Justice League of America #228-261 (1987)

 

I gave up on comics at the age of fourteen, having discovered punk rock and decided that I was all grown-up. Specifically I started buying Sounds music paper on a weekly basis, which meant I could no longer afford to keep up with 2000AD comic, which, in any case, seemed to be treading water at the time. Five years later I made the acquaintance of Charlie Adlard and Garreth Roberts* while taking a fine art degree at Maidstone Art College. I was intrigued by the fact that both of them still read comic books, and even American comic books which seemed way beyond anything which could be excused by what turned out to be my first experience of nostalgia for something I'd enjoyed a few years earlier. Just when I thought I was out, as Al Pacino laments in the third Godfather movie, they pull me back in.

Anyway, just like junkies hoping to share their addiction, Garreth attempted to stem my uninformed guffaws by lending me a few things to read, notably the Frank Miller version of Batman, an issue of Micronauts, and Justice League of America #257, from which point on I was hooked, albeit not to those specific titles. The Dark Knight Returns impressed the shit out of me, and I was vaguely familiar with the Micronauts having once been obsessed with the toys, but the Justice League book was bewildering. I had no idea who any of the characters were, and the story, if it was a story, took place in a strange metaphysical landscape inside Zatanna's head - whoever she might be. I spent decades wondering what I'd read in that book, and curiosity eventually got the better of me - nearly forty years later - and what we have here is a complete run of the Justice League of America in their final incarnation before Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis hit the reset button, at least in publishing terms. The fact that this run of the comic seemingly remained almost universally reviled even years after its passing, combined with whatever the hell had happened in issue #257, appealed to my sense of mystery.

The point of the Justice League as I understood it from a distance, was to have Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and all your faves in the same comic. Growing up in England and being therefore more familiar with Marvel, this didn't hold much appeal for me. I've since developed an appreciation for the DC aesthetic, when it's done right, which differs significantly from the legacy of Stan Lee, but for many years it seemed dated, stuffy, square, and lacking the dynamism of Marvel; and so my impression of the Justice League would be Superman and his pals up against a guy wearing a giant purple top hat with a question mark on the front who cackles and very much enjoys being the bad guy - more or less Enid Blyton in spandex. Without having read any of the comics, for better or worse, the form struck me as limited.

The comic book hadn't yet quite pow! grown up back in 1984, but I get the impression that DC at least wanted to move the Justice League on from confrontations with anyone wearing a question mark, and so Gerry Conway shook things up, replacing most of the team with characters no-one had heard of. Len Wein had done it with Marvel's X-Men ten years earlier, replacing the perky apple-polishing college freshmen with a menagerie of previously unknown sideshow attractions. If this didn't directly serve as inspiration for the revision of the JLA, it was at least a good argument for what rewards might be reaped from a thorough shake up. Accordingly I'd expected to notice a few more parallels with the X-revision in this run of the Justice League, but Vixen doesn't really have much in common with Wolverine, and Gypsy echoes Kitty Pryde only in being young, and the rest can be attributed to their both being superhero books.

We kick off with a war between Earth and Mars in #228, the stretched point of which is that it might have been a bit less of a clusterfuck had the absentee Superman found time in his busy schedule to lend a hand in punching their big green faces all the way back to their home planet. Therefore the Justice League, despite having won, has let everyone down and we all need to go back to the drawing board. With the League's orbital space station in ruins, they move into a disused factory complex in Detroit - actually a super technological secret headquarters - specifically in one of the less salubrious neighbourhoods. This is where we meet Vibe, a young streetwise Latino with powers of er… vibration, who enjoys breakdancing and probably even smokes whenever Chuck Patton is drawing someone else. We also meet Steel - an angry cyborg, Vixen - an African supermodel with animal powers, and Gypsy - who is never quite explained but just seems to show up. We also meet half the neighborhood, and thus get issues where - in the absence of anyone wearing a purple top hat with a question mark on the front - Steel hunts down some kids who nicked a packet of Toffos from Mr. Papagaulos' corner store while Vixen helps Old Mother Windom find a treasured spoon - a family heirloom - which she could have sworn was in the cabinet in the hallway. Of course, neither of these tales happened, or at least not on screen, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise from the letters pages of subsequent issues. I guess this was the point at which the ratio of regular kids to comic book obsessives reading these things switched, arguably for the worse, to the latter.

The letters were a mix of positive and negative - those enjoying the changes against those who had paid good money for tales of Earth's greatest heroes and now found it very interesting that the same were conspicuously absent from the book and would therefore like to speak with your supervisor - although a substantial minority of the angrier letters would also have liked to know why DC comics were suppressing the deluge of hate mail directed at Vibe, Vixen, Steel and Gypsy, pretending that it didn't exist when it definitely did and was in fact the biggest mountain of complaint in the history of moaning.

Did DC really owe these people yet another fucking title with Superman or Batman punching the purple top hat off that guy's head yet again, given that this was still happening in every other book they published? I don't know, but having read a couple of the earlier issues - and the occasional interlude issues of this run bringing the familiar faces back presumably for the sake of pacifying the worst of the fandom taliban - this version of the JLA was a lot more fun for my money, and a lot more engaging by virtue of the restoration of mystery in characters which could still surprise us. Sure, Vibe was corny as hell in places and Gypsy dressed like Cyndi Lauper, but this was a comic book, not Crime and Punishment, and these were arguably hypocritical objections coming from those demanding the restoration of a rigorously traditional flavour of corn. Was it not enough that they still had to fight an android named Amazo?

For what it my be worth, I'd say Gerry Conway, Chuck Patton, and particularly Luke McDonnell did a great job on this run of comics, keeping things interesting, moving everything along, and without resorting to crowd pleasing clichés; and by the time our guys have to save the world from a three-eyed Godlike alien named Despero, it really begins to feel as though the wrinkles have been ironed out and we've found our feet, and it was as good as anything you would have read in - off the top of my head - an X-Men comic of the time.

