, in something which actually commits racism rather than simply fails to cheer on the perceived victim with sufficient enthusiasm - Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lovecraft for example, neither of whom ever wrote anything approaching the depth of this novella.

It's chewy, but it's short, and your brain will thank you if you can make the effort.

The Witches of Karres

James H. Schmitz The Witches of Karres (1966)
Thanks to Research Alpha, co-written with A.E. van Vogt and which I read back in February, Schmitz was seeming a lot like one of those great, long overlooked etc. etc. authors for a moment there, so it was exciting to have found this so soon after; and then I tried to read it.

In its favour - and it has a lot in its favour - The Witches of Karres is packed with the kind of weird and wonderful ideas which I can see would have appealed to his co-writer on Research Alpha; and Schmitz writes well, with genuine wit, and - taken in isolation - much of what he writes is a delight; yet once past the first couple of chapters, I was bored pretty much solid despite everything. Apparently this novel was formed from a couple of thematically linked short stories bolted together, and my guess would be that they probably worked fine as short stories and maybe didn't require inclusion in this three-but-felt-like-seven-hundred page marathon. The wit and the imagination may remain intact, but reduced to a much smaller fraction of the whole, I guess it all turns to wallpaper.

For anyone still wondering, The Witches of Karres is almost a fairy story transposed to space with a thoroughly Lovecraftian monster waiting at the end of the book. The witches are three little girls from the planet Karres, a world which is able to move around in space to elude its enemies, not least of these being the entity behind the terrifying worm weather, as it is known. As a novel, Witches has no business being quite such a slog given the story it attempts to tell, but a slog it unfortunately is.

While we're here, should anyone have noticed a Goodreads review implying that The Witches of Karres has some sort of paedophile subtext, the detail to which this person refers is specifically that one of the little girls fancies the starship captain who rescues her, thoroughly embarrassing the aforementioned starship captain, which hardly seems significant given all those children's stories I seem to recall wherein little girls develop a crush on some rescuing father figure or some dashing yet unobtainable knight; and which hardly leaves The Witches of Karres looking like the sort of thing you'd expect to find on Gary Glitter's hard drive. I also seem to remember Asterix's dog falling in love with Geriatrix's wife, which doesn't make her the lovely Debbie McGee. It's not that hard to understand, but the implication is about what I'd expect of an individual with a peace symbol and a smiley face in rainbow colours as their avatar. Scratch any one of those tie-dyed crusading new age fuckers and nine times out of ten you'll find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.

Tomb of Valdemar

Simon Messingham Tomb of Valdemar (2000)
Why do I do this to myself? It was the usual thing - shitty times justifying the written equivalent of comfort food because I'm too psychologically punch drunk to tackle Voltaire or any of the other stuff on the shelf of books purchased but as yet unread. I used to buy a couple of these Who things a month and read them religiously, and because that was more or less all I fucking read at the time, I lacked anything decent by which to make comparison, and so my filter was set pretty low. Some were great - as I've been able to confirm during more recent re-readings - and others were less great, meaning that attempted re-readings undertaken on this side of the millennium can be sometimes akin to tackling a Rupert annual, which is particularly disappointing when you have an apparently false memory of it having been at least up to the standard of Asimov or whoever.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Rupert annuals, by the way, but then I don't remember having read a Rupert annual which thought it was China Miéville.

Tomb of Valdemar has the reputation - at least in my head - of being the one where Simon Messingham got it right. It therefore seemed a safe bet, despite The Indestructible Man - which I read back in 2016 - being pure shite. Assorted Goodreads drones hail Tomb as being proper science-fiction like the stuff by all those guys who wrote those books they haven't actually read, or else miss the point completely by praising Tom Baker who is a television actor and as such had what I would suggest should be considered an entirely peripheral influence on this masterpiece.

Anyway, to get to the point, here we have Baker's Doctor imaginatively transposed to what is more or less Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu, but written so as to really, really, really make it feel like something which was on telly whilst also invoking Lovecraft at his most purple. The story is actually decent and not without a sense of invention, but the author insists on addressing both us and his characters in the rhetorical tone of a ponderous seventies Marvel comic, asking Tom Baker if he really thought that was a good idea, asking what he didst imagineth wouldst happen, and all that sort of shit liberally seasoned with ohs and ahs and self-conscious asides referring to whether or not we readers are getting anything out of Messingham's testimony; which I sort of wasn't. Tomb initially reads with the cadence of someone who would rather be telling you the story out loud while pulling spooky faces in a room lit only with black candles, so naturally there's a shitload of those inactive sentences wherein the full stop is used to invoke a portentous Orson Welles voice over; which I guess the author believes is dramatic, but which suggests a basic lack of ability. At least to me. Because it's obvious. And tedious. Just crap.

