Wednesday 21 February 2018

This Creeping Evil (1950/1963) by Geoffrey Bennett



Now, it doesn't matter how I start now, there's no better introduction to this review than that cover.

Geoffrey Bennett was a British seaman and author, chiefly remembered for his naval histories, such as his The Battle of Jutland or Charlie B: a Biography of Admiral Lord Beresford of Metemmeh and Curraghmore, G.C.B., G.C.V.O., Ll.D., D.C.L the latter of which I give in full specifically because of that being it's actual full title. He wrote some fiction on the side, under the pen name of 'Sea Lion', almost all seemingly drawing on his own experiences at sea and thus having something to do with ships (even two of his three Desmond Drake novels about a British Intelligence agent deal with ships in some capacity, be it blowing them up or finding them when they get lost) and This Creeping Evil is the only one of his books I can find with a supernatural/superscientific element.

The story details how a giant big blob comes out of nowhere and starts demolishing various British cities via steamrolling through them, all the while the author, one Thomas Delaney of (at the time of publication still) His Majesty's Navy, seems to have the terrible habbit of running into it quite a lot by accident.

The first time Delaney comes across it is when it shows up at the Port in Portsmouth where Delaney is to land his ship, but a huge gelatinous blob coming out of Dartmoor to flatten everything will probably get in the way of shore leave, as so often is the case. Now, Delaney loses his whole ship while attacking the Thing and is the only survivor, thanks to a rather far reaching coincidence. Then, never caring to really mourn any of the men he captained for two years and just acting like said disaster was a nuissance or an embarassment at best, he carries on talking about the Thing a whole lot. He finds people who are oddly thrilled by having seen it kill thousands of people due to it being so 'exciting', and then he's nearly crushed to death when the Thing crashes a football game between the Angles and the Welsh at Wembley, the final result of said unfinished game surely being the focus of much pub-side speculation and the occasional dust up. Of course Delaney is seemingly the only person to survive, and he is rescued by his wife and a chance acquaitance of his whom she randomly meets in the street.

Now, considering how much of an Odyssey the acquisition of this book was for me (this consisting of a crooked used book seller at a certain website trippling the price on me or getting overbid by 50 cents a second before the end of an Ebay auction at 4 AM) I find it painful to state that it doesn't get any better than that. If anything, well.....

The narrator basically just sits around, talks about the Thing a lot, and describes it's seemingly erratic and never explained movements from one city to another. I was hoping there would be some explanation offered for that, but instead the author invokes the "supernatural therefore I don't have to explain anything" clause, making me want to bite something.

The book suddenly shifts to prattling about how England needs a Leader from amongst the Church, how this Thing is clearly the Devil or something of that sort, bringing up a "Prophecy" from the Bible about how this is totally the "Serpent" let loose after a thousand years because, etc. etc. Then when the Thing finally does something different and starts to slowly squeeze London to death with it's tentacles, we get told that England totally deserved this because unlike the "Heathen of China or the Congo" they've been taught the Christian way and ignored it. Apparently not working on Saturday and having a luke warm approach to active worship is apparently just the worst and most evilestest thing ever, and was deserving of God letting loose his wrath upon Britain. Bear in mind this was published in 1950, a mere five years after the War and yet apparently no one thinks it's strange that human experimentation and mass ethnic genocide and slaughter of millions of people is apparently considered not as bad in comparison, since God never thought it'd be a good idea to let his giant goop monster loose on Nazi Germany.

Then someone says how God let loose the Thing because people lack faith in him and my first reaction was "Of course, and here I was thinking that the best way for God to revive Faith in himself was to manifest himself publically in such a way as to deny any possible denial or skepticism but silly me, the answer was clearly to let loose a giant slimey blob to randomly bulldoze through England, killing old people, women and children alike, with no apparent link or direct connection to God or Christianity, in the hope that people just kind of piece that one together. Brilliant !"

This is in keeping with the same logic that basically pretends that only Christians live in the entirety of Britain and there aren't any Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists or any other denominations about in the heartland of the then British Empire.

