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.

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!

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird Smackdown rounds 10 thru 12, Amirite?

Pull up a chair, won't you? We've got to decide which branch of fantasy fiction has borne the sweetest fruit, and we can't do it without you, dear reader.

Round 10! Charles De Lint steps up for Tolkien, with a vignette titled The Conjure Man. I dunno if Neil Gaiman was singlehandedly responsible for the 90s trope of unhoused people being represented as majickal Wise Ones guiding seekers to fantastical truths, but he popularized it, and here's Charles de Lint taking it out for a spin. The young female protagonist meets a Shaman of the Street who doesn't seem to have any pressing problems, other than that someone cut down a big beautiful tree to which he liked to whisper stories. The wisdom he has to offer the heroine, and the reader, is "You guys... trees! and stories! amirite?" So she plants a tree and tells it stories and gets a thumbs-up from the happy-go-lucky unhoused guy. Fin.

"Magical guru shaman" may be an improvement on the other models genre fiction has for unhoused people, like "Scary zombie," but while it might humanize them a bit, it doesn't do a good job of addressing real needs for real people, or even suggesting that we should. Beyond that, this story is an endorsement of trees and stories. I, too, value trees and stories.

Lovecraft is represented, or at least referenced, by Bruce Sterling, with a story called The Unthinkable. Two diplomats, one Russian, one American, relax together after the end of the Soviet Union, and ponder what the future holds for humankind. But this is an alternate Earth where magic takes the place of technology, in the same manner that dinosaurs replace electricity in The Flintstones. The Russian guy lives in a Baba Yaga hut, and the fridge has a tiny frost imp keeping things cool. The punch line unites Lovecraft's nihilistic cosmology with the atom bomb in a way that brings home, for me, the existential threat of nuclear weapons like nothing else I've read or seen.

It's very similar to the story The Dragon of Tollin by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, which appeared earlier in this Smackdown, but I prefer Sterling's rendition of the "Monster symbolizes nukes" notion for two reasons:

1. It's concise. Scarborough belabors her point like an unsilenceable drunk cornering you at a party; Sterling compresses his into a phrase, and lets you figure out the ramifications.

2. Presenting nukes as a dragon makes it seem manageable. Presenting nukes as gods of utter doom reframes it nicely, challenging blasé assumptions about our ability to manage the problem.

Okay, on to the New Weird, with Jeffrey Thomas and his story Immolation.

In a future where engineered and enslaved homunculi (called cultures) do jobs in extreme conditions that human bodies can't withstand, a culture named Magnesium Jones goes rogue, and gets caught up in an altercation between the bosses and the unions. Unions hate the homunculi for the same reason real world unions aren't fans of automation; they "take" peoples' jobs. There are racial implications here as well; the union views the cultures as machines, rather than fellow workers trapped in second-class citizen status.

Thomas doesn't presume to resolve these issues; instead, he sketches the complexity of race and labor struggles in a story that, beneath the science-fantasy element, is a noir. And a mighty tasty noir, at that. Thomas describes things with a concise vividness that recalls pulp writers from Raymond Chandler to Jack Vance. It's tough; it's bright.

So who wins this round? Not poor sleepwalking Team Tolkien. Team Lovecraft comes forth with a thoughtful wit that Lovecraft himself could never manage, and leverages Lovecraft to wake this reader up to the total nature of the nuclear threat. Thomas turns in a thrilling crime story that never speechifies, but reveals the ways power maintains itself by turning demographics against one another. Lets give it to The New Weird.

Round 11!

Tolkien might be surprised to be represented by Dennis L. McKiernan, whose claim to fame is that he tried to get the Tolkien estate to approve his Lord of the Rings fan fiction as an authorized sequel, and they told him to buzz off. They made the right call, if his story Halfling House is representative. The eponymous House is an inn for small faerie folk; it travels through space, in magical and random fashion, just like the TARDIS in Dr Who. I'm an easy mark for cozy domiciles that are also fantastical conveyances, especially with an ensemble cast, but this story is overstuffed with jokes. Lots of jokes. Oh, those jokes. The story's almost 30 pages long. It should be about 8.

