Compulsion and Conundrum

Is it mad that I want to buy a book for the sole purpose of taking a picture of it, for my 'read in 2017' post?

I've read the novel, but in an edition that is an omnibus of that one and its sequel, so I feel unable to put it on the pile. I feel like I could buy it because the book itself was very good and touched on themes I love to see in stories, and the cover for the original paperback isn't at all atrocious.

Here's the book in question.

Not your typical Sword and Sorcery novel wouldn't you say?

It also would (maybe) take away the need, no; the pressure, no; The POUNDING COMPULSION to plow through the same omnibus again before the end of the year, this time reading both books back to back, and reviewing the whole (though that would not be for this year). 

 This reading-the-whole-omnibus-idea also seems to conflict with my 'want to read in 2018' scheme.... which just adds yet another incentive to buying the stand-alone novel.

Buying an older copy of book 1 would (/might), in effect, stifle the need for finishing the omnibus by the end of the next month because even if there's no review of it, there would be a version of the novel I'd read in the pile, even if what was on the pile wouldn't actually be the version I'd  read (which, again, maybe I shouldn't but I am going to reiterate at this point, I would be unable to put on the pile because I haven't yet read both novels therein and the reading plan for next year necessitates a complete re-read of the book I already read, hence my thought that I should buy a different copy).

The marvelous evil-doer at the heart of these mental perambulations

Maddening cyclical reasoning, indeed, dear sir or madam.

The whole conundrum is utterly ridiculous, in any case: first world problems.

And yet. And yet the thoughts are still grinding away in my head, and I can't just shove them aside.

I suppose it's the same issue I'm having now with telling myself I can put the Necronomicon omnibus on the 2017 read-pile.

"Yes, yes I FINISHED it this year, but the bulk of it was read over the PREVIOUS years..."

But I find I can easily solve that one by argumenting that those anthology novels, despite having been partially read in 2016 as well weren't eventually part of the picture that I took that year.

Which validates Necronomicon but still brings up the Von Bek omnibus one... and besides, it isn't as if it was a small part (of the overall book) that I read: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was 80 pages, and the Afterword was another 50. That's a good chunk of the book.

...

I just now realized that I have actually done what I first was harping on about earlier with another novel already this year: buying a new copy to put on the read-pile in lieu of the omnibus version.

The difference, of course, lies in that the Necronomicon is a collection of short stories, whereas that other (Vampires) was made up of several books AND short stories...

Laying it out like this still doesn't help me though.

Ah fuck it, it's 5 pounds. Just do it and stop thinking. You've spent way more time on this than it merits.

-----

Aaaaaand when picking books to take the pictures I realize that the novel I've bought to stand in place for the Vampires Omnibus isn't actually that particular novel of that omnibus that I've read this year.

I knew that it wasn't Ancient Blood and I didn't really mind at the time, as I have long had this hidden goal, which is so insane that I don't want to write it down or say aloud for fear of making it real, for fear of making me commit to it. And if I'm honest to myself, it's this goal rather than the replacement copy I stated I needed that urged me to make the purchase.

With this information in mind, I find that I have actually no problem with putting the Vampires omnibus on the read-pile. Huh.

Anyway. A middle way for the Von Bek novels then? Read this year, review at the start of the next? Would that smear the greasy ill-smelling ointment of comforting, cooing platitudes on my frustrated and bewildered brain?

...

Nope. Nope, I don't think so.

Shit, I guess I'll go sleep on it.

I have to get up for work in 6 hours. I'm just quickly posting this so it's out of my system, and because, groggy and tired as I am, I'm more inclined to post this now as it is rather than risk waking up tomorrow and deleting it all in annoyed self-reproach.

Sharing is caring... but then, for myself? Caring for myself?
...
Hell, maybe I'm just here to entertain.

Edit: Slip-shod Rough-shod but there it is. Slight edits but nothing big.
Oh, and I'm buying the novel. It's got a bad-ass cover. That's all it needs really.

Thraxas and its covers

I was doing some cleaning, checking through some lists of 'to-buy' books and I stumbled on mention of the Thraxas series. I remember sometimes looking around for copies of these books but never finding anything decent. As it was before, so it is now because, behold! I found this:

Book 1 is advertised as a World fantasy Award winner and it's the reason why I know about the series. Advertised as subversive, humorous and yet tackling serious themes with a tact and sensibility much lacking in general pulp fiction.

I imagine and am hoping for something akin to Terry Pratchett but then seriously more violent and as a longer epic maybe.

But man. How do these award-winning novels keep slipping through the cracks so much? To the extent that Createspace has to be the platform for making these available to the buying public again. It's frustrating and absurd.

I can't find any pictures of hand-held-copies or clear pictures of books 5-8 either.

I'm not sure why the ladies are always on the cover either. I know Thraxas is a dude who has a female ex-gladiator side-kick but is that a reason to have her on all the covers?