And so, in keeping with this sudden turn, a new character is introduced twenty pages before the end (the book has a real problem of basically having no one but Delaney stay around long, every character that gets introduced only showing up for a chapter or two before dying or leaving for the rest of the book) who gathers up people inside Saint Paul's Cathedral and gives them a sermon, and tells them how the only way to save themselves from the Thing which not even an Atom Bomb could really put a dent in is to pray. Not, you know, getting airlifted out of there which the authorities tried a whole one time and then since the plane got demolished by a crowed never tried to do again, apparently. Not tunneling beneath the enclosing claw, which they totally have time for because the damn Thing takes literal days if not weeks to close in in any significant fashion.

No no, clearly the real solution is to march out towards the Thing singing hymns and then praying in front of It and hoping God just does a Miracle.

And yeah, the climax of the book is that a bunch of people kneel in front of the Thing, there's a lightning flash and it's just gone.

....Now the question is why Arrow Books decided to dust this one off thirteen years later. The Thing saw publication only a few years before the start of the Giant Monster movie craze in the mid 50's and early 60's, as testified by the appearance in rapid succession of such films as The Giant Claw, The Giant Gila Monster, Gorgo or Reptilicus just to stick to US releases. I believe the people at Arrow saw this book as a quick way to cash in on the trend, and even got some bloke to make this utterly amazing cover for it. Sadly it's probably the best thing about the whole production.

Saturday 17 February 2018

Wulfheim (1950) by Sax Rohmer



Sax Rohmer aka Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward is remembered today primarily for his Fu Manchu novels, and even those are brought up mostly to cringe at the Yellow Peril aspect of the franchise. Yet he also penned outright genre fiction, including the phenomenal masterpiece of the form that was Brood of the Witch-Queen.

Wulfheim was published towards the end of Rohmer's life, under yet another pseudonym, this time as Michael Furey. To my knowledge this is the only time Rohmer used this name and I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps he wanted the work to not be tinged with expectations his name may provide, as it probably is a completely different book from what his readers would expect ?

Either way, this is a work of his that has, quite frankly, garnered very little attention. I do not, however, believe that to be justified, as Wulfheim is a fine work indeed.

Set in an unspecified period of time not quite modern but no longer renaissance or Medieval either, it follows the Monk Hilarius, formerly Otto of Wulfheim, who ran off to a monastery for very personal and very troubling reasons. He returns home to tell his father the Count of Wulfheim why he did so, especially given that this way the Wulfheim name passes and the Domain falls to the Church on Otto's death. When he arrives in the Domain where he is virtually a stranger, he meets not only his father and sister Fragia, but also Fragia's best friend Loe, her parents, Loe's almost-fiancé and the resident no-bullshit-taker, Dr. Oberon. Along the way he finds that people in the Domain shun him, he feels an evil presence about, discovers the ruins of an Abbey that burned to the ground as well as discovering two rogues digging up the heart of Caesar Wulfheim, the last Abbot who had been burned at the stake for devil worship.

The story focuses on the interactions between the people in the oppressive atmosphere of Wulfheim Castle that is, in the truest sense of the word, Gothic, without having any of the usual pretensions that happen when an author tries to do this idea straight in modern-ish times. The people at the Castle are slowly revealed to be suffering various stages of depravity and erotic mania. Loe's father the General can't help but try and make the light-as-a-feather Castle Maid and her mother is purposefully blocking Loe's engagement simply because Loe's chosen husband refused to sleep with said mother. Meanwhile the true nature of Otto's mania is revealed to us, and it is perhaps only slightly less interesting because the novel very bluntly hints that the half-sister he can't but think of isn't actually his sister. I will, however, commend Rohmer on having this revelation only come after it's too late for it to mean anything beyond making Otto feel better about himself.

In the background of all this is the creeping aura of some ancient evil, culminating in the post-mortem possession of Fragia's body by another, long departed soul. And while the few reviewers out there seemed to suggest the story up until this point was gearing up for literal lycanthropy, what we get and how we get there isn't bad at all, especially since the atmosphere is quite strong throughout.

