Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird final rounds

(The series starts here)

Let's review the final entries!

Round 17! For Tolkien, it's Down the River Road with Gregory Benford. We're in a world that's a long tubular cavern, a wide endless tunnel with gravity pulling toward the cave walls, with a river running down the tunnel and land to either side. If you go upstream, you also go back in time, while going downstream is going forward in time. Most travel goes downstream because that's easier, but it's possible to hustle your way upstream if you've got the motivation and the moxie. Our protagonist is a young man seeking his missing father, but he's got to go through a whole Bildungsroman first. The conceit of going backwards or forwards in time by going up or down stream seems to be irrelevant to the story as it rolls along, so pondering its likely significance, in the context of a tale about a boy seeking his mysterious missing father, helped me guess the fantastical twist ending. A famous Wordsworth quotation concerning fatherhood is relevant.

This is probably the best old-school Twain-and-Faulkner-worshiping bildungsroman ever set entirely in a tunnel where the flow of a river closely tracks the flow of time. 

For Lovecraft, it's On the Slab by Harlan Ellison. A rock concert promoter obtains the body of a giant, and puts it on display. It's more than an evolutionary oddity, though; something about it brings the promoter a comfort he's never known, so much so that he takes to sleeping near it in the display hall where it lies in commercialized estate. 

The big reveal is that it's Prometheus, and he's a comforting presence because he dared defy the gods and sacrificed himself for humanity. Almost the opposite of Lovecraftian. Anyway, a professional showbiz promoter is a good protagonist for Ellison to write, since he was a self-promoter as much as he was anything.

The New Weird gives us The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines by Alistair Rennie. If you were worried that the New Weird might not be metal AF, Rennie is here to settle those concerns. This story is overflowing with characters right out of of a fantastical fighting game, and they pursue one another across pixelated backdrops before enacting gory conflict upon one another's powerfully brutalized and brutalizing bodies. Pro wrestling splatterpunk with cheerful, punchy prose that does Harlan Ellison several times better, simply by eschewing the sugar-glaze of sentimentality that drenched Ellison's faux hard-boiled fantasies. Surface pleasures abound, if you've the stomach for it, not to mention the unspooled entrails impaled on a cruelly twisted dagger blade for it.

It's a choice between the faux-depth of microwaved Modernism or the Warholian real shallowness of Pomo brattishness (or Ellison if one insists). I'm a sucker for sham Faulkner, but Rennie is delivering a Nietzschean vision that makes more sense of the Trump era's zero sum cruelty. Here's hoping the Cyber Ninjas (whose website is unnervingly inept, boding poorly for the detail-oriented nature of their Arizona audit) end up as happily as most of the characters in Rennie's round-winning entertainment.

Round 18! 

Tolkien is represented by Judith Tarr, with Death and the Lady. A medieval village has been depopulated of men by conscription into a fruitless war, so industrious women labor in the fields while tending to children. The village borders a wood that everyone knows not to venture too deeply into, what with the Fay and all, but a woman emerges from that wood on a desperate journey away from one man and towards another. She's get to stay in the village for a time, though, where she becomes part fo the community whether she likes it or not. Then the man she's fleeing comes to visit...

Tarr has many issues on her mind: gender roles and relations; the responisibilites of child-rearing and community; romances claims and costs. She manages the mighty task of using her concerns to propel the story, rather than stopping for lecture breaks, and I'm frankly in awe of her craft. The large and small decisions her characters make, and the logical and emotional motivations that energize their decisions, are much of the story, and the human insight Tarr never lets the period detail and the fantastical elements overshadow the recognizable people at the heart of the story.

Lovecraft's final offering is 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai by Roger Zelazny. A woman named Mari travels through contemporary Japan with a selection of Hokusai reproductions, each of them portraying Mt. Fuji from different standpoints. Traveling on foot, she visits the approximate spot from which each portrait was painted, and contemplates an array of literary, cultural, and historical references that bind together into a net of allusions. It's a lovely piece of fictionalized, and fiction-besotted, travel writing which demonstrates that an engagement with the world around you and an engagement with literature can be braided together, creating a mental landscape of great richness.