Also, one of the characters is described wearing a Red Dwarf T-shirt, so tee hee. Hooray for super bingeworthy cult telly shows. Plus there's Huvan, the pimple-spattered comedy adolescent who writes terrible poetry and takes himself far too seriously, which would be funnier if it didn't feel as though we were reading one of his efforts.

To be fair, this still pisses all over The Unreadable Man, which admittedly isn't saying much, and there's enough going on to infer there having been a decent novel in here somewhere, albeit one which has been obscured by its own telling. I really hope the other five million I'm still to revisit aren't quite so shabby as this.

The Mystery Play

Grant Morrison & John J. Muth The Mystery Play (1994)
I'm pretty sure I had this at the time but it didn't leave much of an impression due to an ongoing bout of comic book indigestion. Anyway, I'm better now, so here we are again. Muth's photorealist watercolours are at the most breathtaking I've seen, and Morrison reigns in his usual excesses to tell a proper grown-up story with allegories and everything. Comic book mythology being what it is, I can't help feeling this may have been written in the spirit of showing that silly Alan Moore once and for all, which may even inform the final scene wherein the gruesome reality of the tale we've just read is sold for presumably underwhelming development to some television dude coincidentally named Alan; and yet, for the sake of argument, show him it does in so much as that I can't really imagine himself achieving such lightness of touch without all the component parts having been nailed to some labyrinthine flow chart, somewhat spoiling the effect.

The narrative spins around the contemporary setting of a mystery play in which someone murders the bloke playing God, so God is dead, and without so much as a nudge, a wink, or anyone screaming do you see what I'm saying? in your face. The detective who seeks the truth of the murder is himself revealed to be hardly lacking in sin for which he's literally crucified, thus ultimately bringing salvation to the town, although there's a question mark hanging over whether the salvation provided has actually made anything better. As for what any of this might be saying, I guess it's saying quite a lot of things, and none of them so regulated or clearly defined as to be ticked off on an imaginary list as job done. The potential for ambiguity is why it works, and why it feels crafted rather than merely assembled - as with a piece of music, you simply have to read the thing, because descriptions - including this one - will be something else entirely; and neither a Mason nor a Lovecraftian space octopus to be seen.

The Face in the Abyss

Abraham Merritt The Face in the Abyss (1931)
It seems that Merritt was a big, big deal in his day, a name which dominated the fields of fantasy and science-fiction at the dawn of the pulp era before anyone had quite decided which was which or where to draw the line; and then he just went away, barely surviving as a footnote in popular terms. He significantly influenced both Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, but my own interest stems almost entirely from his influence on the work of Robert Moore Williams.

The Face in the Abyss is the first of Merritt's books I've even encountered on the shelves of a second-hand store, so naturally I snapped it up, although I suspect it probably wasn't the best place to start. The influence of H. Rider Haggard is tangible, so we have what feels a little like a more literary Edgar Rice Burroughs - intrepid explorers discovering lost civilisations full of dinosaurs and that sort of thing, embellished with occasional flourishes of sciencey ruminations.

The caverns of the face might be a laboratory of Nature, a crucible wherein, under unknown rays, transmutation of one element into another took place. Within the rock out of which the face was carved might be some substance which by these rays was transformed into gold. Fulfillment of that old dream… or inspiration… of the ancient alchemists which modern science is turning into reality. Had not Rutherford, the Englishman, succeeded in turning an entirely different element into pure copper by depriving it of an electron or two? Was not the final product of uranium, the vibrant mother of radium - dull, inert lead?

Yeah, I know - it still belongs to the special kind of ray school of technological speculation, but my point here is that this is essentially a fantasy novel wherein the magic is explicitly identified as advanced science.

The Face in the Abyss is otherwise very much of its time. Our hero learns of the lost gold of Atahualpa, setting off to find it in the inexplicable company of ruffians. Not a night seems to pass without one of them pulling a gun on the other three, tying them up, then delivering one of those hard boiled speeches about how he's known all along how they would turn out to be dirty, double-crossing rats, in light of which maybe he'll be keeping all the gold for himself, see? Of course, everyone is friends again next morning, having somehow risen above their little misunderstanding, at least until they encounter creatures which would almost certainly have been animated by Ray Harryhausen had this book ever been adapted for the big screen.