Anyhow, the fair folk wind up trying to rescue a pair of their number from enslavement in an opium den, a mimeograph of Sax Rohmer's discarded drafts. Not content with lazy racism against Asian people, McKiernan sweetens the pot with some doltish victim-blaming of drug addicts. "I raged against the sheer stupidity of anyone who would get addicted to anything, whether it be narcotics or illusion or drink or pipeweed or anything." Thanks for the considered social commentary. Also, there's a female character whose personality is to take offense at things the male protagonist says (because girls, amirite?), and then to be all flirty and kissy face with him (because male writers, amirite?). After 30 pages of this crapola, I was raging against the sheer stupidity of the author. Seriously, they couldn't get Guy Gavriel Kay?

Team Lovecraft rolls out one of its pride and joys, T. E. D. Klein, with a story warningly titled Black Man With a Horn.

An elderly, forgotten pulp writer meets a frightened missionary on the run from an isolated (fictional) Malaysian tribe called the Tcho-Tcho. The Tcho-Tcho is associated with a murderous monster that looks human, with black skin and a large protrusion from its face. In an elegant and knowing reworking of The Call of Cthulhu's complex plot, the protagonist stumbles across research materials that suggest this monster situation runs deep, and is more than a legend. There's a surface narrative in the world we know, and a submerged narrative of monstrosity. It's a bit like mystery structure, except where a mystery ends with the apollonian folding together of two layers (the mystery seen from without, and the true nature of the situation), this story threatens to have one layer pierce the other, the same threatened trauma that one finds in Lovecraft.  

Another thing one finds in Lovecraft is dumb reactionary racism, and this is another tradition Klein seems proud to follow. I've written about Klein and how he is, on the evidence of his fiction, a straight-up racist, but I hoped this story would show him reconsidering his lethally white supremacist views. Nope. His defenders will try to pass it off as an unreliable narrator situation, but with an unreliable narrator, the author shows us the light shining through the narrator's tattered thinking. Poe lets us know that the narrator of The Telltale Heart is indeed mad; Nabokov shows us that the ceaselessly self-justifying Humbert Humbert's paraphilia and misanthropy ruin the lives of people around him. But Klein only ever shows black people as, at best, creepy and unsettling. 

Another possible defense of Klein; in both this story and the one I've reviewed before, Children of the Kingdom, black people are a bit of a red herring; initially presented as the cause of the threat, while the actual problem is a nonhuman monster. Trouble is, Klein seems fully committed to the idea that black people are little more than a social ill. The reveal isn't that black people are maligned in error, but that they're not the problem... this time. He utterly denies the common humanity of black people.

Klein doesn't seem to write anymore. I've read two stories by him, and it seems that's about a quarter of his total fictional output. I've checked out a few interviews with him to see if he's got anything more or better to say on the subject of race, but none of his oddly fawning interviewers dare, or care, to raise the subject, even though it's a big part of his fiction. In a recent episode of a podcast called Eating the Fantastic, the host asks Klein what kind of periodical he'd like to edit, and Klein answers that he'd favor a politically incorrect right-wing magazine. Stay blocked, Klein.

For the New Weird we have The Lizard of Ooze, by Jay Lake. the title had me worried; visions of Xanth danced in my head, and I don't need that. The story's better than Piers Anthony's jejune japery, but I don't want to damn it with such faint praise. It's a romp that puts a sprightly spin on sword & sorcery fooferall.

This is a vision of contemporary America, but dotted with cities hanging on risers from the interior of great pits, rather like cliff dwellings. Once such city is Ooze, and it reveres a giant magical lizard which lives at the bottom of the pit. Our hero, a sort of ninja cop who guards order in Ooze, guides an odd messenger to the bottom of the pit. It's an adventure, with an exciting fight scene at the bottom, and some vivid, if silly, worldbuilding, fit for an antic computer game. A bowl of ice cream.

Verdict: Tolkien's representative doesn't pass muster, at all, at all. Lovecraft's is almost great, a master class in structuring a persuasive uncanny tale, and prose so schooled in what they used to call slick writing that horror fans think Klein's a master prosesmith, but I'm disqualifying this entry for racism of such pitch and intensity that I can't in good conscience factor it out. That leaves Lake, who tells a diverting tale without being an overt racist and therefor triumphs over his competition.

Round 12, which happily is more competitive than the last!

