A mildly amusing Halloween diversion, Fangs is a light, creepy cute series of romantic slice-of-life comics (if one can call the daily lives of the unA mildly amusing Halloween diversion, Fangs is a light, creepy cute series of romantic slice-of-life comics (if one can call the daily lives of the undead slice of life, of course) originally published as a webcomic series by Sarah Andersen, best known for her influential Sarah’s Scribbles comics. Fangs is an endearing, sweet read with a patina of darkness appropriate for the slightly goth or fans of What We Do in the Shadows. Following the budding relationship between Elsie, a 300-something year 26 year old vampire and her dreamy man-bunned werewolf bf Jimmy, these two opposites attract partners learning to live with each other’s quirks should appeal to many couples early in a passionate romance. Andersen’s art here is expressive and detailed, quite different from her other work. Its origins as a webcomic are fairly evident with the jokes coming in at a quick pace, some relatable relationships observations, others drawing on silly werewolf/vampire tropes. All in all, a nice way to spend a few minutes in the fall season but not exactly digging new graves in the horror romance category....more
“A haunting is like anything else in life. Impossible to prepare for. So it’s better not to have expectations.”
Emily Carroll’s latest affecting, eeri“A haunting is like anything else in life. Impossible to prepare for. So it’s better not to have expectations.”
Emily Carroll’s latest affecting, eerie graphic novel A Guest in the House is her most chilling yet. I’ve rarely felt literal chills while reading a comic, but Carroll certainly builds them up here. Grounding her phantasmagorical ghostly tale in the familiar mundanity of a quiet northern lake town sometime in the ‘90s makes the horrors that fill the pages all the more startling. Carroll is an expert at evoking visceral human emotions and imbuing them with an ominous power, and A Guest in the House accentuates this.
Abigail, an emotionally subdued, self effacing young woman newly married to an older widowed dentist, is struggling to adjust to her new life, especially engaging with her new stepdaughter Crystal. Under the surface of her placid, passive exterior, her personality surges with a vibrant, if unsettling fantasy life. Despite the prosaic appearance of her life, it is a house of secrets and the presence of Sheila, her husband’s first wife and Crystal’s mother, looms large over the lakehouse Abby spends so much time alone in. Soon, Abby comes to interact and build a relationship with Sheila's presence in the house, a relationship by turns enticing and menacing and the boundaries between the real and the other begin to blur, for both Abby and the reader. Carroll illustrates the mundane details of Abby’s daily life - the grocery store, the wall harp, the dock - in a static black and white, while her dream experiences are shown in lurid reds and blues, a striking and effective way to convey this disquieting atmosphere, especially as the ambiguity of Abby’s understanding becomes more evident. Full of strange and surreal touches that accentuate this uncertainty, as the tension mounts, we find ourselves unsure where Abby’s dreamworld ends and its reality begins.
All in all, there is a lot going on under the surface of this story, from Abby’s anxieties and sexuality to the stifling nature of her small town at the end of the conformist 20th century, that makes it all very open to interpretation in a provocative and rewarding way, especially its shocking and sudden ending. An intricate and terrifying puzzle, Carroll’s lush artwork and pacing make A Guest in the House a gripping story that is best read during the day....more
Spare and eerie, but with a morbid charm, Jon Klassen’s short children’s novel/picture book, The Skull, is a creepy but cozy tale I look forward to shSpare and eerie, but with a morbid charm, Jon Klassen’s short children’s novel/picture book, The Skull, is a creepy but cozy tale I look forward to sharing with my kid on a gloomy, dreamy fall night in a few years. Gleaned from a moody Tyrolean (a region of Austria) folktale, Klassen’s elegant art with its muted blues and grays and his effective, stripped-down storytelling capture the strange whimsy of fairy tales, from the plucky young Otilla to the gentle-natured skull to the mysterious secret Otilla must confront. I loved the use of short chapters setting up the themes and elements that would appear, allowing a young audience to prepare for what would occur without spelling them out. All in all, The Skull celebrates the weird joy of spooky things and, I think, could inspire a lot of conversations about Otilla’s actions and her matter of fact reactions to the mysterious things she encounters. ...more
She Walks in Shadows is an anthology of short horror stories written by women exploring Lovecraftian themes and the Cthulhu Mythos through a feminine She Walks in Shadows is an anthology of short horror stories written by women exploring Lovecraftian themes and the Cthulhu Mythos through a feminine lens, one that has all too often been ignored or marginalized in the genre. Lovecraft and his followers and imitators included few women in their work, mostly as a few inconsequential extras or particularly disturbing antagonists, but the writers included here take his themes and explore them in ways Lovecraft, stuck in his own stunted and bigoted worldviews, could never have imagined.
Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who has since become a prolific and interesting author tackling these themes throughout her work, these stories represent some of the early critical and creative reevaluations of Lovecraft’s opus as authors grapple with the intractable racist and sexist themes endemic in it, taking it to new and thought provoking places. In other ways, though, this remains a pretty typical Cthulhu Mythos story anthology in which the authors riff on the old tropes, with some writing more straightforward homage (and tedious Mythos poetry) while others try to engage with these themes on a deeper level. Whether retelling some of Lovecraft’s stories from flipped viewpoints, such as Lavinia Whatley (The Dunwich Horror), Asenath Waite (The Thing on the Doorstop), or even Marceline (from Lovecraft’s most infamously racist story, Medusa’s Coil), or taking us to the far future, Roman Britain, or farther afield to confront the colonial and gender ramifications of the themes, there are some clunkier works and some stronger ones. All in all, a fairly strong collection worth checking out if you are craving more contemporary rethinkings of cosmic horror....more
I went into Dead Eleven with no real expectations, drawn in by an intriguing premise and a striking cover, but what really sparked me to check it out I went into Dead Eleven with no real expectations, drawn in by an intriguing premise and a striking cover, but what really sparked me to check it out was its setting, Door County, Wisconsin, a place I’ve spent many long weekend vacations with my family throughout childhood and into adulthood. This grounding of the strange and horrific in the familiar is a theme that always appeals to me, and I was interested to see what Jimmy Juliano would do with it.
I had not heard of the author and I’ve never checked out the online community he apparently honed his craft in, the NoSleep sub on Reddit, but the general tradition the NoSleepers appear to specialize in, CreepyPasta, is a fascinating one to me. Members post stories that are generally framed as having really happened to the author or someone close to them, attempting to build a sense of verisimilitude as users do everything they can to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality.
Beginning Dead Eleven, this influence was very evident in Juliano’s work, which frames the novel as a series of “receipts,” including various documents, chat logs, and transcriptions of recorded conversations compiled by a sports journalist named Harper after his investigation into his sister Willow’s mysterious disappearance on the isolated Clifford Island, a tiny community off of the Door County Peninsula in Green Bay. Suspiciously obscure for a bustling tourist region known for quaint boutiques, cozy cherry orchards, and pristine Lake Michigan coastline, the islanders maintain some bizarre eccentricities, living as though it is always 1994, down to watching VHS tape recordings of the OJ Simpson chase on repeat. Comprising what Harper calls an “oral history” of the island, he promises the sinister truth behind these retro habits, revealing why the island cut itself off from the outside world for the last three decades by drawing on Willow’s experiences gleaned from letters to her estranged husband and those of a skeptical young islander who wants to expose everything.
Willow, haunted by the death of her child and a traumatic childhood is drawn to the island after discovering the name hidden in her son’s bedroom and begins to discover local legends of “dead things” hiding in the woods and the lake is more than just folklore, and that there is a lot more to the island than just old fashioned locals stuck in their ways. Hoping to escape a childhood of vintage hand-me-downs and socially enforced nostalgia, both siblings are aided by local kid Lily Becker, who believes her elders' stories of an evil presence underneath the island are a lie designed for control. She’s wrong, of course. We know that from the beginning. Piecing together these various primary sources are what Harper (or Juliano) calls “reenactments,” tying everything up into a narrative that makes up the bulk of the novel, functionally no different than a typical third person omniscient perspective. This is where, I think, it all started to break down.