On the other hand though: trade paperbacks...

Hmmm....

NO! DAMNIT, LEVI,

 this was supposed to be a slightly baffled look at some covers, not a step-by-step account of you actually talking yourself into buying yet more books!

I finished Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

On the shelf AT LAST!!!

Alright, I finished the 880 page Necronomicon. It was a read that might've taken me as long as 6 years, I'm guessing. Mostly because, for the longest time, I didn't care to read the last 200 pages on account of I didn't have much interest in actually doing so. The bulk of what was in those pages were the Curious case of Charles Dexter Ward which I was reasonably sure I had read before (but needed to re-read anyway because damn my compulsions, and good that I did at any rate because it's indeed a good one) and together with the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which I hadn't yet and which seemed incredibly dull reading, I held off for the longest time. Last year somewhere I read the first, and earlier today, I finished the latter. I also read the To a Dreamer poem and the rather extensive, and increasingly list-like the further that you get, Afterword: A gentleman of Providence.

The To a Dreamer Poem was nice, if short but the main reason for this post is that I did want to say something about the Kadath story.

At times monotonous with turgid, fabricated prose and at other times (though not often) surprisingly poetic, the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath's most interesting achievement is that it seems to rather explicitly tie together several stories in Lovecraft's oeuvre, mostly just by name-dropping, but in some cases reintroducing characters from other short stories. Mountains of Madness and Pickman's Model are pretty noteworthy in this, with references to the locales in and surrounding Leng from the first and the ghoulified character of Pickman from the latter.

Something else that I found pleasant was that after having forced myself to read through it, it gave me more of an understanding of why Moore's Providence turned out the way it did.
With an apocalyptic end-of-the world scenario you usually expect something violent will happen. A terrible, cataclysmic event: the coming of Cthulhu, baptizing the world in blood and fire. But I expect not many people would've foreseen the course those final issues took. An ending not nearly as (explicitly) violent as supposed.
And maybe, most interestingly: Not madness-inducing at all and maybe this was the only way in which such radical changes to the world could come about. Madness or suicide: that's the way Lovecraft's characters usually go and it's Providence writ large. But Moore, by using The Dream-Quest's hints as a guideline and as a tool, provides an alternative. Acceptance through a paradigm shift, the altering of reality from one state into another; one operating (partially at least) on dream logic, hence: acceptance of things that can't be rationally accepted leading to preservation of sanity.
Though I guess I would be curious to see how the dreamworld would look after the closing of the Neonomicon-Providence storyline. Would it still exist as it was, or would it be altered as like when above becomes below, with sane and rational dreaming being the abhorrent thing in a reality of madness.

This is of course provided you take The Dream Quest, Pickman's Model and others as part of the Cthulhu mythos, which I guess is what Providence made me accept.

(If you need more hints to go and read Providence I'll give you one. Go buy it. It's horrific and will likely put you off of eating for a while, but it's an incredibly well realized and researched bit of work. It requires a lot of effort to read, but it's brilliant and messed-up and likely one of the best adaptations/looks at/critiques of  Lovecraft's work and character ever. It does require you to have at least read a lot of his fiction though, or else everything will just go right over your head.)

And yes, of course, instead of picking up any of the books I was planning to read I immediately went and started reading the Eldritch Tales book, because hey, if I'm doing ok now, might as well keep it up. For a little while, at least. First impressions are that this one is filled with a lot of shorter Lovecraft works, which works out just fine as it will give me something to dip in and out without much hassle in the near future.

Read only 2 fragments; History of the Necronomicon, which I also had extensive background in in Providence and a short story called The Alchemist.
That last seemed to be a Poe pastiche, which is always welcome, and it was far better written than the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which makes it doubly welcome. It's nice to remember that Lovecraft, with his work honed and properly revised, is actually quite good. Mind you, I'm not saying the story was very good, just that the writing was pleasant enough to make me breeze through it.
It's also not very long, which is another reason why I'm pretty sure this book won't take as long to finish.
Eldritch Tales is made up, barring a few exceptions, of short stories ranging between 1 and 10 pages. It's a far more pleasing prospect to peruse through bite-sized tales, rather than 80 page dream-quests without comprehensive editing and without a clear plot drive.
Though I must admit some of those final 40 pages were very bloody good. I don't mind telling you, I read more today than I did all week. A huge sense of scale and there was actually some universe-ending brilliance along the lines of The House on the Borderlands in there.

I guess I'm of two minds about the story. It's hugely flawed and is riddled with casual contradictions and typing errors and at its worst bogs down the reading with some of the worst prose that Lovecraft penned down (with a fountain pen. As a casual aside, for those interested about this sort of thing). And then at its best... Yeah... at its best; it reminds me of the House on the Borderlands.

"So, I watched through the fleeting ages..."

Necronomicon Goals, Big Black Book Edition

After finishing up the stunning Providence, I figured that this might just be a good time to finish off some of the Lovecraft work I hadn't yet read. For illustrative purposes here's my copy.

