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.