For Tolkien, Emma Bull with Silver or Gold. Alder Owl, the village witch, goes on a quest to rescue a missing prince. Moon Very Thin, her youthful assistant, remains behind to help tend to needs around the village, such as birthing cattle. Every night, Moon uses a scrying spell to determine if Owl is well or not. Soon, Owl is not, and Moon is compelled to leave her village in search of her beloved mentor. Soon, she is drawn into the search for that lost Prince. Along the way she must discover the answer to a running debate she had with Owl; should the four elements of earth, air, fire & water be honored and invoked in separate magics, as is traditional, or treated as aspects of one holistic totality, as Moon intuits?

I tried to read Emma Bull's beloved first novel, War For the Oaks, once, and while I greatly admired her vivid descriptions and propulsive narrative, the story indulged daydreams that I had insufficient patience for ("Oh no, two hot elf boys are fighting over their love for me! Whatever shall I do? At least our band rawks"). I can't hate, but I couldn't quite make it to the end. It seems she got the raw Mary Sueishness out of her system, though; Silver or Gold is a mature work, circling around familial loss and community building while saving the daydream fulfillment for the very end (a prince marries a village witch? Really? Okay sure fine.) It's the kind of psychologically focused, eventful journey through dense wilderness and magnificent palaces that this fantasy fan eats with a spoon.  

Lovecraft gives us Love's Eldritch Ichor by Esther M. Friesner. A romance publishing company has acquired a promising first-time novelist, but this publisher is a chiseling operation that wants to exploit and underpay.  The young woman's editor, who's comically cowardly and cowed by the domineering lead editor, falls in love with his charge, and tries to make everyone happy. It can't be done, of course, since "mercilessly exploit this woman's labor" and "Protect this woman from exploitation" are irreconcilable. Happily, the novelist has other, more powerful allies in her family, who are a Lovecraftian riff on the Munsters.

Get ready for more jokes! Jokes, jokes, jokes. Freisner's better at them than is McKiernan, but then, so are you, dear reader. She aspires to do a Warner Brothers style cartoonishness, every human (or monster) behavior carried to extravagant exaggeration. It's a tough thing to pull off in prose, and while for this reader the results are hit and miss, Freisner gets within hailing distance of Tex Avery and P. G. Wodehouse. 

The New Weird offers Watson's Boy by Brian Evenson. A young man lives with his parents in a hermetically sealed, windowless, exitless labyrinth of hallways and rooms and locked doors. There are keys in many of the rooms, along with other, more obviously useless things. The boy explores the structure, collecting keys. He wears a suit of hooks upon which he hangs the keys; we are told on the first page that one day the weight of the accumulating keys will surely break his back. 

The family's basic needs are all provided for, but no one else is to be found in the structure, and none of the keys seem to match any of the doors. Still, there's more to explore, although it is endlessly repetitive, like an 80s electronic game. Mother is an unspeaking invalid, defined largely by her frailty. Father drifts about, not doing much of anything, but trying to offer his son some elliptical guidance, all of which is either too tentative or too doltish to be of any help to a boy with an autistic focus on key collection and door attempting. 

I was reminded of austere European art writers from Beckett, to Klossowski, to the Oulipo writers. In other words, fantasy fan catnip, amirite? The structure of the environment and the structure of the story mirror one another, and recall Gormenghast, although that dire palace was technically open to the outside world, and full of surface variety; it was the stagnant culture that rendered it hopeless. In Watson's Boy, the family is literally trapped, with only a vestigial sense that escape is possible. Will they find escape? Will the boy's back be broken by his compulsive accumulation of seemingly useless keys? The story uses ambiguous tension and subtle narrative variety to keep one reading through a seemingly monotonous situation, until a conclusion that is both surprising and logical. 

Verdict: Team Tolkien finally gets its act together; I want more of Emma Bull, who offers hope for new growth, while Evenson shows us a situation in which new growth will be too misdirected to bear fruit.  Between the two of them, they offer powerful glimpses of the most hopeful and most hopeless aspects of life. In between, we have jokes about Lovecraftian gods having to share a hotel room.

Well! The New Weird certainly handled itself best across the board. Emma Bull shone while her fellow Tolkien types bumbled and bored. Team Lovecraft was sometimes powerful, sometimes cheesy, and sometimes racist, just like Lovecraft himself. By the way there's gonna be 6 more rounds of this, and then we'll know for sure what kind of fantasy literature is THE BEST. Can't wait.