It's of the Gollancz Black Books range, which I wasn't enormously into for some reason. The Whole list is comprised of only 6 books: of which I've read at least 1 completely (Complete Conan Chronicles), 1 at least partially (Conan's Brethren), 1 is a MUST read (Lyonesse) and one, despite nigglings that I really should, have absolutely no interest in (Tarzan). 

That last one might be because, compulsive as I am, I might feel forced to dig through the entire Tarzan series and as that thing runs to about 26 novels, there's no way I'm touching that thing with a ten metre stick. Although, I did read Princess of Mars, come to think of it, and I'm not feeling much of a need to read beyond that first novel. It was last year even. Hmmm...

Well, whatever the reasoning for my holding off on the others, I couldn't resist the 2 Lovecraft volumes which I did buy, because, why not put black faux leather with golden lettering on a book with occult connotations and eldritch naming?

These books are, in fact, the same size

Gollancz, I fookin' love ya.

It would be nice If I could finish this last part of the enormous Necronomicon book by the end of the week. All that's left is the short poem 'To a Dreamer', the lengthy short story 'The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath' and the 'Afterword' section. Which looks somewhat like this.

When done, there'll be no review for this one. This is just for me.

I've been aware that my reading pace has slumped to a pretty horrifying low, so this will enable me to add a book that I've dipped in and out over the years to the completely-read-Shelves without having to give it much thought.

Before beginning with this edition I was comfortably sure that I had read most all Lovecraft's stories, in various anthologies over the years, but I figured at the time that it wouldn't take much effort to make completely sure by purchasing and reading a complete edition.

Not yet quite exactly a decade later and I still haven't finished up that book and I haven't even started on the smaller, but still daunting Eldritch Tales. But I guess now the time is good to finish off the first. It'll add some context to some of the later Providence issues, the Randolph Carver ones.

-----

... Aaaand, my god, not many pages in and I'm already regretting it.
The 'Dream quest' short story, at this point in reading, seems to be Lovecraft's sustained effort to imitate Dunsany's stories. But where those things were artfully dreamy, Lovecraft's is just mindlessly, endlessly imaginative without restraint. Where it should be dreamy it is soporific. Where flowing without effort, it is instead clunky and unpolished. A quick search reveals that this is because it's one of those works not published during Lovecraft's lifetime.
However, it does seem to shed a lot of light on some of the mythology that was previously only hinted at throughout the other short stories, by giving an unrestrained, 'un-maddening' and thus 'all-accepting' view on the outer gods.

I'm having some difficulties going on, which is why this post has been polished a lot more than I'd been planning. Maybe because the tale is about dreaming itself and the wonder of imagination. Doesn't help that I'm tired and tucked in a warm bed after a cold, wet day.

Alright, continuing on. Have a nice evening (or day) yourself, dear reader.

Review: Providence, Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

Well.
It's done and I'm not sure what to say.
The lofty literary achievement of Providence's chapters 1-10 is gone. Or at least undercut by its final and ultimate resolution. A resolution that ties inescapably, inextricably to Moore and Burrows' earlier outing; Neonomicon, and then goes fantastical to the extreme, subverting, recreating and building on the entire Lovecraft mythology with an ending that is deliriously impressive in its scope.

That fantastical ending by the way, for the audience at large, would be a pleasing thing, but I confess I'm just a little taken aback as, in those final issues, we're brought back to the seedy horror and outlandish sensationalism of the Neonomicon, even though I completely knew and expected that going into this work (and note above that I didn't call this post a comic book review). But, much like Robert in his 'Commonplace Book' comments, as readers we were hoping for our narrator to survive, similar sentiments apply. But I don't mean that here in the literal sense, I rather mean that I had hoped the work would be able to stay true to its beginnings, without having to abandon the literary approach that the series stuck to for so long.

There would have been an extremely easy way to do this and you can clearly distinguish the cut-off point, if he would have chosen to do it so, but Moore must've had his reasons.
I would have preferred if he had did another 4 or 6 issue arc for the final issues that are set in the present day and leave Robert's story separate as its own thing, because now, the final issue is just another comic book issue, rather than that other thing that earlier issues of Providence succeeded so well in being. It was something so completely against convention, and to turn something with so much labour and thought behind it for such an extended amount of time, into this completely lesser thing is just a little grating. But then that might be the point and If you've read it you'll already have come to that conclusion. Parallell of intent.

I might have been giving the wrong impression here. I don't hate it and it's still completely brilliant, of course.

I just miss the comfort of the sedate and familiar pace of reading Robert's 'Commonplace Book', and maybe I'm just bewildered and still struggling with trying to impose some sort of coherent view on all the story implied, plotwise. But then, I guess there's little reason to be found, there at the end, logic being far afield in the world of dreams.