Also, there's something terrible and secret going on, which she's trying to both evade and prevent from overtaking the world. The scary story could easily be separated from all the travel writing and mini-essays on literature; shorn of everything that isn't central to a woman's attempt to prevent her ex-husband from enslaving the world, it's a straightforward, sturdy, but adorably quaint 80s SF adventure. The travel writing, as well, would be diverting without the pulp adventure nestled deep within its folds. Together, however, they blend like nitrogen and glycerin.  By hiding the pulpy aspects of the story, letting us glimpse it through the gaps in the carefully crafted "reality," the story gave me a chilling sensation of occult existential threat like few stories manage. It is in this that the tale is most akin to Lovecraft's best work.

The New Weird's final effort is a collective effort, in which Paul Di Filippo writes a first chapter as a sort of pilot episode, and a clutch of other authors contribute a chapter each. There's a final chapter, but it isn't in the book.

The story is set in a pseudo-Indian city during a massive religious festival. A man from a rival city comes to participate in a mysterious plot to do... what, exactly? Even he doesn't know, but he's pretty sure it's something good, from his society's perspective, and something bad, from the local perspective. There's a lot going on, though, and each chapter gives us a glimpse of activity that broadens the world of the story and may or may not cohere into a satisfying conclusion. Di Filippo sets up an array of characters and factions, in a vivid city with fantastical beasts and religions for the other writers to play with.

Cat Rambo contributes a chapter in which a mysterious woman is observed doing increasingly mysterious things. It's a dandy standalone story; a sense of wonder, unreality made manifest.

Sarah Monette gives us a confrontation between a detective who's not quite lost in a thicket of cover stories, and hybrid animals that haven't integrated the personalities of their component entities. Brief, zesty, frightening.

Danial Abraham follows a pious and wealthy businessman whose faith (devoted to a mindless insect god, and demanding motiveless mindlessness from its followers) would seem to preclude conspiring and colluding for gain and vengeance; yet that is precisely what this fellow does. A cunning examination of unruffled religious hypocrisy, and its uses for the greedy class.

Felix Gilman centers on a useless cop holding down headquarters and refusing to stick his neck out, no matter what mysterious dangers show up just outside the door. He reads a doltish pulp magazine about a fascistic but highly active cop which fails to spur him to action; only to lull him into grouchy indolence. Ironies and fantastic adventures cunningly undercut one another.

Hal Duncan shows us a boy auditioning for a celebrated boys' choir in which expressions of musical purity cover over a cesspit of pederasty, and how seamlessly the boys are groomed. It's agonizing, and enriched by a detailed investigation of musical processes and corrupt leadership processes, but lacks that crucial element: bold acts of the imagination. Perhaps, on the limited evidence of this short narrative, Mr. Duncan should explore the possibilities of more realistic social fiction.

Conrad Williams brings things back to the protagonists of the first installment, the man from another city, and a woman who rescued him from dangerous beasts. Adventure ensues, as she tries to lead him to safety, only to be ambushed by (essentially) ninjas, before a shocking terrorist attack (doubtless meant to evoke 9/11, still, at the time of publication, quite fresh in the memory).

The final installment, by Paul Di Filippo, is not bound in the book, but presented as a PDF on the publisher's website. Or at least, it was. I had to dig around with archive.org to find a version of the website that offered this concluding chapter, and having read it, I can see why no one thought it was worth printing or keeping around. It ties story threads together with the facile cunning of a skilled improv comic, but reminds me of the guy in Parade's End who preens himself on his ability to write a sonnet on any subject in five minutes. Loose ends get stapled together, than a monster shows up, the guy from another city switches sides, he beats the monster and the hypocritical villain, and gets the girl. Straight out of a movie you saw in a hotel room and then promptly forgot. 

VERDICT: Judith Tarr brings the final round home for Team Tolkien.

Oh brother, let's do the final scoring now! I considered giving New Weird a handicap to balance the fact that it wasn't represented for the first couple of rounds, but decided that I'm sufficiently biased in favor of M. John Harrison et al to leave things unbalanced.

And having tabulated the score, I find that New Weird required no handicap, for it wins in a blowout, 10 points against Tolkien and Lovecraft, who tied 4-4.