Yet it was not to be, which I assume came down to sales. Gerry Conway - who had really shown that he knew how to write this stuff - was suddenly and abruptly absent without even the customary letters page farewell, and J.M. DeMatteis was brought in to perform what felt like a wack job, albeit a poetically loquacious one. Vibe was killed fighting another android built by the guy who created Amazo - thus inadvertently foreshadowing Poochie from that episode of the Simpsons - then Steel was next, with the other two deciding to take long holidays elsewhere as the remaining cast did a huge boo hoo and pretended they couldn't hear the joyful hooting and hollering of the fandom taliban.

The next month's issue was the first of the revival by J.M De Matteis and Keith Giffen, which was great, and which somehow kept the wankers happy without inserting Superman into every other panel or pretending it was still 1956. It's an ill-wind that blows no good, but I still don't see that there was anything wrong with this version of the Justice League; and if there was an ill-wind, it was surely the crowing of a new, profoundly unpleasant generation of comic book fans celebrating the death of a character they didn't like because they'd never heard of him. If it's occurred to you that we can no longer have nice things, I'd say that's one reason why right there.

*: Not to be confused with the former author of Who stuff, as should be obvious from the unusual spelling. Garreth was one of my very best pals for the duration of those art college years, and I have no idea how we managed to lose touch, aside from that he was always a bit on the flaky side. Whenever Charlie and I get together, we always have the inevitable whatever happened to Garreth? conversation.

D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

 

As I said when writing about John Thomas and Lady Jane, the previous draft of Lady Chatterley, I had the wrong idea about Lawrence's final book, having read somewhere that it had been written in anger with Dave, somewhat weary of his novels being described as pornography, deciding to give his critics an extended letter to Fiesta as a sort of fuck you. This may even have come from Lawrence's own letters, in which case he was clearly joking. As we all know, the book was subject to charges of obscenity, which - as I now appreciate - says plenty about the mid-twentieth century and not very much about Lady Chatterley's Lover. Where Lawrence made use of medical terminology such as fuck, cunt, shit, and arse, it appears in short agricultural bursts limited to a few moments of conversation, then back to the kind of language of which my wife's aunt would approve for the next three chapters. That said, there's a whole lot of nobbing going on, most of which is described in Lawrence's usual terms, mapped by means of emotions, symbols of the same, plenty of stuff about flowers - notably woven into pubes at one point - but it really isn't about the sex, or at least it's about a whole lot more than just the sex.

All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.

'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'

I've a feeling that may have been the passage (no pun intended) which made everyone angry. I'm sure there's been a bongo magazine called Secret Openings at some point but I doubt it could have been easy to find at your local WHSmith.

Anyway, to get to the point, Lady Chatterley's Lover is more or less the same novel as John Thomas and Lady Jane. The same encounters involve the same people, albeit with minor variations, but the emphasis is much expanded. Lawrence was approaching the end of his life to the point of his existence having become defined almost entirely by its termination. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality, as Clifford writes in a letter. Where the previous version was concerned with class, the relationships between men and women, and the law of diminishing social returns - as were most of his novels - Lady Chatterley imagines a world without the author, that which was to come after his passing and how much worse it would be.

They don't like these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing coal, where men always did it before. And they say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it'll be all machines.

In places, it's the closest Lawrence came to writing science-fiction - which is admittedly not conspicuously close. Brave New World was still four years away, but it seems likely that he'd been discussing some of his concerns with Aldous Huxley.

'I do think sufficient civilisation ought to eliminate a lot of the physical disabilities,' said Clifford. 'All the love-business for example, it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed babies in bottles.'

As with John Thomas and Lady Jane, it's written with a clarity and sense of focus which he seemingly developed during those last five or so years. His arguments are clear without sacrificing the poetry to the kind of pedantic analysis he despised, which is why this novel gets away with doing so much, even breaking new ground for Lawrence; which is why its reputation is so well deserved - here referring to the literary achievement rather than its potential as erotic testimony.

Yet for all its qualities, I still prefer John Thomas and Lady Jane, which is more typical of what Lawrence did, but arguably nails it like no previous book, possibly excepting Sons and Lovers or The Rainbow - neither of which have anything like the concision. Additionally, this retelling closes with a number of letters exchanged between the main characters, which feels a little hurried. Nevertheless, as yet another account of why everything used to be better than it is now - or was in 1928 - it remains difficult to disagree with Lawrence's main objections, and hard to fault his foresight.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason, most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Ralph Blum - Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs (1974)

Where vintage UFO literature is concerned, I tend to prefer the weirdly implausible to droning lists of moving lights seen in the sky which, while doubtless unnerving for those who saw them, don't necessarily make for interesting reading. So I'll make exceptions to my preference for the writing of John Keel or Brad Steiger where the author actually claims to have been taken to Venus, but that's about it. Until now, for this was recommended by a person on facebook as dealing extensively with the Pascagoula encounter wherein an angler found himself forcibly interviewed by things which looked like this:

Happily for me, it turns out that Ralph Blum was a legitimate journalist before he was a believer, who came to this subject having been commissioned to write about flying saucers for Cosmopolitan, of all things. So beyond the obligatory cover reference to von Däniken - and its use of the font which launched Eric's shabby efforts - we have a well-written, beautifully argued, and entirely sober account of what happened to Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, extending into a much broader examination of the saucer phenomenon and what it meant in 1974. Blum doesn't bother with any of the overly defensive stuff about how so-called scientists will mock, or - on the other hand - dismissing everything as having been Venus seen through swamp gas; and so we have an account and its analysis which seems very much consistent with present times, given that the US Air Force can no longer be bothered to pretend it ain't happening. The tone is closer to that of political biography than to that of most UFO literature, making allowances for sake of argument and taking the rest from there yet without going full Brad Steiger. I'm inclined to wonder whether a few more of those published taking this approach might have brought about the thawing of officialdom a few years ahead of schedule.

