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.

If You Have Ghosts

Douglas Payne If You Have Ghosts (2019)
Here's another coming of age narrative - as I'm sure some idiot will eventually call it - from Amphetamine Sulphate - very much its own thing, but likely to strike chords with anyone who enjoyed their books from Meg McCarville or Josh Peterson; so we're dealing with childhood, memory, emerging sexuality, and often in terms of the details most writers tend to excise, the parts which don't fit. Despite any reputations which may still be lingering, I'd say Philip Best is right to harbour a certain ambivalence regarding the transgressive tag. If You Have Ghosts isn't the Waltons, and Hollywood would leave out all the elements which make the story what it is, but this is only outsider when you consider that most of us are outsiders by some definition, at least anyone worth talking to. We all have ghosts.

This one had me hooked from the first page, upon which I read.

Aside from Barney and his space exploration, I loved a Sesame Street video where Big Bird and Snuffleupagus are in ancient Egypt. Big Bird dies and he is judged by Osiris in preparation for the afterlife, his heart weighed against one of his own plucked feathers.

As with the best of the imprint, Ghosts keeps hold of its sense of humour without feeling the need to crack jokes and renders emotion without resorting to sentiment, limiting itself to just the stuff you need. Weirdly, and it may be due simply to the amber tint of south-west geography, Payne's writing reminds me of Ray Bradbury of all people, except where Dandelion Wine all but chokes on its own syrup, this one is clear, uncongested, and rich in flavour. It may even be the most powerful, convincing and confident piece of writing that Amphetamine Sulphate have published since the New Juche books.

I know literature is supposedly a dying art, but it doesn't much look like it from here.

Mu Revealed

Tony Earll Mu Revealed (1970)
Despite being in possession of a more or less fully operational brain, I'm a sucker for this kind of Fortean bollocks providing it's entertaining on some level, so this one was difficult to resist. Mu Revealed purports to tell the story of the lost continent of Mu through reference to the eyewitness account of Kland, a young priest and citizen of the same. Kland wrote about his life on a series of ancient scrolls, although obviously they weren't ancient at the time of writing - some thousand or so years prior to Mu sinking beneath the waves. The scrolls were found during an archaeological excavation in the Valley of Mexico, to which Kland had retired at some point in later life.

I knew this one was going to be tough. Not only am I pretty certain that Mu never existed, but I've spent too long immersed in Mesoamericana to suspend disbelief when these crackpots start making it up or citing implausible sources, as they always do - every fucking time.

The alarm bells rang earlier than I'd anticipated. Our boy kicks off describing the excavation of an amazing buried city in the Valley of Mexico, giving no more specific location than that it's in the north-west of the valley. A clay figurine from this dig is named the Hurdlop Venus, having been discovered by Earll's colleague, Dr. Reesdon Hurdlop, later renamed the Texcoco Venus by actual archaeologists, which is weird because Texcoco is very much in the south-east of the valley, and that's one big fucking valley. The author additionally implies that they had specifically set out in search of relics relating to lost continents on the grounds of this unidentified locale being exactly the sort of place a refugee from a lost continent might settle. Then we have page after page describing goings on at the dig, who had which amazing hunch, who was surprised by what they found and so on and so forth - all a bit Edgar Rice Burroughs, I thought.

I vowed that I wasn't going to allow myself to be influenced by researching Mu Revealed on the internet, hoping to give the author a fair crack at pulling the wool over my eyes, but I just couldn't not take a sneaky peak. Mu Revealed, it turns out, is a parody - or so ran the description I found - and the author is one Raymond Buckland writing as Tony Earll, an anagram of not really. Another anagram would be Reesdon Hurdlop, which comes from Rudolph Rednose, and Hurdlop's female colleagues, Maud N. Robat and Ruby Kraut, also sounded suspiciously fictitious.

So I persevered in anticipation of something cannily taking the piss out of the sort of book this purports to be, or at least in anticipation of something amusingly ripe. The closest it came was Buckland's analysis of Kland's testimony regarding the ocean going longboats of Mu being covered in silver. Buckland suggests this as the most likely interpretation of the narrative, although admits he doesn't want to rule out the possibility of said massive boats being quite literally made of silver.

See, I couldn't really tell if that was supposed to be a zinger or not. The civilisation described by Kland seems to be the usual variation on Greek, Roman and Egyptian society with a bit of Ben Hur thrown in, and if it's marginally more entertaining than what Buckland writes as Tony Earll, it's still pretty fucking dull due to our notional priest dutifully recording - for the benefit of future generations - even the most mundane details of his existence and what type of trousers he wore on certain days of the week. It's almost as though this was written by someone with no imagination.

Further research reveals that Buckland was better known for his books of magic, Wicca, and the occult, so it's difficult to see how this is genuinely a parody, as distinct from just some bloke telling lies, making things up, and wheeling out the snake oil in hope of paying a few bills; and Robat, as in Maud N. Robat, was actually Buckland's special magic name—sorry, of course I meant his special magick name. I was hoping that, at worst, this might be interesting as modern mythology, perhaps reflecting upon the psychological aspect of the stories we tell about things which don't exist, but really it's just some dude taking the piss; which is why I skimmed the second half. I have other stuff to read and, crackers though he may well have been, Richard S. Shaver did a better job.

In Watermelon Sugar

Richard Brautigan In Watermelon Sugar (1968)
Friends have dropped hints about Richard Brautigan ever since I borrowed and enjoyed The Hawkline Monster from Reuben back in the early eighties, and yet somehow I never took those hints. Then I read Sombrero Fallout in 2017, which was great, and then I found this so I suppose you could say I'm picking up the pace, a bit.