At last, the world has an answer. Tolkien and Lovecraft are equally meritorious and equally deficient, while the New Weird smokes them both. You can't argue with the facts.

I'd like to close by acknowledging Emma Bull's story Silver and Gold as my favorite story that didn't win its round, so one might conclude that Tolkien does in fact outshine Lovecraft by a whisker. Thank you and good night.

I don't Remember Why I Called This "Outlaws & Inlaws" (#24)

From Best American Short Stories:

I Want to Live! by Thom Jones: Mrs. Wilson is a grandmother with cancer. The narrator stays right in her thoughts, and we follow her sharp-witted battle against despair. She roils with the agonies and indignities of the sick body, then develops something resembling a religious conversion upon dipping into Schopenhauer. Family appears in a succession of walk-on roles, and a childhood memory of a rambunctious rooster arises from the swamp of memory to serve as her final vision of the life force doing its thing in the teeth of death's increasingly immanent inevitability. 

All this might sound like a dreadful slog, but the struggle between Mrs. Wilson's failing body and unfailing mind provides a literary liveliness. It reminds me of a discussion an old friend and I had about the contrast between reggae's upbeat music and often acerbic lyrics; my first awareness that the manner and the matter of a work of art could contrast in a way that makes engagement with that matter aesthetically invigorating.

In the Gloaming by Alice Elliot Dark: A handsome young man named Laird is dying of an unspecified ailment (apparently the TV movie adaptation names the culprit: AIDS) and living in his parents' comfy house, lovingly tended by his lonely mom and entirely avoided by his workaholic, emotionally sealed father. The story is told from the perspective of Janet, the mother, as she comes to realize that Laird is the true love of her life. The two develop a warm, cheerful, communicative closeness that blossoms in the evening, in the gloaming.

As his condition declines, these conversational sessions fade, to Janet's despair. Memories of Laird seem to become piquant post-mortem memorials even while he's still alive. After the young man's death, an emotional fault line cracks open; devastating. 

Dark tells the story plainly, with thoughtful, humorous but unshowy dialogue, and maintains a tone like a pellucid evening.

From Plays in One Act:

Heatstroke by James Purdy: 

In a tropical setting, a woman named Lily turns to eccentric Doctor Douglas for help with her chronic pain. His advice is startlingly impertinent, but she stays with him, because they have a common bond; they are both murderers, on the lam for their crimes of passion in the States. His prescription offers at least short-term respite for both of them.

If you think the trouble with Tennessee Williams is that he didn't go bonkers enough, James Purdy is here to help. Intense passions and barmy dialogue coruscate like lightning across the stage. Pain and shame alchemically transmuted into camp gold.

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Part II by Jonathan Reynolds. Australia, 1938: Lord and Lady Murdoch hope to win a spot for one of their sons at Eton or Harrow. Miss Fairchilderdern will evaluate the boys for admission, but it doesn't look good; she hates Australians. Two of the three sons shine at poetic recitation and interpretation, but little Rupert is a complete wash. Then, in a sudden, mystical overflow of theatrical magic, little Rupert's true talents emerge; talent for vicious, filthy, contemptuous bile with a lot of razzle-dazzle and populist appeal. 

Since we can't put Rupert Murdoch in the stocks and pelt him with feces until he looks like a cheap, wailing candy bar, we'll have to mount productions of this play, instead, as the next best way to express the salvageable populace's loathing for him and his ilk.

From Interzone:

On the Deck of the Flying Bomb by David Redd: An enormous flying military vessel heads toward its target, for the vehicle is a bomb, and will explode upon arrival. The captain is merely a figurehead, with no authority whatsoever. Strict discipline and incompetence coexist, as no one aboard questions the nature of the assignment--after all, the ship is loaded with lifeboats--and no one has any true responsibility. But inside one of the lifeboats, a stowaway hides. His purpose is obscure, but he isn't a saboteur or enemy agent; he just wants to understand what's happening, and plans to escape in the lifeboat at an opportune time.

In the curt, unstressed finale, our protagonist discovers that the lifeboats don't work, were never intended to work, and everyone on both sides will die in the ashes of this suicide mission. The parallels to nuclear armament are never less than clear. 