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird Rounds 7, 8, & 9

Start here if you need a grounding in what I'm up to with this series. 

Round 7 (clang!). For Tolkien, it's Patricia A. McKillip with The Fellowship of the Dragon.

The Queen's harper/unworthy boyfriend has gone missing in a dragon's territory, so the Queen asks five childhood friends, each a tough, able woman, to bring him back. They must travel through a beautiful but  actively dangerous forest, and along the way the women face one sorcerous temptation after another. McKillip sets similar temptations for the reader; every page shines with gemlike sentences that lead one astray from the narrative, so inventive and lovely are they. My rule of thumb distinction between popular and literary fiction is that the former tries to plane every sentence so smooth that the reader glides easily to the next sentence, the next paragraph, never doubling back or pausing to ponder the meaning, or possible meanings, of a single strand of words. Literary fiction tends to require a more scrutinizing consideration of sentences as challenges; riddles and poems and koans embedded within the tapestry of the story. By this rule, McKillip is an unabashedly literary writer.

She is also an inventive and conscientious plotter, weaving fairy tale conceits and feminist friendship in a braid of antiquarian stylings and contemporary concerns. So far, this is my favorite story in this collection.

For Lovecraft, Kim Newman offers The Big Fish. I was aware that Newman writes fiction, but I knew him for his film criticism, generally centered on horror and arthouse film, two subsets with more overlap than is often supposed. He seems to have absorbed many lessons on vivid storytelling and fast-acting characterization from the flicker shows; The Big Fish is a gas.

During WWII, an LA detective is hired by a starlet to track down yet another crummy boyfriend. This one's a gangster who seems to have joined a cult. The cult will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth, a tale about a town full of people who've bred with sea creatures, producing not beautiful mermaids but uncanny fish people. Lovecraft was writing about the alleged horrors of "miscegenation," because he was a racist twerp, but Newman begins his story with a sardonic denunciation of the USA's herding of Japanese-American people into camps (while letting Italian-American gangsters continue to strut around) that goes some way towards distancing Newman's story from Lovecraft's theme. For Newman, the horror that has imported itself from Innsmouth to LA is not intermarriage, but Dianetics. 

Newman writes a ripping yarn without over-relying on guys coming through the door with guns (though there is some of that). Also, he has the detective's subscription to legendary detective fiction magazine Black Mask get mixed up with equally legendary horror mag Weird Tales, in a cute acknowledgment of the genre-crossing going on in this story. Newman creates settings so vivid that the reader practically becomes an illustrator. I'll have to read more of Newman's fiction... after I read more McKillip.

For the New Weird, Kathe Koja offers The Neglected Garden.

Yet another lousy boyfriend tosses his girlfriend out, but she only goes so far as the backyard wire fence, where she ties herself to the broken rusty wire. She stays there, to the annoyance of the boyfriend, until she begins to change... the plant life merges with the catatonic woman, and she changes until she bears unexpected fruit.

I'm an old Swamp Thing enthusiast, so any story where people merge with plants has an allure for me. I'm also into anything where body horror becomes a means of emotional expression. This story nails the damage done by selfish men to the women who love them, and works as a revenge story that firewalls the woman from blame for the glorious horror which her wrath wreaks, in much the same was that BDSM submission fantasies permit the consideration of acts that one "mustn't" engage in.

VERDICT: Each of these stories is terrific, and I hate to pit them against each other in a cheap zero-sum game. But rules are rules. Here at But Don't Try To Touch Me, we take our responsibilities with the utmost seriousness.

I liked them all but I liked Fellowship Of the Dragon, with its animistic fairy tale setting and rambunctious ensemble, best, and since there is no distinction between my own personal preferences and Absolute Merit, Patricia A. McKillip wins Round 7 for the world's most famous philologist.

Is it already time for Round 8? Time flies in quarantine. 

For Tolkien, Harry Turtledove presents The Decoy Duck. Some (basically) Christian missionaries from (essentially) the Holy Roman Empire come to (more or less) Viking territory. The missionary's ace card is a handsome and devout young man who was abducted from this viking village as a child. His absolute devotion to his monotheistic faith fascinates the villagers and infuriates the chieftain, who permits the missionaries to live and do their thing more out of an inner core of decency than any desire to allow open discussion. The conflict between the chieftain and the missionary, both of whom are men of honor and virtue, is a conflict between two immiscible cultural value systems, and despite the mens' mutual, and earned, respect, something's gotta give, which means someone's gotta die. The conclusion feels inevitable, which does not lessen the tension that underlies the tale, and doesn't bring the tension to an end, since the conflict between the two men is by no means the final proxy war between two conflicting cultures.