Merritt's prose has been generously described as florid, or as purple by less sympathetic critics. I fall somewhere between the two in holding that while his writing is ornate and often quite beautiful, a little goes a long way. Hoodlums aside, everyone in The Face in the Abyss speaks in what I have come to think of as Marvel Shakespearean, not quite the full my liege at the termination of every bleeding sentence, but certainly a lot of persons asking what say you, my friend?, and not a whole lot of chuckles to lighten the atmosphere of what begins to feel like one of the more portentous Ultravox records, thematically speaking.

I can see how Merritt's influence on Robert Moore Williams is at least as profound as that of A.E. van Vogt on Philip K. Dick, and I can see why he was popular for at least a couple of decades; and while this novel had a lot going for it, I unfortunately found it a bit of a trudge getting there.

The Book of Sand

Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Sand (1978)
These short stories apparently number amongst Borges' last writings, and I gather the collection is regarded as being amongst his lesser works. Personally, although I didn't find much which packed quite the same punch as any of the stories collected in Labyrinths, it may simply be that I had a better idea of what to expect with this one, and it seems simply a quieter, less demonstrative work. A couple of the tales simply pass beneath one's gaze, like watching a stream from a bridge, leaving only a vague impression; and yet even in such cases, Borges' voice remains gripping, pulling the reader into the narrative regardless of how well the story appears to be shaping up. It's quite difficult to work out how he does this, but he does it very well, and the effect is slightly eerie, underscoring the notion that maybe we're reading something which is more than just fiction.

The years pass and I've told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it's only my words I'm remembering.

As a writer who appears to speak directly from within his own pages, Borges writes books within books, implying layers of reality which blur the distinction between the reader and that which is read. These tales are short and evoke the mystery and serenity of de Chirico's art, fleeting presences half seen around a corner. In this one we have forgotten languages, a book which reads differently each time one opens it up, and even a tribute to those forbidden texts so pivotal to the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft - who, for all of his qualities, probably doesn't quite deserve such a tribute. This collection leaves the reader with the impression of having said a great deal, even though it's just a whisper, and the words seem to be different each time.

Doctor Who and the Zarbi

Bill Strutton Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965)
This would have been the third or maybe fourth book I ever read, excepting Asterix, Tintin and stuff like Where the Wild Things Are in which the pictures are either equal to or more important than the text. Being a children's book, this one features a token line illustration every few chapters so as to sweeten the pill, I suppose, but I'm not counting those. I'm guessing I would have been about eight. I was ill with something or other, and my mother had let me spend the day - or possibly days - convalescing in my parents' bed, probably because it was more comfortable than my own. On one of these days she came back from Stratford, our nearest town, with a copy of Terrance Dicks' Target novelisation of Spearhead from Space, probably because I'd spent so much time gaping at the cover in WHSmith. So that was, in theory, the first novel I ever read, and the other four Who adaptations then in print followed soon after, although I'd presumably recovered from whatever had struck me down by that point.

The Web Planet, here retitled so as to remind us that our purchase shall be rewarded with monsters, had accumulated the reputation of being amongst the worst Who tales ever to disgrace the screen last time I looked, although that was admittedly a while back. It was too long, too slow, and the effects were comical, leading to the Zarbi being sarcastically described as pantomime ants by Steve Lyons and Chris Howarth. I never shared this view, having enjoyed the VHS release on several occasions. It was slow, but I felt the weird pensive, atmosphere more than compensated; and whilst it's true that if you look very closely, you can see they're in a television studio rather than actually on the planet Vortis, and those creatures are really just underpaid human actors in costumes knocked up on the cheap, I never really saw why this should be considered a problem.

The novelisation worked better for my eight-year old self than it does now, probably because it duplicates the television script so closely, specifically identifies the star as Doctor Who at every opportunity - just like the strip in TV Comic - and is mostly a cycle of our heroes being captured then escaping, over and over until someone explains that they've just invented what may as well have been named the anti-Animus-gun and saves the day, the Animus being the entity which is controlling the Zarbi and causing them to behave like a set of cunts*.