From Calling the Wind: 

Top of the Game by John McCluskey, Jr.: Clarence "Thunderin'" Hurd, a professional basketball player, is about to break the late Alvin Tolbert's record as all-time American Basketball Federation scorer, but Hurd has the jitters and in game after game, he can't... quite... make... those crucial final shots. But this isn't his story; we only meet him in passing. It's the story of Roberta and Alvin Jr., the wife and son of the Alvin  Tolbert, as they get escorted to game after game, and interviewed for various sports shows and segments. They hope that this pageant will end soon so they can go back to their regular lives. They're running out of patience with these proceedings, but the league implores them to keep showing up and doing interviews, so...

Their memories of the husband and father who set the record are centered less on sports than on who he was in their lives. One overfamiliar version of this story would rip the lid off of what a scumbag the beloved athlete was, and play with the contrast between the man in public and the man at home, but McCluskey isn't writing prestige-cable melodrama. The family's high estimation of Tolbert has little to do with his accomplishment in the court, and much to do with his excellence as a family man. 

The tensions in the story aren't about anyone being a villain; everyone is friendly and good-hearted, but mother and son don't relish the obligation to go to game after game, interspersed with the interview circuit. They want to get back to their ordinary lives. Excellent quarantine reading.

Going to Meet Aaron by Richard Perry: A disillusioned young man decides that peaceful protest isn't enough after living through the Mississippi Burning murders, and decides that terrorism is called for; strike back, make the white supremacist establishment afraid. He heads to a meeting with his co-conspirator, and remembers fragmentary events that have helped lead him here. 

Our protagonist lives in an uneasy balance. He's devoted to the cause of civil rights; but he's also motivated by regret over an interracial romance he bungled. He knows his plan (blow up a bank) won't accomplish anything for the cause; it's an immoral moral act, but having committed to it, he won't back out. On his way to the deed, he buys a frozen treat from an older black man, who lays out a challenge to the very idea that meaningful change is possible. Tangled convictions collide with the futility of human endeavor.

From Outlaw Bible of American Fiction:

The Way It Has to Be by Breece D'J Pancake: A scruffy young couple is in conflict, because the guy wants to go murder another guy, because revenge. She would prefer he didn't. One of the many problems with revenge is that people who want it are insufferable and inconsiderate. Everybody suffers because this guy can't let things lie. Dusty small town roadside America is the setting, and Pancake captures it like a polaroid. Will our heroine break away from this useless man or will he shoot her for even considering it? Westerns and noir all distill down to a few taut, rich pages..

American Skin by Don De Grazia: Three disgruntled military recruits discuss the possibility of going permanently AWOL. Two of them are skinheads, and one is a libertarian college boy who dropped out and enlisted as a whimsical prank, and now wants to split just as soon as he browbeats the other guys into being Objectivists. They resist, correctly, and one of them notices a picture in a student newspaper from the college boy's former Alma Mater. It's a picture of a pretty girl, and suddenly our observant hero knows exactly why he's going AWOL; to find that girl.

This story captures the dissolute, improvisational combativeness of young male bull sessions; with freeze-dried talking points hastily thawed out, and ad-libbed retorts that may or may not force one's adversary to rethink their assumptions. But some people respond more to beauty than ideas.

The Ceremony by Weldon Kees: Some workers are digging a foundation when they discover that they're digging in a First Nation burial ground, so they stop, appalled at the thought o violating these ancient graves. The supervisor yells at them until they do exactly what they didn't want to, and they make a joke of it; a self-aware, ironical joke which reveals just how easily they sacrifice their qualms, and their respect for their predecessors, to the contrived urgencies of capitalism. It's a valid point, but this satirical setup/punchline won't entice me back for a second reading.

Terminal Lounge by John Sayles: We spend a little time in the bar at a train station, listening to the regulars describing their lives of quiet desperation. A womanizer breaks it off with one of his squeezes on the grounds that he's getting married. A struggling salesman ruminates on the injustice of trying to make a living and a legacy when one is judged, not by one's life, but by one's most recent profits. Demotic barroom philosophizing that never seems bored or listless; powerful urgencies fuel the discourse. 