What a work and what an achievement.
Meta-fictional in its execution and metaphysical in its story, Providence talked about all things Lovecraft, criticizing and commenting on every facet of the themes and styles present in his work, nothing gets dismissed, nothing is left unaddressed, all the bad and all the good, both present and what flows forth from it, while still managing to work towards building the greatest and most important Lovecraftian epic ever created.

I loved it.

-----

It's certainly better than the Fall of Cthulhu and also similar (but again, better) to the terrible, horrifying madness of Nameless.

Just thought I'd mention the other two major apocalyptic comic epics inspired by Lovecraft's fiction.

...

Nameless... 

...

*shudders*"

Review: Song of Kali, Dan Simmons, Fantasy Masterworks and Terror 8 addendum

It is June 1977 and an Indian poet lives.

The long-presumed dead writer M. Das, is rumoured to have resurfaced in Calcutta, with a significant new body of work to his name.

Fledgling writer Robert Luczak is sent by his editor at Harper's Magazine to meet with the poet, to verify if the work is actually by M. Das' hand and to negotiate the purchase of the manuscript.

With his wife and new-born daughter in tow Robert travels to ancient Calcutta where it soon becomes apparent that there's more to the place than meets the eye.
And what the eye meets is already disagreeable enough; at the height of its raining season, with mountains of garbage and filth coating the streets, drenched sodden one moment, and baked dry by the searing summer heat the next; the place is a reeking dungheap, and a heaving sea of people, the uneducated and the destitute, swarm over every inch of it.
A city at its lowest point in decades, it has become a place of monstrous slums, and it's where Robert swears he can feel an evil intent simmering beneath the surface.

 And when it turns out that the poet M. Das might well have been thought dead for a good reason, then that intent is given a name.

Kali.

Four-armed goddess of  preservation and nature, and mother to all.

But she is also considered the goddess of death and destruction and the one to ultimately be the devourer of reality itself.

And Robert Luczak is running straight into her waiting arms.

----

Dan Simmons is one of my favourite writers and, so far, all his novels have been built with a consistent level of quality and craft. However, unfortunately Song of Kali isn't one of his better ones and I found that I had a few gripes when done with it. In the main, this is down to the negative portrayal of certain elements of the plot. Most of those have reasons for being depicted the way they are but one of them has come about because of a rather narrow-minded focus to it and it honestly doesn't merit much excusing or rationalising.

I'm referring to the malign force at the heart of the story, the goddess Kali. Or rather, that's what Simmons makes of her. She is clearly just demonized and there's no doubt about it. Her better aspects are forgotten or left at the wayside and there's no real mitigating factor here other than that this is how Simmons made chose to tell the story. Maybe he needed a villain, but then he's chosen to represent her in an extremely nebulous manner.

The other main problem is the novel's depiction of Calcutta, which has a reason for looking the way it does and I'll divulge that information in just a moment.

There are spoilers in this post at several points throughout, mostly because of inferring and hinting, but because I've written too much it's become hard to give a good cut-off point. I'll just put the disclaimer here and move on with the program.

Outside of the book's themes and elements the writing felt a little austere, unlike Simmons' usual self.
He is usually a comforting writer, mainstream but rather more aware of himself, holding himself to a consistent standard, notable in its readability and yet, holding up to criticism. neither overly poetic nor overly workmanlike.

Literary Influences

Simmons is a clever writer who loves putting his literary influences on his sleeve and it's pleasant to see that this element has been present in his work since this, his first outing; Song of Kali. The main character is, like Simmons at the time of writing, a beginning writer and editor of a literary magazine with only a small volume of poetry under his belt. Simmons himself sold his first short story in 1982, coincidentally, on the birthday of his daughter, 3 years before the release of Song of Kali.
As Simmons notes in the early pages of the novel; decent, rational people who one used to be able to have memorable intellectual conversations with are reduced into cooing halfwits by the birth of their child. And as it is with those people, so it is with Simmons' first novel as you'll notice when reading that Luczak's little baby Victoria is an ever-present gurgling, burbling and drowsing entity. Also, she's very relevant to the plot.

The various other characters found throughout the novel have, at the very least, a passing acquaintance with the world of literature, occasionally throwing in observations and opinions on various writers and famous works of literature, occasionally tying them into India and its culture.  p37:

"I quit in disgust when a fool of a professor would not accept my paper on Walt Whitman's debt to Zen Buddhism..."

But not all writers need to be tied into the setting, sometimes there's a little time for the occasional absentminded barb. p52

"Her interest and belief in the supernatural had until now seemed non-existent. I had never even been able to interest her in the trashy Stephen King novels I would bring to the beach each summer."

It's not a literary novel if the author can't at least throw a barb at a writer he doesn't respect. That it's Stephen King here is ironic, of course, as that gentleman's generous cover quotes grace (or deface) many a Simmons novel.

Most interestingly though, the novel is a homage to Rabindranath Tagore and has more than passing reference to the work of William Butler Yeats, through whose work Simmons likely became acquainted with the former.