There are definitely creepy moments and Juliano occasionally builds up a sense of suspense. He is undeniably working with some rich veins for a gripping contemporary horror, pulling at a variety of motifs that quickly drew me in. Underneath the inherent silliness of the early ‘90s paraphernalia and riffing on the tendency of rural, out-of-the-way places in the Midwest to feel like time capsules preserving fashions and technologies long since discarded elsewhere is an intriguing blend of all too relatable human experiences (grief, resentment, boredom) with cosmic horror.
It is disappointing, then, that the broth becomes so thin so quickly. Despite these promising elements, it seems evident that everything is built up around the concept or gimmick Juliano is working with and his characters and events are ultimately less important than the concept itself, which makes things feel like they don’t actually go anywhere. Juliano never ends up doing anything interesting or novel with any of his ideas and none are ever engaged with on any sort of deeper level. Everything ends up being mere set dressing to pad out that central concept of a town stuck in the past, making the novel, by the end, feel conceptually empty.
(view spoiler)[By the end, I feel we don’t really learn anything we didn’t already know in the introduction, which tells us that Willow disappeared, that Harper knows she is dead, and that something supernatural is to blame. Aside from its basic premise and its themes broadly, the reasons for it all remain vague and not in an ambiguous or intriguing way. I kept waiting for some sort of twist or reveal, but what was there didn’t add much. (hide spoiler)]
It seems pretty evident that Juliano maybe took the ferry to Washington Island, was amused by the payphones and dated infrastructure they’ve still got up there, and decided to base a whole thing around that observation without really putting much into anything beyond that. I also have to admit being confused about who the intended audience for this novel is? It seems to have been marketed as a horror novel for adults and deals with some pretty heavy themes, but its writing and PG language throughout feel distinctly middle grade, placing it in a rather strange place stylistically. It would have been a stronger work had it shifted its focus in one direction or the other, but as a whole, there was just something superficial about the entire novel, something that all of its intriguing parts could not quite square.
All in all, Dead Eleven was a let down based on some of the places I feel that the story could have gone. Part of the appeal of CreepyPasta is its collaborative nature, with users reacting to the heightening tensions of the original poster as they add their own twists, pulling in their own threads and making their own additions to the text, but this is, of course, more difficult with a static, published work. We’ve got the Dead Eleven streaming show to look forward to, I guess, already in development with A+E studios but I can’t really see myself tuning in.
I’ve read other works of horror recently published taking on similar ideas and themes as Dead Eleven - its grounding of psychologically resonant real-life concerns with the supernatural, but doing more compelling and disquieting things with them, which makes me recommend skipping this one....more
A suspenseful, unsettling, and eerie work, Fever Dream by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin is particularly disturbing for a new parent, strugglingA suspenseful, unsettling, and eerie work, Fever Dream by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin is particularly disturbing for a new parent, struggling to establish their own “rescue distance.” Schweblin writes with the cadence of a nightmare, starting us off in a chilling and mysterious place, as the narrator, who we quickly understand to be undergoing treatment in a hospital, interacts with a cold interrogative voice hoping to guide her through her memories to find “the important thing” that led to this eerie moment.