In Watermelon Sugar seems to occur in a rural agrarian post-society community. A few online sources describe it as post-apocalypse, but there's probably too much in the way of weird mythology woven through the thing for it to be taken quite so literally - notably the talking tigers and watermelon sugar itself, an improbably versatile building medium derived from watermelons. The name of the community is iDEATH, which is never explained, and nor is the logographically similar name of inBOIL, the bad guy of the piece, or at least the local undesirable. There isn't actually much which is explained in In Watermelon Sugar because it's mostly language stripped down to its most functional in order to describe actions and their consequences, which lends the narrative a thoroughly folksy rhythm. Brautigan isn't going to assume anything here, beyond that readers will most likely be quite capable of forming their own emotions without him having to spell anything out.

The economy of the telling yields a story which feels both mythic and yet with a solid grounding in reality one doesn't often encounter in works of fiction. It's so free of embellishment and unnecessary frippery that it feels real, which actually makes for a truly peculiar and powerful read.

Consider the hint taken.

Quest of the Three Worlds

Cordwainer Smith Quest of the Three Worlds (1966)
The first thing I read by him - which was Stardreamer, a posthumously published collection of short stories - was so weird and amazing as to immediately imprint Smith's made-up name onto my consciousness, meaning future titles would be snapped from the shelf of the book store without even pausing to examine the cover. This is the second thing I've read by him, and it is unfortunately not very good at all.

The ideas are nice, and as pleasantly peculiar and surreal as I had hoped, but they're embedded in the sort of story you might expect given the presence of quest in the title. It rambles and digresses with the rhythm of a folk tale, but one of the ones people stopped telling because they weren't actually that gripping in the first place; and everyone says everything three or four times in a variety of poetic variations. For example, it is mentioned that Finisteris was once a beautiful woman no less than four times over the first three pages of part four, which might not be so bad but that we have no idea who Finisteris or Samm or Folly are supposed to be. They turn up in part four like characters from an entirely different novel introduced to Smith's book by virtue of a book binding accident. I had no idea what was going on or why I was expected to care.

Deathlok the Demolisher

Rich Buckler, Doug Moench & others Deathlok the Demolisher (1976)
Excluding English black and white reprints, the first American comics I can recall are Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, and the first issue of Phoenix from the short lived Atlas Comics, dating respectively from November 1973, May 1976, and January 1975. These turned up at some sort of jumble sale held at my school, Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, possibly on more than one occasion. I seem to recall the two Marvel comics being found together, but I'm not sure about Phoenix. Anyway, they were in colour with stories of filmic aspiration spread across a much higher page count than that to which I was accustomed. As science-fiction, they made The Whizzers from Space in the Topper seem slightly ridiculous. They made a huge impression.

Deathlok was a cyborg, and a surprisingly gruesome creation for Marvel, but this was the seventies and America was still trying to process the Vietnam war and the rise of its own counterculture; so Deathlok is a much darker spin on square-jawed Steve Austin. It wasn't quite a case of rebuilding him - seeing as he was actually killed and was therefore a stiff, but they augmented him with robotic parts, put a computer in his head, and reanimated the dead bits with preservative in the hope of slowing his deterioration. Most depressing of all is that having been revived, the computer prevents him from killing himself, leaving him no choice but to serve as a programmable assassin. You can see how it might have left him feeling a bit grumpy.

Deathlok the Demolisher was set in a post-apocalyptic America and is therefore approximately a mash-up of Shelley's Frankenstein, I Am Legend and its big screen reincarnation as The Omega Man, plus a whole load of countercultural ill-will. We're at some distance from truth, justice and the American way.

Deathlok is the warrior let down by his country, the soldier who becomes aware of his own place within an industrial process, and the parallels with those returned or otherwise from the Vietnam war are difficult to miss.

All the places Janice - my wife - and I went to when I was normal! All of it - gone. The restaurants, theaters, everything that was precious to me - gone.

So, as is probably obvious, the Deathlok of Astonishing Tales was one of those strips pitched beyond the traditional Marvel audience, more in the direction of your older brother with his prog rock albums and Farrah Fawcett posters. It was ponderous, vaguely cerebral, and not afraid to unsettle its readership - maybe not Crime and Punishment but certainly a few stages on from Superman's brightly coloured adventures; and most notably, much of issue #35 occurs within a computer generated reality - possibly not quite the first but substantially predating the popularisation of cyberspace by William Gibson and others, and even predating Tom Baker pottering around within the matrix in The Deadly Assassin later that same year.

The only problem with this version of Deathlok is that he exists mainly for the sake of his post-apocalyptic environment and what it said about the present, as was, so he doesn't actually have much to do beyond a series of ambiguous missions, betrayals, and ensuing pontification. Buckler, Moench and others seemingly realised this and tried to jazz the story up with increasingly implausible twists, but only end up muddling things. Deathlok the Demolisher only ever needed to be a hero journey, or rather an antihero journey, in the same way that Heart of Darkness is about the progress more than the destination. Instead we find Deathlok restored to full humanity in a clone of his original body, except the cyborg body remains sentient so that now we have two of them. Then some minor point of continuity demands that this cyborg is only a copy of Deathlok, who has actually been elsewhere all along, following up some mission or other.

They should have quit while they were ahead but inevitably they didn't, so Deathlok returns a couple of years later to have adventures with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, which works about as well as would Frank Miller's Dark Knight travelling back in time to hang out with sixties telly Batman. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not making Spiderman better, you're just making Deathlok worse. There were ten good issues before it all turned to shit and contradiction, but those issues were mostly amazing, Keith Pollard notwithstanding, and arguably unlike anything Marvel published before or since. Sometimes, no matter how good your intention, you just can't bring them back.