Rabindranath Tagore, or Thakur, was an Indian writer, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature, specifically for his Song Offerings, which is a selected collection of songs or hymns, much in the same vein as the Biblical Song of Solomon, that were previously published in other volumes in India (the largest part of Song Offerings is comprised out of selected songs from Gitanjali). Written in complete isolation and tranquility on a houseboat, they were subsequently translated to English from his native Bengali by Tagore himself. They were carried with him on his visit to Britain where it was passed to W. B. Yeats who promptly fell in love with it.
It was he who, also generously, graced it (this time without a doubt) with an introduction that might just have been a tad overselling it.

"I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me."

Whatever your opinion, it was Yeats whose glowing praise introduced Tagore's work to the west.

As you might gather from the quote, the songs/poems are idealistic and uplifting, despite having undertones of loss which are a reflection of Tagore's own. Throughout the novel we are regaled with the events of his life at several points.
Oddly then, it skimps on mentioning something quite important; the death of Tagore's wife and children in 1902 (yes yes, the house boat thing was earlier, but I've got everything hopelessly muddled at this point). Tagore suffered this tragedy and it's easy to see, when read, how this might have influenced Song of Kali's story, but the real reflection lies in Tagore's (and Robert Luczak's attitude towards their loss; even with their pain and their loss, there is still, once past the focal point of the horror in their respective lives, a renewal of hope and self-love; Yeats' 'self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-afrighting' spirit. Love for life itself.

The quote (p 301) comes from Yeats' A Prayer For My Daughter. Witten at her birth, it is full of hopeful and well-wishing sentiment, but this part of the prayer has undertones of tragedy and loss, swiftly followed by hope and self-love, mirroring the arch of the main characters in Song of kali.

Yeats' doom-laden Second Coming poem is also quoted before the climax, but after the worst has already happened. Simmons has a penchant for a good quote, applicable to his own work.
More than that however, he weaves it straight into his narrative, and the poem's bleak prophesying of an apocalyptic future further strengthens, and maybe only because of its inclusion, the tense build-up of the final parts. The suspended breath before the storm, but it's a storm that does not materialize because just like where Tagore's Song Offerings acknowledge the coming end of life, they also acknowledge and, more importantly, hold on to the love for life in and for itself.

Where the song of Kali, in the novel, is one of coming death and destruction, Simmons, after having put us to misery and death, offers up the idealism of Tagore by ending the story with (p 311):

"The Song of Kali is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. Its chorus grows and grows and grows.
But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung."

-----

There's a part in the novel where one character regales the others with a description of the last days of Tagore, and I'm not sure if we can take that at face value. The other native characters seem keen to drown the teller out, possibly to suppress less than desirable information to get out, but it is more likely rather, to stop erroneous, embellished information to get out.

It was my idea that Simmons had heard this story somewhere and, despite knowing it to be false, incorporated it anyway, to illustrate how stories grow and morph in the telling.

Letting it be regaled to us in the novel, doesn't have to mean that he stands behind the facts as they are told, as the other characters seem to protest against the telling, because they are also him. 

Its inclusion is evidence of a rather sly sort of humour.

Simmons has a love of storytelling and an interest on how the tale alters with the telling. There's another part in the novel where we are told the story of a man in three whole chapters, with possible hints of the supernatural peppered throughout, but it could be that, showing one character to be an unreliable narrator, the other narrators might then fall under this as well. Maybe even the prime: Robert Luczak himself (The novel is in first-person past tense).

It gives rise to something I'll talk about later:

 Explanations that negate, though with leeway to the contrary, every supernatural element in the novel, to root the story squarely in reality.

Another thing to note is that throughout these stories in specific and throughout the novel as a whole he also shows himself acutely aware of the problems that crop up between languages incorporating both the clash of world languages and the difficulties within a language's varied dialects.

Calcutta

Like in every novel that Dan Simmons delivers, there's been extensive research into the background of the various elements of the novel, as with Tagore, so it is with the city of Calcutta.

However; something that's been noted often and a ready point of contention, is its depiction.
It's the novel's greatest strength and at the same time, its greatest problem.

The city is so well depicted, so ever-present, towering over every scene like the backdrop of a theater production, and so memorably unique, it has become one of the characters in the novel (as much as I hate typing that cliché sentence, it conveys exactly what it accomplishes).
There is garbage and filth towering up at every street corner and clotting shut dark alleyways,

accompanied by an all-pervading smell of corruption and decay, it is swelteringly hot, loud and wild; a veritable human sea of sweat-matted flash, to be cooled only by downpours of biblical proportions.

It's impressive and memorable but there is an issue with this.

For many mainstream readers, this might be one of the first novels that gets you acquainted with India and its culture, it certainly was for me, and here is the problem I spoke of: Knowing nothing of India but the depiction of Calcutta presented to you in the novel, you could be forgiven for thinking India might just be an unmitigated hell-hole.