Alternatingly grounded in familiar daily life details and crawling with an otherworldly dread, Fever Dream pokes at those fuzzy boundaries between dream and reality. With an ambiguous threat that seems all too real, it feels like a particularly rural horror, and while the details are Argentinian, the isolation and strangeness of the countryside seems very relatable to me living in the US Midwest. Short and impactful, Fever Dream will definitely stick in my dreams. ...more
An uninspired Cthulhu Mythos pastiche among many, The Colour out of Darkness is a fast paced but conceptually empty novella that attempts to dress up An uninspired Cthulhu Mythos pastiche among many, The Colour out of Darkness is a fast paced but conceptually empty novella that attempts to dress up its blandness through a heavy dose of “edgy” sex and violence. Leaden prose and performative misanthropy makes it all a flatly unpleasant read. To be honest, what was I expecting?
Pelan brings the Cthulhu cult to the grimy urban wasteland of 21st century Seattle, but aside from the novel setting, does not succeed in building much atmosphere. Amblingly listlessly from scene to scene, the narrative is further broken up by lurid interludes which reveal various historic mass murderers, from Caligula to Jack the Ripper to Pol Pot, as Cthulhu worshippers. This is, frankly, gross, but it's not like the novella does anything new with any of these tropes anyway. Compared to the new crop of reimaginings of Lovecraft’s works that have been published recently, examining and critiquing his xenophobia and racism while creating eerie and atmospheric narratives, this one seems, even more, a relic of a creatively bankrupt genre. ...more
Effective and topical horror, discomforting and real, in Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt draws from many frightening aspects of daily life for tEffective and topical horror, discomforting and real, in Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt draws from many frightening aspects of daily life for trans people in the UK and refracts them through the lens of a haunted house, exposing the dark heart of England and the pain it’s imperialistic xenophobia continues to inflict. Rumfitt’s work is visceral and sickening and does not turn away from the trauma endemic to the specter of fascism, that nightmarish entity that continues to haunt the world. Told from the alternating perspectives of Alice and Ila, queer college grads, and The House known as Albion, which inflicts horrific abuse on both, absorbs their friend and inserts itself into each, driving the two apart as Ila embraces TERF ideology. Moving backward and forwards through time, the story is both hallucinatory and grounded, engaging in all of the transphobia, queerphobia, racism, and misogyny that haunts our lives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Exploring this blurry area between metaphor and reality, and wearing her influences on her sleeve, especially Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter, Tell Me I’m Worthless is full of interesting if grim insights and meta commentary, befitting the way history haunts the present and pulls us toward the future, in a way that does not pull away from the terror. In spite of Rumfitt’s utterly terrifying scenes, though, the ultimate message delivers a kind of strange catharsis. Taken together, this is a novel that captures the fear and humanity of our scary moment and offers much to think about....more
In Tinfoil Butterfly, a tautly written and heartrending thriller, Rachel Eve Moulton builds a cinematic atmosphere throughout her gritty but affectingIn Tinfoil Butterfly, a tautly written and heartrending thriller, Rachel Eve Moulton builds a cinematic atmosphere throughout her gritty but affecting first novel. Narrated by Emma, a self-destructive and tough young woman on a desperate road trip to the South Dakota Badlands, she begins the story in a rough place and her situation quickly gets worse. Stranded in an isolated ghost town, she meets a strange young boy who wears an intricate tinfoil mask and who needs her help and in turn may help her. He has his own secrets, though, and through the menacing autumnal landscape, bleak but beautiful, Emma will have to confront familial horrors, her own baggage, and things that might not be completely natural.
Throughout the novel, Moulton interweaves Emma’s memories of why she is running with the dark place she finds herself in seamlessly, keeping up a fast pace even as the suspense escalates through the story’s twists. On the whole, she is able to pack an impressive amount of stark action and thought-provoking themes in her relatively slim novel, leaving only a few loose ends. A retro grindhouse of a novel, Tinfoil Butterfly is an unsettling, visceral book that will definitely stay with you. ...more
The second entry in the Lovecraft Squad series, Waiting is an anthology of interconnected stories featuring the Human Protection League, a secretive iThe second entry in the Lovecraft Squad series, Waiting is an anthology of interconnected stories featuring the Human Protection League, a secretive international anti-supernatural task force affiliated with the American FBI in a world in which H.P. Lovecraft was writing nonfiction. With the contributing authors approaching the founding and early actions of the HPL during the mid-twentieth century, a shared universe of the secret true natures of various historical events is established, though nothing really original is included.