I'm no expert, but Turtledove would probably make a formidable debater or lawyer; he crafts strong arguments for both sides of this conflict, and shows us the steps that might be taken to resolve the conflict; all that needs to happen is for someone to give up. There will be no brokering of a long-term accord. It's rather like a courtroom drama; compelling, but, with the exception of how things end, it never feels the way I want fantasy to feel; like a step into the unknown. I'm on the side of those who believe the jet fuel of fantasy is bold acts of imagination, but there's no room for such stuff in Turtledove's humane and carefully reasoned philosophical tale. What we get here is lucid, thoughtful historical fiction, and that's a good thing in its own way.

For Lovecraft, Joanna Russ writes I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket... But by God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph From Life!" The title is taken from the punchline of Lovecraft's story Pickman's Model, in which the big reveal is that an artist who paints monsters isn't indulging in flights of fancy, but is doing journalism. 

A kindhearted woman takes on the emotional labor of helping a young male coworker make an effort at romance with a bewitchingly glamorous woman. The young man needs help; he's socially clueless, discomfiting to everyone around him, helpless in matters of money or romance, yet arrogant (and foolish, thinking his passion for H. P. Lovecraft makes him superior to others). In short, he's me in the 90s, a fate I'd wish on no one. His compassionate coworker soon has cause to regret her offer to help the young man in his courtship, since he demands more and more of her time and attention. She doesn't quite understand his confused cries for help until it is much too late... The mysterious woman may be a localized expression of a cosmic power; perhaps she represents the temptation of cosmic horror literature to young people who can't quite hack it in the human sphere. People who opt out of life in favor of hikikomori consolations may be the true subject, here.

I've read enough vintage vampire stories to know that many of them are about dangerous lovers, in which the viewpoint character observes a friend being stolen away from their proper life by some wicked Other person. This is one of those, and it's fascinating in part because of Russ's reputation. Ask any midcentury SF fan or pro to describe Joanna Russ, and they'd say something like "bra-burning man-hater." That's certainly not the impression I get from this story. Compassion for the clumsy young man shines through,  even while diagnosing his shortcomings in clinical detail, and showing greater sympathy for the woman he ropes into holding his hand through his unwise courtship. It's left an open question whether or not the human race as a whole is better or worse off for the removal of unpleasant young men.

Speaking of people who seem to prefer tales of cosmic nihilism to life's more positive possibilities, The New Weird offers A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing, by Thomas Ligotti. A young man with a history of debilitating health problems is beguiled by the creepy muttering of his doctor... but did the doctor say anything? Was all that muttering coming out of the narrator's subconscious, and was it mere delusion that ascribed those words to the doctor? 

The young man finds his way to a town of strange folk parades and tight-lipped locals offering hostile hospitality. The conclusion is lavishly, yet icily, nasty. 

Ligotti takes the cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft and shears away the rubbery monsters and adventure tropes, which leaves stories of people having their minds shattered by direct perception of the dread hopelessness of existence. The first time I read one of his stories (in an anthology called 999) I was impressed. This is the 3rd or 4th I've read, and despite a surface narrative variety, a certain thematic sameness sets in. M. John Harrison also deals with enigmatic folk traditions that suggest something nasty beneath them, but where he leaves them as open signifiers, Ligotti weaponizes everything to the proving of his joyless point. He's the Jack Chick of cosmic nihilism, which is certainly a thing to behold.

VERDICT: Each of these stories is working to illustrate a philosophical conflict. Russ is the one who leaves the most play for ambiguity, and takes up the least of your time. She, and Lovecraft through her, get the laurel wreath for this round.

Round 9! For Tolkien, Nine Threads of Gold, by Andre Norton. Some kind of soldier-enforced tyranny is spreading terror throughout a fantasy kingdom, and a pack of children from various socioeconomic  backgrounds has taken refuge in an abandoned Hold. A sorcerous woman who grew up in the Hold makes her way back there, and becomes the children's caretaker. It soon becomes apparent that a malign magic threatens the Hold's inhabitants, and the woman must keep a careful watch over the children, while teaching them to work together for the good of all, and to settle differences in communal fashion, without sliding back into prejudices of their past lives.