But you see, the city as it is depicted by Simmons isn't exactly a false depiction. It's in fact a time-period chosen exactly to suit the plot.

On a yearly basis the months between June and September are the monsoon season where most of its rainfall happens in June and where maximum temperatures easily exceed 40 degrees (celcius, for you cretins in america) on a daily basis.

For historical Calcutta, now Kolkata, it is also one of the more clearly distinguishable times wherein the city suffers its greatest socio-economic woes in quite a while.

There's an enormous influx of destitute and low-schooled refugees from Bangladesh's Liberation War. who cause an incredible drain on the city's resources and which is hit by severe power outtages and is overal lacking in general infrastructure. Furthermore the city is plagued by severe worker strikes and suffers from violent insurrectionists.

Insurrections, because before the events of the novel in early 1977 the 'tyrannical' government comes to an end and is followed by what became the 'longest serving democratically elected government in the world'.

The populace was so fed up with its own government that it chose it's ultimate opposite, and more than that, it kept it like this for the longest time because everything was better than what was before.

It's an extreme response and clearly shows how deep the divide between rulers and the ruled was.

All these things manifest themselves, their consequences, in the immense squalor that Simmons puts at the forefront of his narrative, with filth and waste covering, seemingly, every square metre of the city and with slums on every other street, leaving the impression on the reader as if the city has been covered in a blanket, of garbage instead of snow.

Simmons puts his tale in one of the periods which serve the tale he wants to tell incredibly well, but which also serves to show the reader an incredibly negative snapshot of a culture and city which the overwhelmingly large amount of the readership might not have been familiar with.

More than that; through the benefit of hindsight, the novel presents a hopelessly negative point of view on the city in some of the worst straits it's ever been in.

In chapter 9 Robert meets with a mr Chatterjee, and discusses, among a host of  pleasantries and mutual interests, the state of Calcutta itself.

Robert professes that he feels the city itself might have an evil undercurrent, as if the squalor has a singular source of supernatural intent. which is, through our bias as a reader looking for a supernatural horror element, readily acceptable.

However Chatterjee responds with disdain and, taking a book of his shelf, responds with a quote (p132):

'... a dense mass of houses so old they only seem to fall, through
which narrow and tortuous lanes curve and wind. There is no privacy here and  whoever ventures in this region find the streets - by courtesy so called - thronged with loiterers and sees, through half glazed windows, rooms crowded to suffocation... The stagnant gutters... The filth choking up dark passages... The walls of bleached soot, and doors falling from their hinges... and children swarming everywhere, relieving themselves as they please.'

When asked by his host if this might be an accurate description of the Calcutta of 1977, Robert Luczak responds that, yes, indeed, the description is an apt one.

Mr Chatterjee then smiles and reveals the quote to be part of an account of London written somewhere around the 1850's.

Chatterjee, at this time in the book, with paranoia infecting both reader and Robert at this time in the book, is an unwelcome element of rational argumentation.

In hindsight, where we might want and expect supernatural horror, Chatterjee provides an alternative.

And time has proven mr Chatterjee reasoned pronouncements correct because today Kolkata is an economically thriving city. India's third city in terms of gross domestic product.

It's problematic in that it almost directly contradicts the novel's suggested premise of a malignant goddess of destruction, decay and violence having sway over the city.

40 years on, in a totally different Calcutta, now called Kolkata, it slaps a time-stamp on the novel that could be called malignant and xenophobe at worst, and giving an unfair view on the city through choice of an unfortunate time frame at best.

(The depiction of Kali as a solely destructive entity is also, of course, a very reductive view on the goddess but I've mentioned that before.)

It's not all doom and gloom though and I wanted to note that occasionally Simmons brings a comfortable and almost magical atmosphere in a scene to then, without much comment, introduce an element of life's many unpleasant truths.

To reflect that with life, comes death and despite of rationalizations, to have the joy that comfort brings usually means that there is someone or something paying a price for the option of having that comfort. He contrasts fleeting beauty with the messy everyday realities that humanity has to deal with on a day by day basis, in order to survive or to progress. It hints, much like the clipped information dumps of violent madness in America at the end of the novel, that none of this is unique to Calcutta and is more a symptom of the human animal's violently 'altering' presence in the world.

World Fantasy Award Winner

Alright, let's deal with the personal nitpick here. The most glaring problem I have with this one.

Published in 1985 it won the World Fantasy award the year after and, it also is nr 44 of the Gollancz' Fantasy Masterwork collection. 

This is in spite of the fact that it's not actually a fantasy novel.