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird rounds 13 thru 16

The question of our times remains unanswered: is Tolkien better than Lovecraft? Or is the New Weird better than both? 

Round 13! Karen Harber's Up the Side of the Air weighs in on behalf of Tolkien, with the story of a girl who gets apprenticed to an aging wizard, despite neither of them being very happy with the arrangement. Things work out the way every story about an old grump having to take care of a child works out, but along the way the girl stumbles across a magical secret not even the wizard knows, and then the wizard fights a sorcery duel and desperately needs his apprentice's (cheating) help. In the end, she saves the day by reusing a spell she got wrong in a new context where the mistake changes from a bug to a feature. The story also addresses basic sexism, arguing that females can be of use to males; very Booker T. Washington "cast down your bucket where you are" logic.

It's not bad, but it colored within familiar lines. 

What about Lovecraft's champion for this round, acclaimed blackpill pusher Thomas Ligotti? His entry, The Last Feast of Harlequin, presents a cinema-ready spin on the old investigator-in-a-small-town-discovers-uncanny-horrors story.

An anthropologist learns about a mysterious clown festival and a related unsolved murder in a small town, and thinks "I gotta investigate that." Lovecraft was a fan of anthropology (although I doubt a person with his low threshold for non-WASPs could have cut it in the field) and anthropologists, like detectives, have license to enter alien territory in search of hidden truths, so it makes sense to build a horror tale around an anthropologist. While I have no idea what a proper anthropologist would make of the protagonist's choices, Ligotti does portray the hero thinking about cultural investigation in a serious fashion, and realizing things I wouldn't have picked up on. For example, there are two sets of clowns... one set is a fig leaf of a response by upstanding citizens of the community to the second set; a desperate distraction from an unfaceable secret. It's a smart spin on the Wicker Man style "The whole community's in on the conspiracy" story. This time the whole community knows, but most of them dread it, and refuse to acknowledge the dire truth.

I wrote about another Ligotti story, A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing, earlier in this series, and I didn't much like the one. I found it too evangelical, too overt in its peddling of Ligotti's nihilism. This story is rather similar, but it avoids overt messaging in at least two ways. Firstly, it allows narrative to work on its own terms, offering an engrossing story instead of a symbolist parade.

The second way requires some explanation. One question I think is worth asking about any horror story is: who's getting libeled? Texas Chainsaw Massacre libels poor rural workers. The Exorcist libels wayward teens and promiscuous youth culture, along with the mentally ill and the addicted (horror is multivalent, even in its libels). Lovecraft's own The Call of Cthulhu libels everybody who isn't white, since it claims that BIPOC people are hiding a god from the ofays. 

In Last Feast of Harlequin, Ligotti plays a witty trick: he libels himself. Nihilists are to blame. 

For the New Weird, K. J. Bishop offers The Art of Dying. A trio of celebrity adventurers in the urban imaginary struggle not against an assailant, but with the performative insistence by one of the crew that she, Mona, is sick to the point of death, a one-woman Munchausen-by-proxy that becomes a quartet, as she, her companions, and an intrusive young gossip columnist travel through town, seeking the right place to lie down for the last time. Spoiler: an obvious sacrificial lamb is selected to die in her place. While I doubt that Bishop is a Trump worshiper, the resolution of the story works in a way that will make sense to anyone with a MAGA cap.

The story reminded me of New Weird charter member M. John Harrison's novel In Viriconium, which also involves a sick socialite gradually giving up the ghost while her companions shamble around a grotesque city and try to aid her. Bishop may not take the sentence-by-sentence risks of the observationally acrobatic Harrison, but she keeps things darkly ambiguous; her loyalties are not obvious.

Verdict: I enjoyed Ligotti's gothic detective story most. Harber's mildly feminist wizard story felt like an overlong wikipedia synopsis of itself. I've read Bishop's story twice now and still can't make my mind up about it. Something about its climactic cruelty leaves me queasy, and while the story's ability to stir troubled ambiguities may be a mark of its power, I'm going to give the win to Team Lovecraft.