D.H. Lawrence - Selected Essays (1950)

 

This feels a little more stimulating after the above undifferentiated adventure porridge*, and although Lawrence was known to produce his own porridge from time to time, it was mostly in the novels and short stories. We seem to be on safe ground with the essays given that he didn't have to keep referring to his characters or describing a flower halfway through some already rambling discourse. What has struck me most from this collection is that, as Lawrence himself cheerily admits, we're a long way from the essay as practiced by Huxley, Orwell and others. The difference is, as Lawrence himself acknowledges, that his arguments are intuitive, developing organically and drawing on experience rather than theory, so his writing often has as much or more in common with painting than with the work of an essayist who might set out some idea and then go about presenting evidence in its favour. This approach additionally allows for some wiggle room in the possibility that Lawrence knows he may have it arse backwards.

From a London editor and a friend (soi-disant): Perhaps you would understand other people better if you did not think that you were always right. How one learns things about oneself! Or is it really about the other person? I always find that my critics, pretending to criticise me, are analysing themselves. My own private opinion is that I have been, as far as people go, almost every time wrong!

With this in mind, the bombast becomes a little more palatable, should you need it to be. Lawrence tackles more or less everything he's tackled in a novel, but here in much snappier form; and even where I might disagree, I don't see that he gets much wrong, and a lot of it is air-punchingly on point. He writes about class, modernisation, human relationships, art, writing, painting, religion, America, Germany, England and all that we're getting wrong in terms which apply as well today as I presume they did in the previous twenties.

In nature, one creature devours another, and this is an essential part of all existence and of all being. It is not something to lament over, nor something to try to reform.

If you've ever wondered where the man was coming from, then you won't find it spelled out with much greater clarity than here.

*: Who shite, the review of which you'll have to wait for the book if you care that much. I've given up posting reviews of that sort of thing here because it attracts the attention of the sort of person whom I would customarily cross the road to avoid.

Harlan Ellison (editor) - Dangerous Visions (1967)

 

Can there really be anyone wondering why I picked up this collection when I saw it, excepting I suppose those who haven't heard of it? I honestly don't want to think about the kind of person who hasn't heard of this collection or who doesn't know what it was, but anyway, Dangerous Visions was the one that changed everything, according to both Harlan Ellison and its subsequent reputation.

It's an anthology of short stories specifically commissioned for the collection, with nothing reprinted from any previous appearance in one of the digests - as was common practice at the time. Ellison was after the sort of material that might be too weird or edgy for Analog, Galaxy, and the rest, with the intention of bringing readers the cutting edge of science-fiction as it was deemed to be at the time - a parallel and complement to England's new wave showcasing how the genre had begun to vibe with the counterculture, so to speak.

So there's some good stuff here, and some great stuff, and at least a couple of masterpieces; but even with some of the contributions being so short - even shorter than Ellison's lengthy introductions in a couple of cases - five hundred pages is a lot. Dangerous Visions isn't a casual undertaking, and while it may be that one is expected merely to dip in every once in a while, that isn't how I read, and I'm sure it's significant that I drew greater pleasure from the first half of the book with honourable mentions warranted by Dick's Faith of Our Fathers and Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage - even though I had to tackle that one twice before it made sense. Unfortunately, beyond these, there's such quantity here that I haven't retained much beyond a general impression of enjoying most of it, excepting Keith Laumer's Test to Destruction. Ellison's introduction to this one laments Laumer being known mainly for Retief the space detective - adventure yarns which he churned out to pay the bills and which aren't a patch on his lesser known serious work; and lucky for us, Test to Destruction is a fine example of his serious work, even though it's a suspense-filled thriller about space espionage. I gave up after a couple of pages so it may blossom into a masterpiece beyond that point for all I know. Test to Destruction is followed by Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels and Samuel R. Delaney's Aye, and Gomorrah… so I got to those a bit quicker, which was nice; particularly as I hated the previous thing I tried to read by Delany.

I suppose these visions were dangerous at the time, given the percentage of the American population who believed that the Beatles represented Communism. If they seem less obviously dangerous in 2024, they have nevertheless mostly retained a certain spiky quality and have as such aged well.

Norman Spinrad - Child of Fortune (1975)

 

It's a good job I try to avoid judging books by their covers because the cover of this one may be the worst I've ever seen - so bad it could be something by Douglas Adams. Thankfully I judge Child of Fortune by its author and so picked it up on the grounds of Bug Jack Barron having been exceptional. Child of Fortune probably isn't quite so stellar but is clearly the work of the same guy, thus presenting what may be the widest ever gulf between the greatness of a novel and the shittiness of its cover in publishing history. I see this cover and the only questions I have are 1) why? and 2) what happened to her legwarmers? Glowing praise from Timothy Leary just inside the front cover doesn't seem like much of a recommendation either, but let us have no further distraction.

Child of Fortune squares with Spinrad's observation that science-fiction as a genre could use some futures in which we're better than we are in the present day rather than worse, although his idea of what might constitute better is rooted in sixties counterculture for what that may be worth. It's the tale of a young woman going off on a voyage of self-discovery equivalent to the medieval wanderjahre, hippy pilgrimage, Native American visionquest, or Elizabeth Gilbert going to India to find herself. Being rooted in sixties counterculture, this entails quite a lot of sex and drugs, with the former being of the tantric variety, naturally. On the face of it, this isn't my sort of book at all, and yet excepting that it's possibly about fifty pages too long, I enjoyed it greatly. Child of Fortune is written in a locquacious and ornate prose which never quite overdoes itself so much as to challenge the attention span. With the spacefaring interplanetary setting and the societies encountered by our girl, it actually put me in mind of Peter F. Hamilton but with the influence of Cordwainer Smith supplanting the Jeremy Clarkson factor, so it's a ripping read even given the hallucinogenic pace, overload of images, and endless succession of people off their tits on some futuristic high.