In 1986 there were a few other nominees for the award.
-The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein, which is apparently a novel with surrealist overtones and time travel
-The Damnation game by Clive Barker, Faustian novel set in modern times
-The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice, the tale of a vampire, apparently Rice writes well and I love the Interview movie
-Illywhacker by peter Carey, magical realism novel with humour
-Winterking by Paul Hazel, myth, gods and mystery set in scandinavia

As you can see, half of these are easily considered to be works of horror and in my book they should be instantly disqualified.
Illywhacker's synopsis tells me I should probably avoid this novel, even though it has some metafictional elements. And The Vampire Lestat (horror too right?) and Winterking are both sequel novels in a series.

Song of Kali is indeed accomplished and this is notable because it's a debut novel. It's obviously well-researched and its ending, especially if you know enough about its influences, is poetic.

Now, the eligibility of any given work to be considered for the world fantasy award hinges on a few things, but mainly it is up to the discretion of the judges and the nominators.

Broadly speaking: any work of fantastical fiction can be eligible, regardless of subgenre or style, though the wordcount always needs to be higher than 40 000 words. (it also needs to be published or at the very least translated into English but let's not get into that now. mainly because of personally preferring to read in English anyway and I don't have any actual beef with the rule other than to note it here and to say that it's a very non-all-inclusive stance to take.

So technically, as Song of Kali is horror, and horror being a subgenre of fantastical fiction in general, it was very much eligible for the award.

And yet, the very fact that Song of Kali is even here, whether it is as the world fantasy award winner or as an entry of the fantasy masterworks collection, rubs me the wrong way. If it's anything it's horror and it's fantastical elements are subtle and downplayed.

It's a good novel, absolutely. I love Dan Simmons.

But I have the sneaking suspicion that the big draw here with this book, for all these so-called judges of literary fiction, is that its fantastical elements are so marginalized and so easily explained and ciphered away. It's a novel that might as well have no fantasy in it, if you choose to view it so.

It is a singularly elitist stance to have, so dismissive of fantastical literature at large.

As I'm working on this already hugely lengthy post I'm reading the final chapters of the sprawling 'Providence' of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows and I've hit this particular line of reasoning by the main character, the very heart of what I'm getting at.

It's one of those things that irritates me by the exaltation of this type of fiction, the barely-slip-stream type of genre, where reality is mixed with almost less than a smattering of fantasy. Where it disassociates itself by sidelining all these supernatural elements, as if fantastical fiction is something to be looked down on by the literary elite.
More specifically, those who are responsible for the World Fantasy Award, as it is they who shouldn't proscribe to popular sentiment and adhere more to the 'Fantasy' element of the title.


And lastly, because I don't know how to quit: Wrapping up and thoughts of the novel's inclusion in the Terror 8.

Flat- out Spoilers for the plot.

Street Art

I've taken some pictures of some street art I've walked, or more accurately, cycled past a lot of times over the years.

It's one of those quick spurts of graffiti that gets almost idly sprayed on public utilities, you know them, you've seen them; the small irritating acts of vandalism, like a fruit fly gently droning around, that are annoying but ultimately not worth the effort of the cleanup.

It translates as 'Fill the Void' and for the longest time I just took it as a scathing indictment of television and assorted fiction, of all the couch potatoes sprawled in fattening comfort on sofas, after a hard day at work, stuffing themselves full to the gullet with utter time-filling nonsense of others' making, too weary to think and content to just lap it up, the brainless zombies of the information age.

But, somewhere along the line it's taken on a different meaning. The brainless cavity of the head has lost its central focus and what remains instead is the television and the words.

Where once they were critique, now they've become guideline.

They've taken on the hue of advice and they come as an offer of help. 

Because it knows that everyone has that dark void; the terrifying thing that makes us reach out, in an effort to fill it, to satisfy the hunger, to blot out the ache that tells us we're incomplete. The social animal of man, most content to extract the much needed meaning and satisfaction from its daily tanglings with those most like himself, when left alone becomes an ugly, desperate thing and gorges himself on whatever has the ability to occupy him and make his crippling loneliness fade in the pound of its sensory input. 

He takes it and goes forward because he finds that with the distraction the hours begin to fade and that soon the intricate dance of spheres will get to continue. Because he's an object and they are objects and all are caught in the mutual pull. They dance a dance of gratifying and satisfying in mutual self-affirming existence, those spheres that orbit because they resemble himself most of all, enabling and comforting.

Sometimes they move in near, sometimes they remain far.

Sometimes those divine, celestial bodies grind close with delirious need, and the gravitational havoc they play on eachother eclipses the rest of the dark, cold void.

And sometimes they hurtle out of eachother's influence and vanish from sight, leaving only that same void to stare at, now all the more darker. But there are always more bodies, and the void can always be filled again.

Some of us don't dance, we are unable to or we don't want to.

 So instead we turn to other things: Television, books, comics, art, food, religion, whatever. It becomes the focus and we fill our lives to the brim with the meaning we endow them with.

I look above at the planets at play with fleeting envy and eternal hate and I grimly smile.

One way or another, sooner or later, we all end up desperately filling the void.

As I said, it's started to look like advice.

But then of course, if you look at what's drawn on the side...