Now, the most sure-fire way to drag a book down and make it tedious is to have a character who likes to wax philosophical. In Visiak's Medusa, whenever Huxtable got into his habbit of speaking in saccharine analogies and long winded spiritual diatribes, it made the already floundering book flounder even more vehemently. This book, however, is the rare exception to the rule. The character of Dr. Oberon is by far the most engaging member of the book's cast. He is snarky, he likes to say seemingly irreverent or intentionally provocative things, likes to be sarcastic to the point where one imagines him rolling his eyes visibly, and does, as a rule, not take anyone's crap and just gets right on to the point that they are either not seeing or trying not to see. This, along with the narrator's own tone, hovering between sarcasm and sardonics, makes for an interesting reading, and generally does not spare anyone.

If I am to lay any criticism against this book, it is that the possession itself is of rather brief duration, cut short by the dramatic and very ironic denoument. Other than that, this is a fine work that I fully believe is worthy of the Rohmer name.

Wednesday 7 February 2018

Medusa (1929) by E. H. Visiak



Edward Harold Physick, pacifist, author and life long admirer of Milton is better known under his pseudonym of E. H. Visiak. However, one assumes that most people know Visiak not from any perusal of his work per se, but from reading about other people talking about how they perused his work.

For, despite being an oft cited and oft repeated name in various biographies, essays and studies of the Weird and Fantastic in fiction, Visiak shares the fate of H. R. Wakefield, in that his actual books are no easily accessible to the public, beyond maybe a snippet that gets released in anthologies ad nauseam. Visiak, who apparently only wrote the few occasional scattered tales that never even found an anthology to this day, does not even have that luxury.

Medusa is often cited as a masterpiece of the form. Indeed, Wagner puts it on his list of 33 best Horror novels, though given the man put something as flawed and mishandled as The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck on the same list means that is in and of itself no great honour. Indeed, if one is to compare Medusa to anything, it should be Visiak's own The Haunted Island (1910), his first novel.

That story, while occasionally containing anecdotes that distract from the tale, is also a tale of a youth who escapes England on board a ship following his own entanglement with the law. But where in Island Visiak manages to keep the theme going strong and only bungles the ending (by having the 17th century mad scientist bent on blowing up England just sort of give up on his evil schemes, because), Medusa is sadly an instance where an impressive near-mid end or culmination of the story is bogged down by a dronning middle.

The beginning of the novel is fine, with the main character going through many unfortunate events and tragedies in his young life that, spaced as they are during a period of many years, allow one to experience their atmosphere in quick succession, giving one false hope that the entire novel would be written in this fashion. Sadly, the middle part, where Will, the main character, joins Huxtables sea expedition to find his son, is the longest and most drawn out. Visiak finds it necessary to encumber his readers with many unnecessary details about the various stops the ship makes along the way and of the mundane sights and sounds one gets to see in the harbour. When the novel starts with Wil killing his grandfather and then beating a bully to death, one can't help but hope for something more exciting than spending several pages talking about a port town and how the shipyard has a crane.

The worst part of this section are the occasional moments where Will's benefactor Mr. Huxtable attempts to imprint some bogus philosophical claptrap onto his protegé. These are dull and tedious and simply stretch out the book until something mildly interesting happens again.

The appearance of a strange merman-like creature on board is not given enough attention and is treated more like a curiosity, and the only way Visiak thought to be able to introduce the lore that is given as explanation behind everything going on is delivered in a droning tone going on about extra sensory drivel that honestly doesn't rise above random, hackneyed digressions on such themes from writers who have no business holding a pen. The climax itself is startling, yes, but it's not quite enough to balance out the tedious journey there, especially given how short it is.

The ending itself is abrupt and feels like a concluding statement is missing, the story simply stopping. It's sad that the novels best parts are so weighed down by the travelogue portion of the story, so tedious the author finds it necessary to excuse himself for his own sluggishness at points. If that were cut down, maybe this novel could be an actual living classic and not only called such by essayists who feel it is their moral obligation to follow the Authorities. Maybe then one could obtain the English language edition of the book for less than 65 Pounds, which, had I paid as much and not simply gotten the dirt cheap German translation, I would definitely not feel a worthwhile price.