Profile: The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories

You can’t really review something like Cthulhu, the enigmatic extraterrestrial entity that has spawned it’s own mythos and who’s name is important enough to be autocorrected. Instead, you finally get a down to reading H.P Lovecraft’s short stories, featuring the great Cthulhu and find out th origin of this pinnacle figure in the classic horror genre. The figure Cthulhu first appeared in 1928 in a pulp magazine as a mix between a human, octopus and dragon with wings in the back and feelers in the front. In his short story “The Call of Cthluhu“, 3 short chapters unveil the legend of Cthulhu, an ancient celestial creature who came to Earth billions of years ago and was trapped under the sea inside the submerged ghost-like city of R’yleh. A mysterious cult forms around the mythology of Cthulhu and the Old Ones (giant ancient gods), spawning madness, fever dreams and a crazed, ritualistic, and unexplainable history of worship.
Fear is born out of the unknown and Lovecraft is pretty crafty (ha) at dipping his narratives in a thick slimy layer of mystique. This is the kind of fantasy-horror that’s timeless, something so big and menacing it can put our whole Lilliputian human race to it’s knees. Much has been inspired by Cthulhu, songs, radio shows, films, art….

Lovecraft’s other “weird” stories are short, concise and rich with essay-like prose, often depicting or suggesting supernatural mysteries from exotic locations like the African jungle, the rural Americas, the deep sea or the sinister history of family lineages. A twist ending is to be expected, one that builds from the opening line (a line that acts like an exposed root to a deeper, darker story that grows out from it.). The terror lies in that build up, in the seemingly normal storytelling until the great reveal. And this reveal comes through the eyes of an unsuspecting human that has little idea of what he’s getting himself into or in what kind of malevolent world he lives in.

For some classic horror, H.P Lovecraft was a great place to start. I could see it becoming a reading tradition every Halloween…especially with the bespectacled caricature found on the cover of this Penguin Classic edition.

Review: The Delphi Room by Melia McClure

The Delphi Room by Melia McClure comes from oddball, Toronto-based publisher ChiZine. ChiZine is basically the unofficial “sponsor” for my little freakbook show this month as 3 of the 5 titles are coming from them (Thank you!!). They are THE place to find all the strange, scary, and surreal in the book world and this novel is a pretty good example of all three.
After hanging herself, Velvet finds herself locked in a version of her childhood bedroom all alone. No way out, no view from the window. Just the bedroom, a bed, mirror and a pad of paper on a desk. Is it Hell? Heaven? Somewhere in between? With no signs from above or below, Velvet begins to (understandably) freak right out. Until she hears a knock on the wall beside her and finds a note stuffed into an air grid. Living beside her, in his own  room is Brinkley. Through the passing of letters, the two try to uncover some kind of answer for their current situations. Inexplicable scenes from their lives begin to play through the mirrors in their respective rooms and as one watches the other’s tragic moments, they begin to gain empathy and understanding for each other, but above all, the feeling of not being alone in the universe.

I was a little confused since The Delphi Room was described as a story about finding love after death. I didn’t feel like V&B fell in love, but rather they fell into a comforting friendship that was based on mutual circumstances (both past and current). In fact, their lives mirror each others (figuratively AND literally) almost perfectly. Both had stunningly beautiful, albeit batshit crazy, mothers who resembled old hollywood movie stars. Both of these mothers offered wild, unsteady upbringings for their children and the result became a manic depressive Velvet who was tormented by an imaginary figure named The Shadowman and a socially inept Brinkley who talked to a poster of Clara Bow. Interestingly, half the novel unravels through their letters back and forth, while the other half is written out through scenes depicting moments from their lives with the dialogue and descriptions of a screenplay.
Perhaps it was naive of me to think the threads in this story were going to piece together cleanly, or that the connection between the characters would solidify. It seemed like each revealing moment or confession acted like a grab bag of images, displaying only excerpts of these two quirky, tormented lives but never the whole picture. Despite that, the conceptual strength of the novel made up for it’s intermittent plot and execution, (historically, Delphi is one of the most important religious sanctuaries in Greek mythology. It is an oracle that is believed to answers questions through riddles). I thought the story of Velvet and Brinkley was a surreal, visual journey through the unknown that shows that the search for answers is often meaningless. That whatever happens will inevitably happen, whether it’s a slow descent into insanity or a quick fall from grace. And that life after death is very open to interpretation.

Review: Night Film by Marisha Pessl

NIGHT FILM.
The first instalment in my October horror show!

The title. The cover. The description. All the markings of a hauntingly perfect novel. But those are often the ones you need to watch out for. The ones that get you TOO excited, because there is almost nothing worse than a story not living up to your inflated expectation. When the idea of it, the kernel of possibility sets a story on fire before you’ve even cracked the spine a little.

Night Film follows a disgraced journalist named Scott McGrath along a consuming and spiralling investigation that begins with a young woman’s sudden death. The woman happens to be the daughter of an infamous horror film director named Stanislas Cordova, known as much for his disturbing films as his reclusive persona. Scott, convinced on an anonymous tip and a strong hunch that Ashley’s death is a direct link to her secretive family heritage, decides to go on the hunt for answers about the obscure Cordovas and in doing so plunges himself in plaguing suspicion.

Night Film delivers on the possibility, the wild goose chase…reaching out for those shiny serpentine strings, and having your imagination fill in the blanks.

As much as the story follows a pretty straightforward breadcrumb trail, the array of characters found in Night Film are extremely interesting – from an aging Hollywood beauty, a witchcraft practitioner, a flamboyant film professor, a pervy goon…However, Pessl’s character Stanislas Cordova is the real heart of this story. His intricate body of work, the secret sprawling manor he lives in, his cult-like following and the whole underground culture it spawns was spellbinding and oozes mystique to the very end. Pessl manages to weave Cordovas pop-history into his storyline, making it feel all the more real, details that include a no-show at the Academy Awards in 1977, a Rolling Stone cover story and a Times piece. Peppered with actual photographs and media clippings, from blogs to newspaper articles and Vanity Fair spreads, Cordova feels like a real-deal celebrity.

Though I had to actively ignore the author’s obsessive use of italics all over the place, the narrative was both reflective and descriptive, tugging at insights concerning fears, truth, suspicion, faith and skepticism.

Though the suggestion and mystery of Cordova is far more fearsome than the actual story (check out these “real” film posters from the author!), the novel is entertaining as hell, and a beautiful object to behold. Though the final revelation might seem lacklustre in comparison to the build-up, I think it was actually suiting to the themes that are tossed around throughout the novel. Night Film delivers on the possibility, the wild goose chase, reaching out for those shiny serpentine strings, letting them take you places and having your imagination fill in the blanks. And even though you want to believe in the possibility of something grander, something extraordinary, the novel brings you gently back down to reality. Disappointing? Not exactly. It’s the trajectory of letting you discover, dig up and run away with a story that makes it exciting. We, like McGrath are strangers in the dark, following a thread of possibility, and it is, like the novel suggests, a human condition to let your imagination wander. To search for mermaids, even though in the end, after you’ve got nothing but a trout in your hands, you realize it was in the journey that the magic really lived and believing was (almost) more satisfying than finding the answer.

Would this not make an astounding movie?