It's a rich setup, and the Hold is full of hidden possibilities that the woman uncovers for the children. Norton has much to say about the challenges and rewards of raising children. Also, she uses em-dashes with defiant liberty.

I found it difficult to fully engage this story, but I think it's because I've never been responsible for children for more than a few hours, and I'd prefer to keep it that way. My own limited parameters are implicated in my muted reaction to this rapturously told and compassionate tale.

For Lovecraft (very much for him!) we have H. P. L. by Gahan Wilson. This story imagines Lovecraft having lived to an impressive old age and getting to enjoy the success which his stories achieved after his (in real life) early death. A young fan accepts an offer to visit Lovecraft (and his mysterious manservant), and a succession of startling discoveries follows. 

This story is quite fannish, and so eager to admire Lovecraft that it sidesteps the man's extravagant bigotries. I like to imagine (on the basis of a rueful late letter) that Lovecraft would have become more openminded and openhearted about human difference had he lived long enough, but this story takes things a bit too far in that direction, having Lovecraft speak out against xenophobia. It's a bit like the scene in the Annie musical that's a love letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt; had Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie, lived to see the show, he would have jumped onstage and decked the actor playing Roosevelt, so passionate was the cartoonist's hatred (often expressed in the comic strip) for that President's socialist ways. 

The ending of H. P. L. is even more goofily fannish, as the Forces of the Cosmos essentially lift Lovecraft bodily up to heaven in a Rapture of one. Cmon. Maybe it's going for camp, I dunno. Wilson does himself more favors when he permits some of his trademark macabre elements to pop up, as when the mysterious manservant laments his one-of-a-kind physical complaint...

For the New Weird, it's the genre's poster child, China Mieville, with Jack. Jack Half-A-Prayer was a legendary, flamboyant hero-of-the-people lawbreaker, and now that he's gone, the narrator wants you to know about the role said narrator played in helping Jack along the way. This is set in a world where criminals are punished with surreal surgeries and nonorganic grafts, and our carceral state (or Britain's) is implicated for the way we make felons carry their crimes for the rest of their lives. It's a smart satire, told in the guise of a penny dreadful filtered through a pub tale, and even though I guessed the punchline a page or two before the reveal, it was still satisfying, in the manner of a skillfully crafted joke with an implicating satirical point. Mieville comes off as a Leftist Roald Dahl, which is dandy, but I don't see much family resemblance to the more ambiguous worlds that the earlier tales in this anthology offer.

Verdict: I enjoyed Mieville's satirical cartoon most, but Norton's might be the richest, with its ensemble of diverse kids facing slippery magical enemies with the aid of a compassionate and wise volunteer caregiver. Still, as David Denby says, "trust pleasure," no matter how blinkered, solipsistic, or culturally overdetermined, so I'll take the easy way out and declare the New Weird the winner by a nose.

What a thrilling competition! Each of our three contestants won a round! Keep reading this blog for more pulse-pounding reviews of stories about monsters.

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!

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird, Rounds 4 & 5

Start here:

Just because I haven't been producing timely posts about fantasy and horror fiction doesn't mean that I don't think about fantasy and horror fiction every day of my life, but I fear the core question of "who's strongest: the Lord of the Rings guy, the Cthulhu guy, or fantasy writers who also maybe read a little Virginia Woolf from time to time?" remains unanswered. Let's see if we can make some headway on that.

For round 4 of this smackdown, Tolkien's proxy, courtesy of the tribute anthology After the King, is Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, with the story The Dragon of Tollin. 

In a world divided into the North and the South, the Southern lands are concerned because they haven't heard from the North in a while. No trading ships, nothing. How could such a thing be? Nothing could possibly have gone wrong, because as everyone knows, the North has a giant tame dragon providing for its security. So the South sends a winged emissary to investigate; the emissary finds that all the North has been burned. Gee, why didn't the dragon protect it from whatever attacked? Soon, the emissary finds a fresh dragon egg, offering the promise of a new dragon to guard the South; then he finds the last survivor of the catastrophe, who happens to be the old dragon's trainer. The trainer tells the tale of how he found and trained the old dragon; how the dragon's power brought heat, light, and protection to the whole land; and how things went wrong.