Round 14 begins with The Naga by Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn. If you've read many myths and fairy tales, you've encountered stories of humans who find romance with a supernatural figure, and the troubles that rise from such forbidden pairings. This is one such, as a rather useless ruler marries a gorgeous woman who claims to be the human form of a shapeshifting creature known as a naga. She won't reveal her true appearance to him, but they agree that they will meet every night without fail, with death as the price of failure to abide by this vow. I thought I could see where this was going. I was wrong.

Enriched by her love, the ruler becomes a more compassionate and helpful ruler, but you can't please everyone, and a violent rebel faction creates very real danger for the ruler and his bride. The climax was an operatically emotional sequence that made me gasp, and almost brought me to tears. I am rarely so moved by prose. I don't trust emotional response as testimony to artistic merit; after all, in 2020 it doesn't take a lot to inspire a big rush of emotion. Still, I think my reaction had more than a little to do with Beagle's storytelling skill, and insight into love. 

For Lovecraft, it's James P. Blaylock, with The Shadow on the Doorstep. An enthusiast for aquariums and exotic fish relates how he keeps visiting squalid, short-lived aquarium stores that might be run by the same person... and might be up to something uncanny. There are, so far as I can tell, no overtly supernatural or horrific elements in this story; only suggestions and suspicions. Has our storyteller stumbled onto the fringes of a secret outpost of Innsmouth, Lovecraft's harbor town of human-fish hybrids, or is he pizzagating a respectable, if rundown, business? The recurring owner of these businesses is an asian man, or different asian men whom the narrator can't tell apart, so yellow peril is an ugly factor. 

I've read and enjoyed a novel by Blaylock (The Last Coin) which was an unabashed supernatural adventure in a whimsical contemporary mold;  nothing in that treat of a novel prepared me for the diffuse melancholy of this submersion. If it weren't encased in a volume with a creepy monster on the cover, it would be possible to read this story and never realize that anything Lovecraftian was being invoked. A keenly observed tour of grubby business ventures, for those (like me) who are charmed by such things, and a tantalizing dance on the edge of paranoia.

The New Weird shows up with At Reparata, by Jeffery Ford. Reparata is a palace founded by a wealthy eccentric, who has set himself up as ruler over a court peopled with derelicts whom the king adopted and ennobled. They've found that being gifted with titles and responsibilities which cater to their aspirations transfigures them into their best selves, and the community thrives, until the sad day when the Queen dies and the ruler sinks into misery. Through magic, his misery is siphoned from him in the form of an enormous mothlike creature, which flies about devouring almost everything. The obvious point, that one must learn to live with grief, since it cannot be removed, is detailed with deft storytelling, but more importantly, Ford depicts the role of the community in helping one to deal with grief. This is an unusual story for this anthology, in that it ends with optimism, community, and love.

Verdict: Wow, this is a competitive round. Beagle's Naga struck with the most force, Blaylock's Shadow crept quite stealthily, yet in the end, I find Ford's Reparata to be a revelation. It offers a vision of damaged people creating a working community, and working together through love and compassion; it's a vision that never feels false or cloying. It's a model of fantasy literature that suggests ways forward for society, and I for one feel the need for such.

Round 15: Mike Resnick tries to do right by Tolkien with Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies. A batch of tiny fairies arrives in a normal guy's modern home, vowing to take revenge on Walt Disney for misrepresenting them in Fantasia. The guy directs them to Tinseltown, and they leave. Then they return, having gone Hollywood. 

Resnick spins jokey dialogue as if auditioning for a staff position on a 60s sitcom, and if you really like 60s sitcoms, you might enjoy this silly jape.

For Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe brings Lord of the Land. Another anthropologist, this time interviewing a family of hill folk. One of them tells the anthropologist an enchanting tale of weirdness, but the earnest young scholar picks up on subtle social cues amongst the family that suggest the tale is a diversion, or a warning. There's something unhealthy in the family dynamic, and this stranger is about to face it if he doesn't skedaddle.

"Compassion" isn't the watermark of most stories that end up in Lovecraft tribute anthologies, but Wolfe is a warm exception to that rule, and as in much great horror of the late 20th century, he bends scare-story tropes to acknowledge the hidden wounds of family abuse.