It's about the evolution of its initially naive main character, but Child of Fortune works because it's also an allegory for the death of the dream of sixties counterculture - or at least what became of that dream if you prefer. For all the pleasure taken in a libertine pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, Spinrad never gets entirely swept up in the drippy evangelism of your Terrance McKenna types, presenting an evenly balanced view of the pseudo-spiritual realm it inhabits which, taking an objective stance, offers a significantly more positive statement about what happened in the sixties than anyone mooing amaaaaaaazing with their head stuck inside a bong ever managed.

I gather critics of the day hated this one, but frankly they can fuck off. It's funny, genuinely weird, beautifully written, strangely gripping, and is sort of about everything if you look at it from a certain angle.

Stanislav Szukalski - Behold!!! The Protong (2019)

 

I vaguely remembered this guy from the first issue of Weirdo about a hundred years ago, which left me with the impression of someone who, if unusually talented, seemed slightly racist in a way I couldn't quite identify; and I didn't understand what the article was doing in Weirdo. Decades later, I stumble across the Netflix documentary and it begins to make sense, sort of…

Szukalski was, so it turns out, Poland's greatest artist and a man whose work was beginning to attract a lot of attention on an international scale; then the Second World War bombed most of his sculptures and associated work out of both existence and public memory, leaving the man somewhat beached in the United States, unable to pick up the thread of his career. The notion that this may have constituted a great loss to twentieth century art is far from hyperbole, as we see from surviving photos. Prime Szukalski seems to represent a unique fusion of nineteenth century symbolism, deco, and with a touch of later Futurism as practised by Fortunato Depero and others - but with a kind of biological elasticity which foreshadows Giger.

Unfortunately, by the time anyone realised, Szukalski's mind had gone somewhere strange, specifically the formulation of what he termed Zermatism - the study of all those bits of human history which science had missed but which were obvious if you knew where to look, or more importantly, how to look. Having been trained as a sculptor, Szukalski knew how to look at examples of primitive or tribal sculpture from all across the globe in ways which eluded members of the archaeological profession, most of whom had been trained to the point of blindness. Thus, were they at a disadvantage, unable to comprehend that which Szukalski saw because he was a genius, as he admits on more than one occasion in this book.

Behold!!! The Protong distills the basics of Zermatism, as set down in the thirty-nine volumes of Szukalski's great work, compiled over three or four decades. Zermatism holds that there really was a global flood as described in the Bible, and that it was caused by the earth inflating, pushing the water up out of the ocean to cover the land. This inflation is part of a natural cycle whereby the sun draws water away from the earth, then replaces it, like breathing in and out but spread across periods of 26,000 years. Humanity came from Easter Island, proof of which can be found in the ancient artefacts of every culture if you know what you're looking for, but also in the names of ancient places, most of which are in Protong, the once universal language. Protong was a simple language, mainly nouns with a few verbs amounting to the sort of things cavemen used to say in the movies - food good, or stranger make sun go away, me afraid, and so on. Luckily Protong was ancestral to modern Polish meaning Szukalsi was well qualified to decode and record this lost tongue; and in doing so he discovered that most place names refer to the flood and those who survived, so it definitely really happened. Those who survived were human beings, and also yeti - their evil, thuggish cousins of such unfortunate genetic proximity as to allow for interbreeding, resulting in Yetinsyn who look sort of like people but are something else entirely. More or less everything bad that has ever happened has been caused by the Yetinsyn. You can identify them by their short arms, piggy eyes, small noses set above a spacious upper lip like Stephen King and John Major, and general gluttony. They tend to seek out positions of authority from which they can wreak the most havoc. Communism was one of their ideas, in case you were wondering how all that got started.

Behold!!! The Protong came about when Glenn Bray and Lena Zwalve were putting together a book of Szukalski's early works, to which the man only agreed on the condition of it being a companion piece to this summary of Zermatism - it arguably being his life's work, and that to which the sculpture was merely a preamble. This is why some people really need editors, or even just a brutally honest pal who will ask what the fuck were you thinking?

It's an undeniably impressive piece of work in terms of how much has gone into it, not least the beautiful illustrations by which our boy was able to underscore or emphasise the features of ancient sculptures to which he felt we should be paying most attention; but, as you may have realised by this point, the whole thing is fucking bananas. It's the same deal as with that pillock, von Däniken - ancient art and even language scrutinised for whichever coincidental and arbitrary resemblance proves whatever stupid point we're trying to make, with evidence to the contrary either omitted or dismissed as a distortion caused by conventional thinking. Szukalski, for one example, claims that no-one knows the meaning of the name of the Mexican state of Jalisco, because - guess what - it's Protong; and it's the same deal with London, and the Mexican Sun God, Tonatiuh - all Protong, you see! Do I actually need to point out that the etymology of these names is mysterious to absolutely no-one, presumably unless you've encountered them only in library books while searching for stuff to force-translate into caveman Polish?

Yet, Behold the Protong!!! must count as a great work at least on the grounds of it involving actual work, which is more than can be said of Erich von Däniken deciding that K'inich Janaab' Pacal is clearly wearing a space suit; and it's difficult to remain unmoved in the face of a lifetime's labour expended on something so patently screwy - a tragedy but for the pleasure it evidently brought Szukalski and the meaning it gave to his existence. In this sense, I'd compare it to the similarly weird belief systems developed by Richard Shaver, Robert Moore Williams and others as, if not exactly useful, then not entirely without value on some level. Rarely in art has the journey been so much more vital than the destination.

D.H. Lawrence - St. Mawr and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930)

 

I read (and inevitably wrote about) St. Mawr only six months ago, but here it is paired with The Virgin and the Gypsy in an edition which I bought new from a book store in Camberwell back in the nineties. So nearly three decades passed before I developed the necessary attention span and somehow I just can't skip St. Mawr simply because I read it back in October. I can't let this specific sequence of inky marks remain ignored.