On a first reading I found this story frustrating, despite Scarborough's charming descriptions of her magical kingdoms, because it seemed like she was employing all the usual twist-ending apparatus to build up to a big reveal that you've surely already guessed. Of course the guard dragon was the force that destroyed the North. On a second reading, I concluded that the author probably intended us to guess that from the start; the real reveal is that the King of the North pretty much allowed it to happen, because he indulged nuclear power/the military-industrial complex/the fossil fuel industry the dragon's growing appetite. A further reveal is that the emissary from the North just doesn't get it; he still wants to take the dragon egg back home, because he's convinced that his people can handle it more responsibly than did the North. Scarborough indicts politicians who endanger us all by building our societies around uncontrollably dangerous powers, but the critique is nestled within a lustrous fantasy world, presented with subdued wit and a prose style redolent of literary fairy tales, making the story more than a screed.

Representing H. P. Lovecraft, Poppy Z. Brite brings us His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood.

Two decadent young men in Louisiana gorge themselves on wicked pleasures (and Bride wishes she could see the look on your face when you read the nasty things she describes them doing) but can't seem to find pleasures rarified enough to overcome their ennui, until they get into graverobbing and make a private museum of the intriguing artifacts they pilfer from burial places. Eventually they swipe a voodoo artifact from a legendary voodoo priest. Then they go clubbing, and meet an enticing stranger they just gotta take home with them...

This story doesn't turn on unexpected plot twists, since stories about robbing a voodoo priest's grave can only turn out one way, but on being as scandalously Goth as possible. Brite's prose is a deep purple velvet pillow designed exclusively to bear sick thrills to a jaded audience. I doubt Lovecraft would have been comfortable with it, since the point of his stories is that everything is nasty and too much to bear and what is sex anyway.

For the New Weird, Clive Barker brings us his much-anthologized In the Hills, the Cities.

A young gay couple takes a road trip through Yugoslavia (it's the 80s). They fight all the way. Judd is a ranting political/historical obsessive; Mick thinks all that political narrative is deadly dull, preferring to revel in the beauty of European art while ignoring the cultural specificity from which it sprang. The only thing that binds them together is lust.

Then they stumble into a secretive rivalry between two ancient villages that threatens both men's understanding of the world. 

Barker takes his time describing the outrageous secret in the hills (and might have given it all a rethink if he'd known just how cruel the immanent future of Yugoslavia was destined to be), but he manages, by withholding crucial information for a good while, to help us believe in something that is frankly impossible. Giants, sport rivalries, folk traditions, even mecha anime wind together in a fashion that only a cunning storyteller could present as plausible. It's pretty amazing.

Rather like Midsommar, the film that I saw on the 4th of July and much preferred to fireworks, this story ends with one of the protagonists submerging into the folkways of an exotic backwoods European culture, and the other getting trampled. Collectivism and dreaminess lead to unity, fulfillment, and an end to loneliness; individualism and hardheadedness lead down to death. And yet the latter option has a valid critique of the former. Confusing, in summary, but quite clear in Barker's telling. If you've been assuming that Barker is just a gruesome schlockmeister, this story will change your mind.

Also, the final paragraph is weirdly soothing to me. Don't read it out of context to try and understand what I mean.

VERDICT?

Thus: Each story is charming enough to cushion the diagrammatic nature of their dialectics. Scarborough's critique of Big Power suggests that only conscientious individual action can save us from the worshipers of power (though it's becoming evident to me that collective action will be vital to that cause). Brite's loving depiction of appetite indulgence suggests that for the tragically hip, there is no cure but to drown in toxic temptation. Barker suggests that humanity's addiction to self-destructive rivalries has no cure, but that we need to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and rivalries may be our only option. Roll Tide!

 
Um, I liked the Barker best. It was certainly the least predictable and (though my spoiler avoidance makes it hard to make the case for this) the most multivalent. As far as the original Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft rivalry goes, I think this round might be a draw between two worthy but minor contenders.

Let's have Round 5 to make up for lost time.

For Tolkien, we have Poul and Karen Anderson with Faith.

