Tolkien Vs Lovecraft Vs New Weird, Round 6

You got your High Fantasy, written by people who take inspiration from Tolkien. You got your cosmic horror, written by people who take inspiration from Lovecraft. You got your weird fantasy, written by people who take inspiration from the Burroughs Brothers, Edgar Rice and William. As longtime friends of the blog know, I am weighing the merits of each subgenre by pitting stories from 3 anthologies against each other. Whee!

Jousting for Tolkien, we got John Brunner, whom I've never read before but is known for eco-disaster SF like Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, with In the Season of the Dressing of the Wells.

Ernest Peake (related to Mervyn?), a shell-shocked veteran of World War One, returns to Britain. One of the gentry, he moves to his Aunt's manor, which she runs with cruel, hypocritical religious mania. The locals are sweet working folk who blend a much gentler piety with pagan holdovers aplenty, and want to resurrect a lightly Christianized tradition: ceremonially placing crudely crafted but vigorously conceived narrative illustrations over the three wells in town, in honor of a never-named goddess of the waters. 

The idea of a spiritual Feminine hovers over the cruel Aunt, but also over Alice, the bold and lovely daughter of the vicar. She befriends our hero and helps him rediscover his artistic and heroic courage. The story is full of contrasting pairings: male and female; Christian and pagan; compassionate faith and judgmental religiosity; working class and nobility; fire and water. Many of these are resolved with syncretic open-mindedness, and Brunner's attentiveness to characterization creates a charming village where I'd be delighted to spend much more time.

Problem: The Bad Woman is old and fat and always mean. The Good Woman is young and beautiful and always kind. C'mon. 

Nevertheless, the protagonists are tantalizing characters. Maybe Ernest goes from traumatized veteran to romantically successful hero of the town
with Tinseltown implausibility, and Alice may be impossibly flawless (she's smart and thoughtful and beautiful and brave and supportive and...) but they think through all the issues before them in ways that allow Brunner to convey the value of thinking, and talking, through the ramifications of life's conflicts as fully as one can, prior to taking necessary action.

Oh by the way, this isn't a fantasy story, not really. Its engagement with paganism is fantasy adjacent, and it plays with syncretism in imaginatively engaged fashion, but nothing in it is outside the bounds of "mundane" reality. It's a celebration of reality's vibrancy, and an illustration of how to infuse life with meaning, even when one has been damaged by trauma. 

For Lovecraft, we have Fat Face by Michael Shea.

Oh man, I read this story when I was a teen. I was very not ready. It has lingered in the back of mind like a troubling dream since then. I'm glad I get to stare the dream down as an adult.

Patti is a Hollywood streetwalker, and has an inherent unstoppable optimism that compels her to  seek community in her environs. Her goodwill towards everyone masks the thin, circumstantial and commercial nature of the relationships she and her "community" of local businesspeople have with one another. But Patti's optimism doesn't entirely blind her to the scalding dangers of her job. Occasionally, she has uncanny visions of Bad Things that turn out to be prophetic. 

She has a friendly crush on an often-seen but never met businessman known on the street only as Fat Face. As Patti works her way closer and closer to Fat Face, upsetting things start happening around her. Is it the usual dangers of a streetwalker's life, or are there something darker happening?

Problem: the story revels in nasty hilarity over the girth and physical problems of various characters. Shea is as unkind to heavy and disabled people as Lovecraft is to anyone who isn't a goy ofay.

On the (considerable) positive side of the equation, Shea shows us the world around his sweet, tragic heroine with lustrous beauty that keeps the story from being a slog; there are absurd, even silly, touches that exacerbate a dread that grows like a fungus. This sweet-and-sour blend of tones leads to  a truly absurd climax; a sick melding of moronic silliness and ghastly tragedy that explains why my teenage self found it indistinguishable from a horrible dream. 

For The New Weird, we have The Braining of Mother Lamprey by Simon Ings.

A young wizard's apprentice tries to solve the titular murder, and uncovers a terrifying plot that presages today's hacking and surveillance threats. Of all the stories in the New Weird anthology that I've read so far, this is the first from an author with whom I was unfamiliar, and the story that was most comfortable with being genre fantasy, as distinct from fantastical literature. You got enough wizards, magic, and oracles for a Mercedes Lackey book. The prose is lush with sentences like "He stepped into the shade of an ornate iron-worked portico, and reached for the heavy brass knocker, fashioned in the shape of a human jawbone." That's genre fantasy to a fault.

Unlike some but not all popular fantasy, though, Ings soaks his tale in humor straight out of Zap Comics. Poop and vomit keep springing to life, and children are born feral, with biting fangs. 

Problem: a male character becomes magically infused with a feminine personality, and the contrast is played for hacky transphobic comedy. 

The climax turns on a man telling a woman to have weaponized sex with the villain. This is the second story I've reviewed for this blog with that distasteful premise (The first was Vengeance Is by Theodore Sturgeon), although this one at least gestures towards the traumatizing, inexcusable nature of such a thing. The tale has some lovely writing and imaginative touches throughout (oracles are permanently pregnant; the aging children inside their distended bodies whisper prophecies to them) that go some way toward making up for the groaner punchline, which SUUUUUUX.

Verdict! At last, the New Weird installment is my least favorite. I liked the other two tales so much that I'm puzzled as to which deserves the victory. Well, I love the complex dialectic and cozy mis en scene of Brunner's story, but it sets up a believably debilitating trauma only to have the hero shuck that PTSD like an old coat. I somewhat prefer the scalding, ironized yet heartfelt nightmare Shea gives us, so Fat Face wins the day. It's real gross and scary. Yay!