Drawing from various genres, from action pulp to noir, the tone and writing style of the contributors feel a bit disconnected even if they are all working from the same pulp premise. A few are slightly entertaining takes, but most play these tired tropes all too straight, and it's kind of disappointing after all of the recent works subverting Lovecraftian horror and taking it in whole new directions. Lovecraft’s infamous racism is depicted, for instance, but it is not critiqued, which is a problem when we’re taking what he is writing as based on reality. While definitely more coherent than the first entry in the series, All Hallows Horror, in spite of a couple fun twists here and there, Waiting left me waiting for something interesting in all of this.
As an ancient evil stirs under England, tying the literary works of Geoffrey Chaucer with those of Dante, an agent of the Human Protection League (or As an ancient evil stirs under England, tying the literary works of Geoffrey Chaucer with those of Dante, an agent of the Human Protection League (or “Lovecraft Squad”) shows up to deal with the mess. A cursed church, a cheesy media stunt, and zombies based around the seven sins round out this bloated but not very scary horror novel. Nothing novel is brought to any of these established horror tropes. The campiness is played all too straight, the characters are completely wooden, alternating between skepticism and credulity as demanded by the plot, and it all drags on at least a hundred pages too long
Altogether, the novel reads like something Garth Marenghi might write, minus any sense of humor. As the first of a series of works featuring the HPL, a secretive international anti-supernatural task force affiliated with the American FBI in a world in which Lovecraft was writing nonfiction, All Hallows Horror definitely does not begin things on the best foot. Oddly, the HPL barely plays a role here, with the proceedings much more connected to another horror fiction anthology series involving the zombie apocalypse, a genre I could not be less interested in. In the end, this is one I wish I had skipped.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke definitely built up a bit of buzz in recent months, especially locally through its Eh, I’ve read weirder!
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke definitely built up a bit of buzz in recent months, especially locally through its publisher, the up and coming Minneapolis based Weirdpunk Books, though I can’t remember exactly what media inspired me to put the book on request sometime last year. With that striking, unsettling cover, I was looking forward to some delicious chills when this slim novella finally came in the other day. The set up is certainly enticing; two gay women, their relationship escalating quickly in the toxic, fracturing pressure of early online culture, an inexorable spiral to an impending doom of the worst sort.
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t live up to the hype, and that eerie, elegant cover art belies the lack of anything really interesting going on here. Despite, or perhaps because of, the novella’s quick pace, author Eric LaRocca squanders their intriguing premise, making it all feel too unsubtle to be really affecting. While LaRocca writes some disturbingly gruesome passages, particularly those enticing vague turns of phrase such as “things have gotten worse since we last spoke” and “what have you done today to deserve your eyes?,” the all too flimsy plotting and characterization don't really amount to much. As Zoe and Agnes escalate their “sponsor/drudge” virtual BDSM relationship, both writing in an affected florid style, there is nothing to distinguish their voices and the story ends up indulging in all of the typical “psycho lesbian” cliches.
LaRocca’s gimmicks, the true crime framing, the epistolary format, the year 2000 setting, the supposed queerness of this abusive relationship, none of it goes anywhere. I guess when you start with a lush description of an antique apple peeler and a cryptic idiom about “deserving your eyes,” you can kind of guess where things will end up and there aren't really any surprises there. Without establishing this compiled email/instant message correspondence is evidence in a police investigation, informing us that someone is dead (since when do the cops ever investigate online crime anyway? But I digress) why would we believe any of this actually happened, anyway? I felt that LaRocca failed to take advantage of the strengths inherent in the early online communications setting, as the tale lacks the ambiguity or mystery that could be built up so easily from the digital world, leaving the manipulations overt and the shocks muted.