The New Weird offers Letters from Tainaron by Leena Krohn. These epistles come to us from a traveler exploring the mores of a land where people's physical forms are in flux. The local culture is thick with secrets, taboos and folkways that are not for general distribution. It's all expressed in Calvinoesque slivers; traces of Barthes and Kafka are also evident, but Krohn's focus on metamorphosis goes further back, to an Ovid who is less concerned with love and desire than with the natural processes of life cycles, and how aging and death are absorbed into the roles we play in one another' lives.

Verdict: Given a choice between hillbilly horror or arty EuroFantastique, I am stymied, but this isn't a balanced consideration of differing but equal merits; it's a Smackdown, and the winner of this Smackdown Round is the New Weird, because each of its vignettes felt new-made yet deeply rooted, and also probably because I'm conflicted about Appalachian stuff, as a product of the American South, while I'm unconflicted in my enthusiasm for chilly European fantastic literature.

Round 16!

In order to make the count round out correctly, Tolkien gets a twofer of tales set in elusive medieval dream realms. The first: Winter's King by Jane Yolen. After a troubled birth, a boy relies on caretakers who can't connect to the child; he is either a changing or autistic, depending on how you look at it (and I believe Yolen is building the story around the doubling of these perspectives). Finally, the child either dies of exposure or goes to meet the Elves of Winter for whom he is a figure of destiny. Yolen creates a double helix of tragedy and fulfillment, allowing the boy to be a simultaneous misfit and king. Irony and sincerity, sorrow and fulfillment, vie for control of the story, and the reader is the final judge.

Also for Tolkien, Gotterdammerung by Barry N. Malzberg. a party of adventurers petitions a wizard for help finding a lost magical ring. As in Tolkien, the ring has great power and carries heavy consequences. The wizard's principled refusal, and the adventurer's confusion, make it clear that this won't be a day of heroic triumph. But then things twist, and twist agin. Duplicity upon duplicity turns this into a cunning and rather noirish tale.

Both of these are brief and dense, like my favorite poems.

Lovecraft's champion is the remarkable Ramsey Campbell, with The Faces at Pine Dunes, about a family traveling around Britain in a camper, looking for the right community in which to settle. The parents have a grotesquely horrid marriage; their young adult son wants to break free from them, but his employment history hasn't panned out, so he's financially dependent on these loveless, toxic people. They settle in a town with a witchy forest, and the young man soon finds an okay job and a great girlfriend. He also begins to realize that his parents have deeper secrets than he could have guessed, and that they didn't come to this town by happenstance. 

Rosemary's Baby and Young Goodman Brown are in the mix of this story, which follows a Lovecraftian structure as the hero explores secrets rooted in eerie locations and twisted people. Horrifying reveals. Big monsters. Bad family dynamics taken to an occult extreme. Campbell may be unmatched among contemporary horror writers for his ability to set the scene. He describes locations with such fluid evocation that I can practically feel the damp, and his psychological acuity is a match for any number of New Yorker approved writers. 

The New Weird responds with The Ride of the Gabbleratchet by Steph Swainston. In this story, excerpted from a longer work, a trio of heroines teleport themselves from one world to another, fleeing an equally mobile enemy, The Gabbleratchet, which is essentially a zombified variant of the Wild Hunt. Swainston describes creatures like the Gabbleratchet with verve and vividness, but for me the shifting, whimsy-indulging tone caused the story to stall out quite a bit. I'm not one to insist on narrative momentum for its own sake, but indulgences need to pay off one way or another. In one world they meet Doggerel Dogs, who live up, or down, to their name. The payoff of Doggerel Dogs is that there are Doggerel Dogs.

I'm not including them in this Smackdown, but the New Weird volume includes several essays about the subgenre, in one of which Swainston declares that "Elves were the first against the wall when the revolution came." This reader would gladly do a prisoner exchange; take back your doggerel dogs, and return the elves. Not that I'm a reactionary, but if the revolution is this close to being a direct-to-video Phantom Tollbooth sequel, I'm not interested.

Tolkein's reps are strong, but Lovecraft wins this round, by virtue of locations so foggy they practically dampened my clothes, and characters I'd skirt around down at pub. The big finish has an infodump quality, but loads on horror after family horror enough to bind bad parents with cosmic nihilism in ways that make far too much sense.

Next time is the last time for this series. Take good care til then!