So trolls build a creepy and impregnable fortress near a village, and abduct children. At first the troll invaders seem like a MAGA fantasy of evil immigrants stealing our way of life, but then the action shifts to inside the fortress and they start to seem more like ICE agents imprisoning kids and spinning bogus narratives about how it's for the kids' own good. The kids yearn to grow big enough to be released; the trolls only release children who've grown nice and tall and plump and meaty, whereupon the lucky urchin is led into a secret room, there's a big feast, and that kid is never seen again.

The Andersons are dab hands at atmospheric, clear and engrossing storytelling, and they bring all that to bear in a story that blends real sweetness and real nastiness in a marvelous update of unsanitized old fairy tales. The kids act like real children, with petty jealousies and earnest good intentions jostling around inside their noggins, along with yearnings that can't be fulfilled in captivity. The ending acknowledges trauma and plausible heroism, which genre fiction sometimes skirts around in pursuit of more blusterous thrills. 

(I've written about fantasy & SF mainstay Poul Anderson here.)

Lovecraft's representative is onetime North Carolina poet laureate, Fred Chappell, with The Adder.

Unlike the other tale of Chappell's that I've written about (Dagon, a depressive BDSM tone poem with fleeting Lovecraft references), this story is cheerful, comic, and concerned with conventional storytelling imperatives like suspense. The narrator and his chummy Uncle are rare book dealers (their affectionate relationship adds a lot of sunshine to the tone, very much in contrast to Lovecraft's paranoia), and they have to handle a copy of that wicked occult book, the Necronomicon, with particular care. It turns out that you can't stack the Necronomicon with other books, or it will start to warp the text of those books, polluting not only the particular copies it touches, but all editions, worldwide. Chappell has fun detourning Milton's poetry many different ways; the story is as much an essay on modern poetic prankster play as it is a suspense story about how they'll try to restore Milton's text. Chappell mixes highbrow formalism and middle-lowbrow genre fun. 

The New Weird gives us Crossing Into Cambodia by Michael "the Elric Guy" Moorcock.

This story (dedicated to Isaac Babel) is set in an alternate version of our world where Russian Cassock Calvary are fighting their way through Cambodia as part of a Vietnam war, with the dubious assistance of a functionary from Moscow who narrates in precise, distanced language that grows cautiously poetic as it struggles to articulate the overwhelming nature of war. 

Put a big content warning on this story for abuses of all kinds. It's demonstrated that in times of extreme duress, people will do anything to survive. This is presented in a calm, Apollonian fashion, but the content punches through the glassy style and insists that we consider the horror and desperation that flows through human history; this may be an imaginary story as to its particulars, but it's built from the brick and mortar of demonstrable human depravity. Everyone they meet knuckles under, and the Cossacks have strict codes of honor that don't prevent them from doing terrible things to innocent people; quite the opposite. They rape women and slaughter men, not because they want to, but because it's just the done thing in war, and they must keep up the standards. Horrible.

The story ends with a confrontation between barbarian courage and modern technological innovations in mass murder, as the Cossacks charge into the wake of a mushroom cloud, refusing to believe the wimpish pleadings of the narrator, and all his Poindextering about "radiation" and whatever. Old-fashioned warmongering and newfangled nuking collide, but not before uncounted villagers have been violated.

Yet Moorcock's background as a spinner of thrilling fantasy adventure stories enlivens multiple set pieces, as the Cossacks ford a river and journey through war-ripped deserts and jungles. Moorcock brings out the beauty of the landscape and the fascination of unfamiliar lands and sensations. This runs the risk of making war seem a grand adventure, but his unflinching gaze upon atrocity after atrocity saves the story from such moral folly. 

What of the VERDICT?!

All are fine. Moorcock's nasty slice of proto-New Weird hit me the hardest. It uses the craft chops of pulpy adventure narrative to rub our noses in the moral sepsis of war. It's full of surprises, unexpected beauty, and even more unexpected monstrosity. 

But by the terms of the original Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft setup, I'm inclined to take the Anderson's tale of babes in the bad woods over Chappell's lark about poetic parody; perhaps it's because I've always loved Babes in the Woods stories, or perhaps it's because I subscribe to Poetry magazine, which is so full of twisty nasty parodic poetry that Chappell's version seems like the training wheels version.  

So far science demonstrates that the New Weird wins every throw against the acolytes of Tolkien and Lovecraft. But there's more to come, and the trad brands of fantasy will have many opportunities to catch up.