If I was slightly less enchanted by his Best Ghost Stories on my latest read than I was after first reading it, I think I can claim after finishing thIf I was slightly less enchanted by his Best Ghost Stories on my latest read than I was after first reading it, I think I can claim after finishing this collection of short weird tales by turn of the twentieth century English writer Algernon Blackwood, that these tales are definitely not his best. While a couple of the stories included here do make an appearance in the latter collection, the majority of these “tales of the mysteries and macabre” don’t really do much for me. Perhaps it was a side effect of reading the musty, yellowed pages of my copy of the book, but these tales felt just as musty and dusty. Many of Blackwood’s common motifs appear here; the mysterious power of nature, fraught relationships between characters, a strong build up of emotion, but all were better realized in some of his other tales of supernatural horror included the Best Ghost Stories collection and after a while felt quite repetitive.
The best of the pieces included in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre are, like “The Heath Fire,” “The Wings of Horus” or “A Victim of Higher Space,” merely slightly more boring examinations of themes explored more effectively in Blackwood’s other stories. It didn’t help that many of them are particularly fraught with Blackwood’s period English racial attitudes and condescension, none worse than the first tale included, “Chinese Magic,” in which the entire shocking revelation of the story is that an English antiquarian loves China so much he delusionally believes his own wife is Chinese! Oh, the horror! One can only be thankful that it’s all in the poor chap’s head, the narrator concludes. All in all, these stories are only for completionists, I feel, and you can really stick with The Best Ghost Stories for a stronger representation of Blackwood’s ideas and moods with none of the works here being at all essential. ...more
“I mean, I don’t know much about the occult, but I’d have thought serious philosophers should be above all that.”- Robert Black “‘Course they should! T“I mean, I don’t know much about the occult, but I’d have thought serious philosophers should be above all that.”- Robert Black “‘Course they should! They talk about distant stars, an’ eternity’s depths, an’ how man ain’t nothin’, though respectable society is, seems like.”- Garland “Warlock” Wheatley Providence Act 4
“I had a bad time in New England.” Robert Black
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Compiling all twelve issues of Alan Moore’s dense, complex Providence series into one volume, the Providence Compendium is a dense, though intriguing, deconstruction of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. Inviting comparison to Moore’s renowned comic Watchmen, treating Lovecraftian cosmic horror to the same critique the former did for the superhero genre, Moore wrestles with the legacy of US cosmic horror throughout popular culture, making some interesting points as well as becoming buried in inertia and shock value. As a follow-up and prequel to Moore’s previous Lovecraftian comic Neonomicon, a work that I found had some questionable analysis, I was intrigued enough to dig into it in spite of my reservations. However, in the end, it lost me, with the “cultists are actually right” storyline feeling all too trite.
At first, the series drew me in with its historical setting and intricate, realist art, promising a thought-provoking and detailed pastiche of Lovecraftian themes. Continuing in collaboration with artist Jacen Burrows, Moore’s talents in directing an almost cinematic pictorial experience make even the most verbose, static sections of the graphic novel flow. Burrow’s work complements the source material with his exquisitely detailed architectural and period work, coupled with humans who just always seem to be not quite alive. This unnerving aesthetic works well with the eerie themes of the graphic novel.
Taking us back to 1919, we follow the closeted gay New York journalist Robert Black, who is also hiding his Jewish heritage, as he embarks on a tour of New England hoping to track down an ancient book of mysterious arcane lore he’d heard about from a certain chronically ill Spanish doctor he’d talked to as part of a story. Hoping to consult the book as background material for his own book on the secret myths of the United States, Black travels to Salem and Athol, MA, to Manchester, NH, Boston to Providence, RI, at each stop encountering various characters mentioned in Lovecraft stories before running into the “old gentleman” himself. Each chapter in the series plays with a Lovecraft story, introducing Black as an outside observer to the events of, say, The Horror at Red Hook, The Dunwich Horror, The Thing on the Doorstep, or Pickman’s Model, to name just a few. At the same time, nestling these horrific tales into interesting and less well-known historical events such as the 1919 Actors' Equity Association strike and the Boston Police Strike serves to ground these tales into the material reality of the time.