What I wrote back in October regarding St. Mawr still seems to apply for the most part, and although it hasn't spontaneously transformed into a different story, there are details and elements I apparently failed to notice first time around.

People performing outward acts of loyalty, piety, self-sacrifice. But inwardly undermining, betraying. Directing all their subtle evil will against any positive living thing. Masquerading as the ideal, in order to poison the real.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. But go on saving life, the ghastly salvation army of ideal mankind. At the same time secretly, viciously, potently undermine the natural creation, betray it with kiss after kiss, destroy it from the inside, till you have the swollen rottenness of teeming existences.

Masquerading as the ideal, in order to poison the real pretty much describes most social media right now, even before we consider any of the rest. Lawrence's pseudo-philosophical train of thought chugs with unusual vigour in this one.

The other aspect which struck me this time around is that the model of Mrs. Witt as the author's punch bag doesn't stand up to scrutiny regardless of her being quite clearly inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan; and it doesn't stand up to scrutiny - despite what we read in at least a couple of introductions - because she more or less expresses Lawrence's views regarding his world in their entirety, and she expresses them forcibly; and if life kicks her in the teeth a few times, this reflects the author's own life more than whatever disregard he may have held for the woman upon whom she was loosely based. So if this rereading didn't quite bring any fresh revelations, it certainly brought what I'd already taken from the story into sharp focus. I'm still not convinced it counts as one of his greatest hits, but it has a lot to recommend it.

Conversely, The Virgin and The Gypsy reads like an early effort, inhabiting the world of uptight clergymen, drawing rooms, and impertinent daughters while lacking ten page existential digressions. Brenda Maddox reckons this is because it was written and then sent to a potential publisher in haste, which makes sense, although my first reaction was that he got tired of all that prog rock and went back to Ramones covers, figuratively speaking. It takes place in a stifling and conservative home environment based on what Frieda left behind when she ran off with Dave, following the story of Yvette who finds herself attracted to a young gypsy against everyone's wishes. Given the religious overtones, notably that Yvette's father happens to be the local vicar, it reads a little like an inversion of parts of the Old Testament, where Yvette is Eve and it all ends with an apocalyptic flood - although Adam is nowhere to be seen and there's more than one serpent, which is probably deliberate.

Paired with St. Mawr, initial impressions are that it's hardly a world-beating combination, but as with most D.H. Lawrence, second or third readings may be greatly rewarding. As ever, there's a lot to digest.

Interzone 275 (2018)

As may be apparent from the review of a couple of previous issues I wrote back in July, I haven't exactly been climbing over my massive pile of X-Men comic books to read this; and I only picked it up because Erica L. Satifka is featured, and she's great and therefore deserving of support. I suppose at least this time it's only taken me six years to generate sufficient enthusiasm to read the thing beyond Satifka's characteristically excellent The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest, which probably means something. It took me sixteen years, marriage, and a change of continental landmass to get around to reading issue 218.

It's not the worst science-fiction digest I've read, but I'm still getting a whiff of those boys and girls who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze. The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest is, as I say, wonderful even given its being a mere two pages in length - a lesson in getting to the point if ever there was. Leo Vladimirsky's The Christ Loop is similarly readable, presenting the death of Himself as a sequence of increasingly ludicrous execution beta tests, each followed by a focus group meeting before they finally settle for the version with the wooden cross. Malcolm Devlin's The Purpose of the Dodo Is to Be Extinct has an enjoyable touch of the Borges about it but probably could have been shorter. I didn't really understand either The Mark by Abi Hynes or Steven J. Dines' Looking for Landau. The former seemed nevertheless decent, but the latter was eighteen pages of growling bikers going into Arizona dive bars and starting fights like you see on the telly, but with infrequent puzzling interjections about the Holocaust.

Elsewhere we have mostly inoffensive editorials, reviews and one instance of the word cisheteronormative, which can fuck right off. A couple of short stories in some anthology or other are slated for satirising the political correctness of wokesters because, as you know, it's only satire when coming from the left, so when the right does the same thing it's hate speech, actually. Regardless of anyone who may or may not be channelling their inner Jeremy Clarkson, I believe I've reached the point of equilibrium where I find those whining about political correctness not significantly less irritating than those whining about those whining about political correctness. The review section spunks away a phenomenal generous word count on nothing that really warrants it, so far as I can see, notably the Ready Player One movie - which I haven't seen and have no interest in seeing - about which we learn:

As Infinity War understands but this film never quite does, true geek knowing is a superpower in itself: a creative, expansive mode of cognition which parses tropes against a vast internalised corpus of actual and potential narrative utterances, and comprehends megatextual vastness beyond the puny grasp of high-cultural minds.

To be fair, I've a feeling this may be deliberate affectation as set-up to the somewhat more direct punchline, but honestly it's hard to fucking tell - or to care for that matter. Nick Lowe writes the movie reviews and is clearly perceptive, and I've very much enjoyed his writing, but I don't understand why movies are given so much space in this magazine, or why Lowe is wasting his time on such garbage. I guess that's more or less it for me and Interzone.

Peter Hope - Boost / 2nd by 2nd (both 2023)

I sometimes find it difficult to work up enthusiasm for contemporary writing, and I'm growing increasingly suspicious of that which offers its contemporary status as but one of its many virtues. Leaving aside the usual creatives, content providers, and loyal servants of the franchise, even the supposed alternatives are looking ropey these days. Among the transgressives I found one internet twat helpfully making blog posts about how avant-garde fiction is easy, fun, and here's how you do it; and if the Neo-Decadents seemed initially promising, I've been somewhat put off by the unmistakable aroma of boys who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze; and of course this sorry state of affairs echoes the culture I inhabit as a whole. Daily existence has become, just as it was for the Aztecs, a balancing act - a matter of keeping those forces which influence our lives at a distance. In political terms, there no longer seems to be anyone who isn't part of the machine. The right seeks allies while the left seeks traitors. There's no-one on our side, the machine is out of control, and the wheels have come off.