Definitely a critique.

And here, from the pages of Hack/Slash, submitted without comment, because it isn't relevant at all in any conceivable way whatsoever:

Birthday Post

Alright, here's a little fun after all the bad hands I've been dealing.

I was going to post this sooner, like, ten days sooner, but due to circumstances, that ended up just not happening. Nonetheless it's still a little fun thing to show off. Positivity, people.

Here's, almost, all of what I got for my birthday.

For the sake of the blog though, I'll mostly restrain myself to the book aspect of the gifts,

Seen above is only a fraction of the artery-clogging load of food I got, which has been mostly eaten by now, and which I've packed on like some introverted bear hibernating for a very cold winter.

Special mention though, has to be made of that lovely Penny Dreadful t-shirt, which, despite being a season 3 bit of merchandise, is still very much appreciated.

Also, this little thing.

The doll doesn't come with Evie Frye's standout Ubisoft Blue outfit (was it Ubisoft Blue?), which was only available in the game via the Uplay service, because of course those fuckers knew just what looked best on her and had to hide it away behind their nauseating service bull-shit.

There's some lovely little detail on the hood, although it seems to be in places rather mushed.

...

The head is oversized...

...

I don't know, man, It's a doll, what do you want me to say?

It's not my thing but it does bring back some memories, of ogling Evie while she is hopping across the rooftops of London. I actually quite liked Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and again, mostly this is because of Evie Frye.

It certainly wasn't because of her twin, because that ass-hat was a complete Jacob.

Eh... yeah that seems about right.

He did redeem himself (somewhat) in the Ripper dlc, which was very good, like a little horror outing set in the Assassin's Creed universe. And I'll likely never forget that one-on-one fight at the start of that story. Good times.

Speaking of good times, this also brings some to mind.

Or does it? It's one of those very ambivalent things.

Anyway: Someone's been reading the blog. Which, despite the connotations, is very gratifying.

I'll admit, when I unwrapped the present and realized what it was, I got a little choked up.

I remember the original copy I read, from the library, not having a dust jacket and being wrapped in a bunch of cellophane tape to protect the cover from getting damaged.

Might be giving it a quiet read again at some point, but for now it'll have to settle for having pride of place on my bookshelf.

Here's something else that gets pride of place:

Me and the Ink-Stained Beard have a friendly little feud, or at least that's what I consider it to be, where one of us loves Neil Gaiman and the other semi-pretends to absolutely revile him.

Oooooh... I suppose this should've been obvious but I just never got it before now.

So getting this book from the inclined-towards Gaiman party could be considered a 'dick-move'.

Especially since I had already purchased and read Good Omens in the edition that matched the Collector's Discworld edition. You know, the ones with the almost minimalist hardcovers that look quite damn good. I've shown them here on the blog at one point, can't remember where though.

I'm very much a fan of Pratchett though so this is still very cool.

Also that red cover with the black lettering is oh so very delicious.

And then of course, when we get to the title page we get this...

Signed by BOTH Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett...

Well damn.

Something, something book club edition. Honestly I have no idea.

I've never much been one for first editions, signatures and printings to be honest.

As long as the edition is fancy and looks good, it's all okay for me.

Somebody's out a pretty penny though.

Here's another one that puts a smile on my face.

One of the, relatively, few Fantasy Masterworks I still need, and it's in rather immaculate condition, which is always a surprise with these things.

Quite a big volume too with all the content made up of them there short stories.

As this edition actually has an introduction by Neil Gaiman I first thought this was another of Beard's gifts, as it arrived in the mail without a note or anything, but it turns out it's from another distant friend of mine.

 Thanks buddy.

And of course, thank you all for the wonderful gifts, all you lucky people.

It was a good birthday.

Just covering all my bases there.

Up next we have another book of the Michael Moorcock Library, 

Which means I've still got three more to go, and I've been assured that another one of those three is still incoming over the next few days, and the other two "Might, just Might *wink, wink* arrive at christmas!"

Aaaand just in time for the post going up here's the other one.

I can see a theme here.

I guess Cornelius is a good name to go for.

And lastly we have a couple of ps4 games:

These two are pick up and play, and I've already had alot of fun with Steep, and will continue to do so long after the stories of other games are done, or so I'm assuming.

For the other, hell and guns, so why not?

I had played doom 3 before, which was pretty ok.

The mythology of the thing is a bit of a headscratcher but I guess it's a brain at the door kind of game.

And here's the one I'm playing right now.

Initial verdict after adapting to the radical overhaul to the combat system:

It is pretty damn awesome.

I'm about to go to Alexandria after playing around for 6 or 7 hours, chasing soldiers and hunting leopards and climbing just about everything in sight.

I'm very much looking forward to having a look at that library, though given the series track record, I'll end up being the one who burns it down to the ground.

*Sigh*

 One just has to be involved in everything or it just doesn't feel special enough, right? Thanks Ubisoft...