At the end of each chapter, Moore includes an excerpt from Black’s Commonplace Book, his diary in which he composes his writing notes, which serves mostly to recap the events of the last comic and illustrate what a tedious prose writer Moore is. Whatever interesting ideas that are posed (ghouls and organized labor, for instance) are drowned out in repetitive walls of text, adding little except recapping the chapter’s subtext. Along with the copious references and easter eggs to various weird tales and weird tale writers throughout the century, these entries can make much of the body of Providence begin to drag.
As a whole, while it’s a very interesting choice to explore the sexual, social, and racial tensions that undergird Lovecraft’s writing, I find Moore’s argument here to be spurious. As mentioned by Moore in an interview, in Neonomicon his goal was to “put the sex back in” to “the sexually squeamish” Lovecraft’s work, which continues to be a theme in Providence. Serving as a stand-in for the various gay and/or Jewish people close to Lovecraft during his life (Robert Bloch, Robert Barlow, Samuel Loveman, Hart Crane, Sonia Greene), Black is an ideal conduit to challenge Lovecraft’s latent antisemitism and homophobia. Well, if he actually challenged anything, at least.
As noted by Moore in the words of Wizard Whately stand in Warlock Wheatley, Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic nihilism seems at odds with his virulent xenophobia and hatred of other humans when everyone is just equally insignificant compared to the infinity of deep time, but in terms of the way the narrative frames the actions of these cultists and ne’er do wells, we have to conclude that, in a way, they are correct in their assumptions.
For a work attempting to deconstruct the Cthulhu Mythos and explore its role in shaping contemporary US popular culture, Providence plays the tropes of Lovecraft’s tales remarkably straight (pun not intended). As Black meets with various Lovecraftian characters, he finds that many of them are queer themselves (Herbert West, Detective Malone, Charles Dexter Ward, among others), though this does not change their generally odious actions. Containing one of the most unpleasant and degrading scenes of sexual violence in any of Moore’s pieces (which is saying something), in general, the cultists and otherworldly beings Black meets behave just as Lovecraft depicted them, illustrating what was only inferred. Like Neonomicon, the rampant racism, misogyny, and homophobia of the characters are mostly unremarked upon. It seems Moore favors the “light is the best disinfectant” style of subversion, taking pleasure in showing just how awful the ramifications of Lovecraft’s stories and attitudes are. I’m not sure that it works in this case, though. For me, at least, this focus on Lovecraft’s sexual hangups was a mere distraction from his extreme racism and xenophobia- as though being asexual or repressed in his sexual attraction caused Lovecraft to react with hatred towards all non-Anglo Saxons. I, for one, am not convinced that the racism of the US stems from any latent societal sexual repression, and this amounts to a deep acephobic undertone.
We’re not meant to witness the scene of underage mind swapping rape in Act 5 and think it’s good, for instance, but what place does it serve in the narrative? The debatable “if we’re going to have a serious, mature exploration of this work, we’re gonna have to include graphic sexual violence” argument notwithstanding, it illustrates that gross misogyny and abuse will take you far. True enough, I guess? These points are certainly well made, but carry with them a major risk as well, that of taking these influences at their word and making the antagonists appear right, and I feel that is what happens by the end of Providence. Framing the xenophobic Lovecraft as being correct, that shifty foreigners and degenerate sexual deviants seek the destruction of the world, in particular.