Thankfully, Peter Hope understands this all too well, and articulates it in terms which resist reframing as the usual rebel product.

Let's go walking through the bluebells with our statins and beta blockers, the buttons are popping and the blinkers are in place, surely we'll all be in a continuous state of dependent bliss before nightfall.

I hestitate, wondering if it's my role to highlight any of this or whether everyone should be allowed the freedom of their bad decisions.

A new disquiet is all around and the legal documents are being drafted to obscure contradictory history. It gets harder and harder to focus on the grey area between black and white, it jumps out of its shoes and picks up a bread knife from the cutlery drawer, upending the furniture and threatening to carve us all new eye sockets.

I hear the beep from a thousand phones letting the populace know it's no longer ok to breathe openly.

Boost and 2nd by 2nd are chapbooks - about fifty pages each, which seems exactly the right length - expanding on this theme - the world right now as experienced by one man, because the political as a universal and absolute response to ethical dilemmas is taking us to some incredibly shitty places. There's nothing here so tidy that it will fit on a placard or lend itself to elitist jargon of the kind which left at least me scratching my head over just what the fuck a red-brown tankie is supposed to be; and the reason there's nothing of that type is because grow the fuck up!

It isn't quite poetry, and it certainly isn't fiction, and although both books carry the same argument, where Boost is hard-headed and direct, 2nd by 2nd takes a more hallucinatory approach, I suppose you might say. The argument, which essentially summarises how well life inside Guy Debord's predicted Spectacle has been working out for us, frames the problem in terms which may hopefully inspire resistance, or at least some genuine commitment to leaving the world in a less shitty state than you found it.

Please someone take some fucking notice.

These are, by the by, almost certainly no longer available but keep an eye on the Wrong Revolution Bandcamp page if you're curious.

DISCLAIMER: If I know you either in person or through social media, or if I've written about something you wrote on this blog, criticisms made in the first paragraph almost certainly aren't referring to you. You hopefully know who you are.

John Scalzi - The Ghost Brigades (2006)

This came as something of a relief after Starter Villain because it's decent, meaning that I didn't simply imagine Starter Villain being nothing like so good as it should have been. I had no coherent plan to read anything beyond Scalzi's generally excellent Old Man's War but this was in Goodwill for two dollars and I liked the sound of it. As with Old Man's War, from which it represents a continuation, it's military science-fiction, a genre which is usually about as good as the name promises, but rather than the usual dreary ticking of boxes for the benefit of persons who enjoy saluting whilst screaming SIR, YES, SIR, Scalzi writes with humanitarian wit and not much conceded to those who back the blue.

The Ghost Brigades is the story of Jared Dirac, created as a clone of a scientist who has gone over to the other side - a coalition of three hostile alien races. Dirac's consciousness is also a copy of the defector's personality, implanted in the hope of revealing just what the fuck the guy was thinking before he jumped ship. So there are plenty of pleasurably disconcerting ideas to keep you busy, but what makes the book - at least once we get there - is the realisation of there being a fairly strong argument for Dirac and his cohorts being the wrong 'uns in this equation; so expectations are turned on their head, and with surprisingly little fuss, before settling into a narrative very much informed by the complexities of conflict in the real world rather than the typically eternal struggle between goodies and baddies. My only criticism is that it's probably a bit long, but it's not much of one given that the final hundred or so pages probably require the preamble. It's probably not quite so good as Old Man's War, but as most military science-fiction seems to be garbage, I'm not complaining.

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis (2004)

By Persepolis, I'm here referring to the whole thing. I read the first volume, itself comprising the first two parts, then insisted Mrs. Pamphlets give it a read because it was so good. She did so, then immediately bought the second volume, comprising parts three and four. I wasn't going to bother writing anything because I'm trying to break the habit of reviewing absolutely fucking everything I read before I find myself passing comment on the ingredients printed on the label of a jar of peanut butter. Although also, occasionally there will be something so amazing that you're not quite sure what to say.

I'm sure we're all familiar with pow! the comic book having grown up. It was never a development which inspired me to unconditional enthusiasm, because - apart from anything - I'd say the evolutionary through-line with Web of Spider-Man at one end, American Splendor at the other, and Watchmen somewhere in the middle is a complete waste of everyone's time. Marjane Satrapi writes with pictures as well as words, and Persepolis is so powerful as to render comparisons pretty much redundant; and by powerful, I don't mean in the sense of frowning whilst thinking really hard about Bakunin - as she does at one point - but simply that it does what it does to the point of representing a sort of perfection. There's nothing here which could have been done better or improved in any way.

As you probably know, Persepolis tells the tale of Satrapi growing up in Iran during the revolution. It's alternately harrowing, funny, touching, and strongly underscores the humanity of those living in countries unlike our own. This last point is, I feel, something we really need to keep in sight given the tendencies of theocracies - our western version very much guilty as hell in this respect - to reduce those people over there to dangerous monsters who dress funny and probably don't speak English. Persepolis works so well because it's hard not to see ourselves in this story, and if you can't see yourself in this story then get the fuck away from me.

Everyone needs to read this.