In its favour, someone had actually bothered to teach Bill Strutton how to write a sentence, so it's competent, reasonably paced given the somewhat repetitive structure of the story, and with none of that tedious reliance on full-stops and non-sentences as an easy source of dramatic tension, the usual ham-fisted attempt to imply the cadence of a portentous voice-over. Also in its favour is that the original six telly episodes were at least trying to do something different in a peculiarly alien environment populated by creatures trying hard to be something stranger than yet more humans with knobbly foreheads. Subsequent authors have found Lovecraftian overtones in this one, which actually isn't too much of a stretch; and whilst a bit slow for me, the novelisation has a weirdness which very much reminds me of van Vogt, albeit in simplified form; so in summary, it's nothing amazing, but I've read worse.

*: The Animus isn't identified by that name in the book, and I don't remember if it was named as such on the telly, so probably that detail came later courtesy of Virgin publishing. Similarly, whilst I'm sure Hartnell's Doctor may well have referred to the Zarbi as a set of cunts, this wasn't in the book either.

The Valley of Spiders

H.G. Wells The Valley of Spiders (1905)
I didn't do very well with my last collection of Herbie's short stories, finding them generally patchy and of uneven quality amounting to things which might seem nice ideas as the mind wanders while doing the dishes, but which don't quite add up to a tale. It's hard to miss that a couple of these follow certain narrative conventions favoured by my fifteen-year old stepson, specifically that by which he came up with the saga of the raccoons with rainsticks.

He was back from a weekend at the ranch, and there had been rattlesnakes under the house. 'I called them raccoons with rainsticks,' he informed me, barely able to contain the pleasure taken in his own wit.

'Tell him how you came up with that,' my wife prompted.

'Well,' he began, figuratively taking a thoughtful puff on an imaginary cigar, 'we were in the bedroom and we could hear rattlesnakes under the house, and Courtlandt asked what it was, and I said it was raccoons with rainsticks!'

'What a great story,' I dutifully exclaimed.

Anyway, Wells employs more or less the same composition technique with tales centred upon the appearance of a weird and unusual thing, entailing the discovery of a thing which seems both weird and unusual, with the weird and unusual thing additionally named in the title of the story - The Moth or The Inexperienced Ghost being two examples. Despite being the father - or perhaps uncle - of modern science-fiction, there's not actually a whole lot of science here; although significantly, there's nothing traditionally supernatural, and that which falls outside the realm of anything sciencey should probably be termed either unexplained or just plain weird. These tales have the rhythm and mood of Poe - or what I vaguely remember of Poe - without quite invoking dark forces as anything much beyond a product of human imagination. I suppose therefore that this was supernatural horror catching up with the enlightenment, the death of God, and the industrial revolution.

Yet for whatever reason, I enjoyed this a whole lot more than the collection based around The Time Machine - or Poe for that matter. The stories were written between 1894 and 1905, roughly the decade from which Wells' better novels came, and so most of these are reasonably tight without too much of the whimsy or jabbering which characterised his less successful efforts. The Red Room succeeds as a ghost story in a universe which doesn't really allow for the existence of ghosts; Pollock and the Porroh Man achieves the same but with a more visceral mood which almost foreshadows Lovecraft; and The Crystal Egg serves as an intriguing pendant to War of the Worlds. As seems to be generally true of Wells' short stories, there's nothing here to match the likes of the hits, but it's nevertheless a decent collection in its own right.

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
I'm sure I remember hearing that it was Céline who first came up with the three little dots signifying a pause, although I don't seem to be able to find any sort of confirmation for this. Never mind.

Anyway, I've been meaning to read something for a couple of decades now, at least since discovering his writing to be an influence on that of Billy Childish, and of course Bukowski, and - as I've eventually realised - pretty much everyone else I'd consider worth bothering with. His innovations mainly seem to have been in introducing a crude - although not lacking eloquence - working class voice to literature, and a willingness to examine all of the gritty details, stains, and skidmarks from which we extrapolate reality at least as much as we do from prettier, less disturbing sights. He was never too worried about delivering a crowd pleaser.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me . . . and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my own class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

Journey to the End of the Night is roughly autobiographical, kicking off with our man's experience of the first world war and the unpleasant truths accordingly revealed.

People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid smelly water. From that moment on we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers' festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface. That's when the unbuttoning sets in, when filth triumphs and covers us entirely. It's a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion, and turds.