As poor Black is led around from one Lovecraft reference to another, becoming increasingly unhinged and traumatized, he only gets one consensual sexual experience, and that ends up spelling his doom and that of humanity, as well. Black discovers that he himself is an occult Herald meant to provide Lovecraft (the true Wilbur Whately) with the raw material to create his most influential stories. As the chosen one meant to “clear off the Earth for the coming of the Great Old Ones,” Lovecraft in effect compiles Black’s experiences into his strongest works, creating a fandom or a cult (same thing) that, returning to the characters from Neonomicon, triumph in the end. Our fascist serial killers and immortal rapists stand alone as the human populace goes mad or dies horribly. Well, I guess that’s as good a metaphor for the state of the world as any.
For whatever insightful and thought-provoking points Moore makes about race and sexuality in Lovecraft’s work, though, by Providence’s apocalyptic conclusion, he only reinforces the general points of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror that sexual and ethnic diversity only bring madness and pain to the world. While that’s definitely not Moore’s point, the general misanthropy throughout Providence and Moore’s taking Lovecraft’s work completely at face value makes me feel it is not effective at expressing a solid conclusion. Many works have been published recently that take Lovecraft’s reactionary tendencies to task while exploring what gives his stories staying power in a much more coherent and affirming way, but given Moore’s well known penchant for lack of engagement with contemporary pop culture, he probably isn’t aware of them. This, in the end, makes the general atmosphere of Providence feel really outdated, making points that have already been made better by others.
Musician and artist Claire Cronin’s memoir Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God, wrestles with her love of horror (especially film), gMusician and artist Claire Cronin’s memoir Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God, wrestles with her love of horror (especially film), ghosts, and her family’s Catholic faith, building surprising connections that left me with a lot to consider about these subjects. An eerie, affecting work, full of intriguing ideas and lush language, Cronin writes “Ghost stories are hovering uncertainties,” and as a historian and librarian, concerned with sharing the mysteries of the past, this sticks with me. Whether through nostalgia or through regret, trauma, or privilege, memories and the past stay with us and affect the present, personally and societally.
Pointing out the contemporary surge in using ghosts as a metaphor for “psychic processes, cultural and political histories, and the nature of media that the word is nearly emptied of its meaning” while its ubiquity “is causing the ghost to slip back to its former life as fact” made me reconsider my own interest in using ghosts as a set dressing for my own fears. As she discusses these fascinating topics, her writing is punctuated by summaries of horror films, her spare, affecting illustrations drawn from movie stills, and poetic, italicized snippets of story fragments or dream memories, whispering ideas through the heart of the book, as though Cronin’s own prose is haunted.
A stylish and vivid high school horror-fantasy, The Scapegracers celebrates the mess of late adolescence for those who don’t fit the mold of the conveA stylish and vivid high school horror-fantasy, The Scapegracers celebrates the mess of late adolescence for those who don’t fit the mold of the conventional - the queer, the spooky. I really enjoyed the edginess Hannah Abigail Clarke instilled in their work here, coupled with an effortless inclusivity in creating a vibrant rural midwest that reflects its true state (though I only wish my suburban Minnesota high school had been even a quarter so cool). Clarke, barely out of high school themself when they wrote this, really captures the feeling of high school life, which amazingly felt familiar to me despite being twenty years out. At the same time, the mysterious forces that surround the characters throughout also feel equally infused with the world.
The Scapegracers focus on Sideways Pike, an angry, angsty lesbian witch drawn into the machinations of the school’s popular triumvirate of Jing, Daisy, and Yates to bring some real spookiness to one of their many Halloween parties. At first, we’re not sure to trust the motives of such seemingly stock characters, but Clarke subverts all expectations as Sideways herself draws out their own magical powers, shaping them into a coven while building friendships. I really enjoyed that realistically dull feeling of many scenes as characters just hang out around this quaint little town, but at the same time, the magic flows naturally from these characters as well.
As the darker elements of the world begin to draw on Sideways and her newly minted coven, we are hit with quite the cliffhanger which definitely left me wanting more. Though, on the other hand, even if it ended with more history homework, Clarke’s writing would have made me want to keep going.
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