T.G. Engle - Silent Dawn (2017)

 

It began life back in 1993 as a play and was rewritten as a novel in 2017, which explains my initial impression being that of a recently revised early novel. Before it occurs to anyone that I may mean early novel in dismissive terms - given that Silent Dawn is also self-published - I should clarify that it does certain things which first efforts tend to do in so much as that the narrative has a loose, somewhat improvised feel and we seem to get a lot of new characters complete with physical descriptions introduced before anything has really started moving. With hindsight I can see some of this may be the trail left by the journey from stage to page - a journey which, I hasten to add, makes a lot of sense given the sheer geographical range of this thing

Beyond these details, Silent Dawn reads like a self-published early novel by someone who really knows how to write. There's a minor issue with formatting, the indention of paragraphs and where it occurs, which I gather is pretty much standard for anyone self-publishing from Microsoft documents; and it's distracting, but not so much as to detract from a novel which otherwise writhes with confidence. As for the usual crimes of the self-published - inactive non-sentences, inept grammar or spelling, absence of proofing, crowd pleasing pop culture references, narrative developments which would transparently prefer to have been on telly, and so on and so forth - we suffer nothing of the sort in this book. Particularly impressive is that in Pastor Stanshall we have an irredeemable monster who, without ever becoming even remotely sympathetic, is easily understood; so his evil - which is the optimum strength fully leaded version - is  believable where, in less capable hands, it could easily have slipped over into pantomime. There are many finely struck balancing acts going on here, which I suspect I only even noticed through having read at least a couple of novels by authors who weren't up to the job.

Silent Dawn is a hard-boiled satire set amongst warring factions of the US population about a thousand years from now. It's not exactly post-apocalypse, but civilisation is a thing of the past and daily life is otherwise about as bad as it can possibly be - rape, pillage, no law, few utilities despite the government still being hidden away somewhere, and a shitload of praising Jesus while passing ammunition. It's like William Burroughs' take on Mick Norman's Hell's Angel books, directed by John Waters, soundtrack by Motorhead - but better. There isn't a whole lot of rib-tickling, and yet it's darkly funny throughout; and certain caricatures which rarely amount to anything more than a groanfest of recycled clichés - not least evangelical preachers and good ol' boys - are delivered as readable and even wildly entertaining, which is a rare thing in my experience. Whatever I read, as soon as the Texan shows up, I'm usually about thirty pages from throwing it across the room and switching to something else, which didn't happen this time.

Charles Berlitz & William L. Moore - The Roswell Incident (1980)

 

Back in the eighties I read this along with a stack of related Berlitz paperbacks investigating mysterious strangeness, flying saucers, the Bermuda triangle, unexplained mysteriousness, and reports which they don't want you to know about. I had a ton of this shit, all picked up on the cheap from Oxfam and the like because I didn't like to read anything that was hard to understand. I eventually saw the error of my barely literate ways and replaced my vast library of cranky tomes with proper books for grown-ups, but I sort of wish I hadn't because this kind of thing is often very entertaining - even genuinely interesting regardless of whether or not you believe any of it.

Anyway…

In short form, the legend has it that the remains of a flying saucer were recovered by the air force from a ranch seventy-five miles north-west of Roswell; and then the story was retracted because it turned out to be a weather balloon; and then this was viewed as a cover up intended to conceal the weather balloon having been a flying saucer after all; except that the weather balloon story was a cover up to conceal the wreckage having originated in some more secretive government effort to monitor Soviet bomb tests at long range; and then somewhere in there we have the bodies supposedly recovered from the crash site, and so on and so forth. All that can really be said is that something crashed, and something was found, and some people were more than a little freaked out by the whole thing*. 

I've been to Roswell since I first read this book. To an outsider, such as I am, it seems a very strange place, not quite real and just the sort of landscape wherein one might anticipate the incursion of strange forces. This sense of mystery is unfortunately diminished by the weight of garishly grinning aliens hoping to sell you everything from cigarettes to chiropody all over the town, and while the portentously named International UFO Museum & Research Center is reasonably interesting, it stretches what debate is to be had to the point of undermining its own argument.

As a book which makes the best of what little it has to go on, The Roswell Incident is more focussed than the museum. Although it doesn't quite manage to argue any case beyond that something happened and everyone shat the bed, the legend seems less easily dismissed in the wake of the US government officially acknowledging that an unidentified flying disc somehow deactivated ten nuclear warheads at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana in 1967. In other words, some of this stuff is now accepted as real by the same agencies who spent the last hundred years or so insisting otherwise; which still doesn't mean that everything described in The Roswell Incident happened, but we're at least a little closer to the idea that it could have done.

*: Quoting myself from here.

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Black Orchid (1989)

 

Back in April, 2018 my long-standing regret at having got rid of so much of my comic book collection back in the nineties achieved critical mass, driving me to buy them all back again. I spent twenty dollars a week at the Lone Star Comics online store, knowing it would take a long time but not dwelling on that particular detail. I bought back every issue of anything I regretted having sold in the first place, filled in all of the gaps, and hunted down everything I would have bought had I known about it at the time; and now, just this week, the mission is completed with the purchase of these three prestige format issues of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid. I may still buy the occasional comic book, but probably not regularly given that there doesn't seem to be anything much that I like these days. Weirdly, it does actually feel like an achievement.

Given how I've since come to regard the work of both Gaiman and McKean, and given the possibility of juvenile nostalgia tinting my judgement, Black Orchid seemed like a bit of a gamble. It isn't that either Nelly or the Davester lack talent, but I strongly feel that both have been massively overrated, having achieved popularity during an era when the comic biz was engaging in one of its most rabid periods of searching for the next superstar creator to fill Alan Moore's winkle pickers. Gaiman's writing sometimes felt a little like Alan-Moore-by-Numbers and eventually went full Tim Burton with the twinkly stuff; and while Dave McKean has always had a wonderful sense of design, he looked a little like a Bill Sienkiewicz tribute act for a long time, and I found it difficult to get past that.

However, going back to what was the start, at least for me, before I'd begun to notice any of the traits which eventually became irritating, I'm really glad to have this one back because it's magnificent. You can really see why these two had to spend the next couple of years beating them off with a shitty stick*.