Driven to the end of his rope, Céline sits out some of the war in an asylum before being sent to French colonial Africa, itself only another variant of hell, from which point the narrative becomes oddly Swiftian, or at least more blatantly allegorical as he becomes a galley slave, rowing to the Americas.

Talk of surprises! What we suddenly discovered through the mist was so amazing that at first we refused to believe it, but then, when we were face to face with it, galley slaves or not, we couldn't help laughing, seeing it right there in front of us…

It's probably just me but this passage immediately put me in mind of Bernal Díaz describing the Spanish forces first arriving in the Valley of Mexico in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain of 1568.

With such wonderful sights to gaze on we did not know what to say, or if this was real that we saw before our eyes.

Of course, if it isn't just me, then the parallel probably constitutes weapons-grade sarcasm, given Céline's time in the Americas representing only a minor improvement on his time in Africa, and that it is characterised by escalating absurdity.

'I believe in the enumeration of fleas! It's a civilising factor, because enumeration is the basis of the most invaluable statistical data! . . . A progressive country must know the number of its fleas, broken down according to sex, age group, year and season . . .'

Indeed, this part of the novel might be taken as a descent into an underworld newly industrialised in the wake of the first world war.

The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises in front of everybody.

The power of Céline's testimony is such as to deliver something pithily quotable on more or less every other page, hence my thus far having used more of his words than my own. If there's a single theme to the novel it would seem to be humanity revealed as reduced to an industrial resource for the first half of the book.

'But you know, doctor, I'm an educated man. I even studied medicine at one time . . .'

At that he gave me a dirty look, I saw that I'd put my foot in it again, to my detriment.

'Your studies won't do you a bit of good around here, son. You're not here to think, you're here to make the movements you're told to. We don't need imaginative types in our factory. What we need is chimpanzees . . . Let me give you a piece of advice. Never mention your intelligence again! We'll think for you, my boy! A word to the wise.'

...and at the risk of hammering this one into the ground:

It's sickening to watch the workers bent over their machines, intent on giving them all possible pleasure, calibrating bolts and more bolts, instead of putting an end once and for all to this stench of oil, this vapour that burns your throat and attacks your eardrums from inside. It's not shame that makes them bow their heads. You give in to noise as you give in to war. At the machines you let yourself go with the two three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that's the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch, is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savour in your thoughts.

All of a sudden you've become disgustingly old.

All outside life must be done away with, made into steel, into something useful. We didn't love it enough the way it was, that's why. So it has to be made into an object, into something solid. The Regulations say so.

The second half of the book describes Céline's return to France where he sets up a medical practice, which in narrative terms allows for further exposition and reflection on both his misanthropy and its attendant self-loathing. Unfortunately, this second half lacks the dynamic of the first, pinning its narrative to events of lesser consequence, and so feeling a little formless in places, at least to me.

Anyway, the significance of Céline should hopefully be apparent from the quotes, in so much as that as a writer he clearly strove to get to the bones regardless of stroked egos, sales, or pleasing images, and yet without going too far the other way and serving up what may as well be Lovecraftian disgust. That he is not so well remembered as might be the case is unfortunate but understandable given his later antisemitism, and not just the sort of thing we tend to pass off as being of its time, but properly antisemitic material written as a vocal supporter of Hitler and the axis powers.

In his defence, or at least in the defence of Journey to the End of the Night, there's nothing antisemitic here, and not even anything particularly racist, which seems noteworthy given the African setting of a few chapters, and when it was written. In fact, given Céline's generally poor view of authority figures, it's far from obvious how he could ever have ended up as cheerleader for the Third Reich. The key is most likely to be found in his enduring misanthropy.

It's no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It's been proved. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals come into the world, labouring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on. Endless waves of useless beings keep rising from deep down in the ages to die in front of our noses, and yet here we stay, hoping for something  . . .

Sadly it seems to be a thin line which divides this sort of general realism from that which gets so thoroughly pissed off at everyone apparently wallowing in their own shit as to get misty-eyed over anything punishing which just so happens to entail jackboots; so Celine's slide to the far right should probably be considered reactionary in the literal sense, a move facilitated by the desire to attribute blame - as he himself once acknowledged.

When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.

It's a fucking shame, and that whole argument about whether it's possible to divorce a piece of art from the shithead who created it is more complicated than I have time to really consider right now, and is an issue which should probably be settled on a case by case basis; but for what it may be worth, Journey to the End of the Night is a genuinely great book, or at least the first half is a genuinely great book, regardless of anything else.

Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight

Robert Moore Williams Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight (1970)
Having discovered that this novel, sold as science-fiction, is actually an autobiographical ramble through Williams' peculiar life, I had to own it at any cost. Luckily the cost was peanuts because no-one remembers or cares who Robert Moore Williams was, which is an enormous shame. I've read three of his novels and they've each been strikingly bizarre, undeniably pulpy, but suggesting the dream imagery of A.E. van Vogt turned towards ponderous allegorical or philosophical ends, like a Gernsbackian update of nineteenth-century Symbolist novels such as A Voyage to Arcturus or Lilith - and yes I know Lindsay's novel dates from 1920 because I've just looked it up. Anyway, it seems obvious that there was a lot more going on here than a guy hacking out tales of rockets and aliens for the sake of making a living.

Williams' story begins with him growing up on a farm in Missouri, inspired by the writing of Abraham Merritt - also a big influence on both Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, with whom Williams' writing shares certain conceits - so clearly a name I'm going to have to investigate. I'd say Bob wasn't the full ticket, and his understanding of reality suggests possibly schizophrenic or otherwise psychologically unorthodox tendencies, but I don't know how much use it would be; and certainly there's not much point reading this thing with the opinion of it having been written by a nutcase. Williams experienced, not quite visions, but certainly voices and inexplicable occurrences, and whether or not they were all in his mind probably shouldn't matter.

Williams fixates on love early on, not just by the terms we already acknowledge, but as though it should be considered an ethereal force roughly akin to the animating yolia of Nahua mythology, or - if you must - the force of Star Wars. From then on he dabbles with Hubbard's Dianetics, specifically the notion of contemporary ills deriving from engrams of long forgotten trauma; then takes part in a new age commune in Colorado Springs, a group he refers to as the wild bunch; invents something called the colourscope with which he put on light shows for an audience towards some spiritual purpose; finally ending up dropping acid on a ranch in California.

Checking out this kick that the kids had going, using minimal quantities of LSD, the experimental work being done in nearby Mexico, I discovered that the kids knew exactly what they were doing! LSD opened a channel into this higher love that had been coming to me in other ways!

What the kids had found was love! Perhaps they had also discovered a way around the meaning of hydrogen!

They were doing exactly what I was doing, but doing it differently and better. They were seeking a path into tomorrow. And so was I! Love was not restricted to writers who lived in lonely mountain cabins and who were sometimes up at dawn to talk to weaning colts beside a horse corral. It was in these wonderful kids too. On university campuses and in little coffee houses the talk was of this astonishing love. Sometimes the regents of various universities were annoyed at demonstrations they could not understand, but my strong feeling was, and still is, that these young people with the shining faces were closer to the heart of life and nearer the path to tomorrow than all the regents who ever existed.

The seemingly esoteric reference to hydrogen stems from Williams' horror at the creation and use of the hydrogen bomb, which comes to symbolise the antithesis of the force he identifies as love.

Of course, on many levels it's all bonkers, but I'm sure we've already established as much, and simply being bonkers doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether or not Love is Forever has value as a piece of writing, which I believe it does. Williams takes a sort of shamanic journey through his own existence which, incredibly, is actually fairly coherent, and works because it is seasoned with self deprecation, just enough self-doubt to render it  readable, and the author's insistence that he is himself nothing special in the great scheme of things. As with so many others of his generation, Williams was simply looking for the way forward in human terms, perhaps not quite dreaming of supermen so much as a species which could at least move past the desire to blow itself up; and even with the testimony coming from the very edge of what the rest of us tend to regard as sanity, there are plenty of worthwhile truths in this book because it comes from a place of great honesty.

At the end I found Williams a likable character, a somewhat driven man who believed in his own experiences and wished only to share them with others; and it gives me cause to regret that he isn't better remembered. His work may not have been what you'd call mainstream, and at least two of the four novels I have are amongst the strangest things I've read, but he's not inaccessible, and at heart he was a populist.

Back when I first took to picking up old science-fiction paperbacks with lurid covers, I always hoped I'd discover some long forgotten master of the art. I just didn't imagine it would be anything quite so peculiar.

Robert Moore Williams, June 19th 1907 - May 12th 1977.