If Neil Gaiman was truly channelling Alan Moore in Black Orchid, it's no longer so obvious as it may have seemed at the time. He imposes structure and rhythm in the style of Moore - switching between variations of six and eight panel pages, and to great visceral effect with the jukebox sequence in book one - but the narrative has a more natural, understated pace giving greater contrast to its dramatic hits than does the jigsaw plotting of Watchmen and the like. Dave McKean likewise keeps it simple, with powerful use of limited colour palettes and generally holding back, allowing the intimacy of his lines and composition to do the heavy lifting - which also reveals his style to be quite unlike that of Bill Sienkiewicz, regardless of whatever else he may have glued to the page in the years that followed.

Of course, Black Orchid is nevertheless caped stuff which also features Batman and Lex Luthor, and was spun out into a Vertigo series which I don't remember being up to much and therefore haven't bothered with this time around; but the telling borders on European art cinema - and the good kind - moody, inspiring, occasionally nightmarish, surreal and yet paradoxically realist at the same time. This may even have been their finest hour for my money.

*: I realise this is an unfortunate turn of phrase given details of Neil's various hobbies which have emerged since I wrote this review.

John Scalzi - Starter Villain (2023)

 

The story here features a substitute teacher inheriting a secret base on a remote volcanic island from his uncle, who happened to be a supervillain in the vein of all those guys who gave James Bond such a hard time. He also inherits his uncle's role and is thus inducted into a world of sentient cats who communicate by typing on a keyboard, with a team of trained dolphins as minions. It's a nice idea which works well for the first third of the novel, even suggesting Scalzi might have a career as the Terry Pratchett of science-fiction, with none of the smirking which rendered Douglas Adams so unreadably pleased with itself. This initial promise seems bolstered when we realise that these aren't exactly Bond villains in the traditional sense but real villains more in line with Martin Shkreli or Bernie Madoff, but without being caught. Then by the time we get to the Bellagio Gathering, a clandestine conference of billionaires and industrialists, it falls apart during chapter after chapter of global economics and the loopholes therein discussed in the form of long, long conversations.

This was the point at which I could no longer ignore just how much of Starter Villain reads somewhat like a script with one eye firmly on the screen adaptation. This was a significant disappointment because I like Jon Scalzi, or at least I liked Old Man's War, and I once asked him whether he would contribute to a short story anthology. The anthology never happened but I was impressed that he took the trouble to respond with a short but chatty email by way of polite refusal. The problem is that Starter Villain reads like a lot of contemporary science-fiction or fantasy in that it reads as though written for people who don't read but identify as nerds because they think it's cute and makes them more like Velma in Scooby-Doo. Tee hee. It's mostly page after page of dialogue and the references are all Millennial friendly and therefore awesome. Here we have Tolkien, The Princess Bride, and:

Dobrev smiled. 'You ever see the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark?'

'Yes.'

'It's like that.'

I didn't see Raiders of the Lost Ark or any of the Indiana Jones movies and have no particular interest in doing so, so this reads like Comicon-pleasing gibberish to me. It's not quite so painful as Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free - also published by Tor, curiously enough - which drops a Star Wars zinger on nearly every other page in lieu of the author developing actual writing skills, but then nothing is quite so painful as Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free, and this is massively disappointing. Also, it refers to a cis woman on page 138, which I find tiresome.

John Lydon - Anger is an Energy (2014)

 

I was initially puzzled as to why he seemed to have written it all over again, and having already read Rotten, I didn't bother with this one. Then, recently re-reading the aforementioned Rotten I noticed that it came out thirty years ago and therefore assumed this must be a continuation; but it makes a second sweep of both Lydon's troubled childhood and his time in the Pistols, so it isn't that either. Now, however, I understand - Rotten was a counter to all those history of punk books that were popping up at the time and not quite getting it right, whereas this is the autobiography proper, now that he's had a lot more to write about.

...or at least to talk about. Once again, we're back with that conversational style of as told to, complete with digressions and the kind of asides which make more sense in speech than on the page. It can be both exhausting and maddening at times, but I get the impression it was either that or the book wouldn't have happened at all; so you just have to get used to it, which you do because Lydon is a very entertaining man who says a lot which needs to be said.

It may not surprise you to learn that our man tends to blow his own trumpet loudly and often. At one point, for example, he takes credit for shops opening on Sunday because Public Image Ltd played at the Rainbow Theatre on Boxing Day back in 1978. However, this isn't to say that he lacks self-awareness regarding the complaints of his most vocal critics:

'What is it they're really trying to say? Have they a point? Should I analyze myself?' And of course, being me, I do. Well, I'm glad to report that I came out of my own self-analysis rather favourably.

Inevitably we also have certain contradictions, and my favourite of these refers to producer, Dave Jerden, slapping a sample of the Pistols' God Save the Queen over the coda of Acid Drops from That What is Not. I'm absolutely certain I've seen an interview - and just months ago - wherein John describes this having been done without his knowledge and so he's furious when he hears it, then eventually grows to like the idea; on the subject of which, herein we find:

At the end of the song I wanted the end refrain from God Save the Queen - 'nooooo fuuuuuture!' That to me seemed absolutely appropriate. I hope he remembers 'me like acid drops.'

Think Tank was about the rewriting of history that was going on with all them idiot punk books…

Yes, the rewriting of history…

Well, it doesn't matter, and our boy seems to pride himself on his contradictions with fairly good reason, rightly viewing them as symptomatic of the ability to think and progress, as distinct from merely hooting and clapping one's flippers in service of this week's most fashionable doctrine, regarding some of which - in case you were wondering - he also asks that we don't go mistaking his views as similar to those of that twat, Nigel Farage, in those actual words.

...sometimes I will say one thing to get a result, when I actually mean the opposite.

See? It isn't actually difficult to grasp, and any other silly questions you may have are capably answered in this book, which is far from perfect, but probably wouldn't do its job quite so well if it were.

You remember that deal with court jesters using comedic forms to say that which cannot otherwise be said? Well, while this one falls on its arse page after page, it nevertheless comes up smelling of roses nearly every time and is generally wise as fuck.

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.