The City of Gold and Lead

John Christopher The City of Gold and Lead (1967)
As you will almost certainly be aware, The City of Gold and Lead is the second of John Christopher's trilogy of children's books set upon an Earth dominated by the alien Tripods. Where The White Mountains seemed more obviously like something extrapolated from The War of the Worlds, this one represents the point at which the tale heads off into new territory. The White Mountains kept its Tripods as a mysterious but remote menace whilst focussing on more familiar human concerns with authority, and how we act when it spins out of control.

This time we go right into the Tripod city to live amongst them as they exist beyond the safety and anonymity of their walking machines. It could have gone horribly wrong in reducing something distant and fairly scary to a known, even potentially comic entity as the creatures from within the machines are revealed to be three legged, tentacled cones of alien flesh with hopes and desires of their own, and apparently based on George Melly - if the one who enslaves Will, our main protagonist, is any indication. Christopher nevertheless pulls it off with ease, crafting a horror story which comes close to hinting at the excesses of the Nazis despite that these Nazis appear to resemble the sort of rubber monsters we bought for five pence a throw and stuck on our pencil tops when I were a lad. It may even be the peculiarity of the Masters - essentially more personable variations on Lovecraft's Great Race - which maintains the fine balance of the narrative by keeping the Tripods at a slight remove from their operators, therefore preserving the menace established in the first book.

Beyond the obvious matters of facing up to tyranny, helping your pals, and generally selfless acts, The City of Gold and Lead doesn't seem quite so philosophically weighty as The White Mountains, although there's also the possibility that I may simply have been overthinking that one; but then it doesn't need to be, because it does what it does to the point of perfection, and is as such one of the best things I've read in a while. As with its predecessor, I really, really wish I'd read this back when I was of the age group for whom it was written.

Eye of Terror

Barrington J. Bayley Eye of Terror (2000)
Shortly after plucking this one from the shelves at Half Price, I noticed it was a tie-in novel, and one of a series to which Dan Abnett has also contributed. This didn't strike me as a particularly good omen, although to be fair I had no idea what Warhammer 40,000 was supposed to be, and it's Barrington Bayley, so it must have something going for it, surely…

However, my first impressions seemed to bear out my fears, as briefly spunked out all over facebook.

It's pretty bloody awful - a novel which aspires to be a table full of little metal figures surrounded by grown men rolling funny-shaped dice in the basement of the mother of the one with the biggest beard. I bought it because it's Barrington Bayley, and Barrington Bayley is fab and weird, but this reads like something written to pay a hefty phone bill - such a waste of a genuine talent. Maybe it gets better. I'll give it another fifty pages.

It was embarrassing once I realised that a couple of my facebook friends were into that whole gaming business. It's not a pursuit which had ever inspired me towards any strong opinion, but what opinions I had were formed back in 1987 when some beardy dude at art college tried to recruit me into his Dungeons & Dragons enclave. He described the rules, most of which seemed to be about him controlling everything and everyone, and it didn't sound much like fun as I would recognise it. The guy was clearly a tosser and so that very much coloured my judgement of anything involving funny shaped dice; also, there's not many things I dislike so much as a novel which really, really wishes it were telly, so the prospect of a novel that wants to be a fucking game seemed depressing beyond reason.

I vividly recall the impression garnered from the first fifty pages which inspired the above facebook comment - far too many adjectives, an overly choreographed fight every five minutes, and all set in one of those Larry Niven universes full of alien bars wherein things with two heads get drunk, stab you, or attempt to interest you in the services of a prostitute with six tits and two fannies; but I persisted, and it got better, and after a while it began to feel like Barrington Bayley again.

The Warhammer 40,000 universe may as well be the same one inhabited by Nemesis the Warlock in 2000AD, roughly speaking, grimy pseudo-medieaval military science-fiction with Tolkien, Lovecraft, and a load of other squelchy influences thrown in; and therefore clearly entirely compatible with the sort of weirdness in which Bayley specialised. Eye of Terror is mostly space marines possessed by demons, Chaos Gods, stomach-churning transformations, and all manner of things which would probably lose a ton of advertising revenue were they to turn up in Star Wars. I don't know what it's about, if it's really about anything, but it becomes vivid and even gripping as the story finds its pace. Strangest of all, disbelieving that something so good should have begun on such poor footing, I skipped back to the beginning and could find nothing of the material which had inspired my initial groaning. Either I acclimated to the novel or the book itself changed as I was reading it.

Very weird.