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Reality with a twist

Book critic Scott Connors looks at Charles Stross’s return to Lovecraftian mathematics, Victor Rousseau’s classic WEIRD TALES stories of a psychic detective, and Ellen Datlow & Co.’s latest installment of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

THE JENNIFER MORGUE
by Charles Stross
(Golden Gryphon Press, $25.95)

The idea of a meta-fiction that takes over reality is explored in The Jennifer Morgue, Hugo winner Charles Stross’ sequel to 2004’s The Atrocity Archives. That entertaining fusion of Lovecraft and tradecraft described a branch of British intelligence called the Laundry that cleaned up after certain complex mathematical formulas were accidentally solved by unsuspecting supergeeks that opened portals into other realities inhabited by Lovecraft’s creatures. Bob Howard, the hacker-hero of the earlier book, returns to prevent a billionaire from using a CIA deep sea exploration platform built by Howard Hughes to raise up a Russian sub that contains a device allowing communication with the dead. Unfortunately, his efforts may awaken Cthulhu and Company, which the British and American governments understandably consider to be a Bad Thing. The billionaire is employing a geas that renders him immune to everybody except a certain fictional British spy with a license to kill, so Bob finds himself teemed with an American female agent whose family hails from Innsmouth (think The Squid Who Loved Me), thinking that he was being shoe-horned into the James Bond archetype. Stross manages to make Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones seem less of a menace than accountants, and packs enough British eccentrics into his story to satisfy any fan of British comedy.

THE SURGEON OF SOULS
by Victor Rousseau
(spectrelibrary *at* gmail.com, $40)

Victor Rousseau (1879-1960) was one of those colorful characters whose fertile imaginations supplied Weird Tales and other pulp magazines with a seemingly endless stream of tales of varying degrees of competency. A British journalist who served during the Boer War in an irregular cavalry unit like that depicted in the Australian film Breaker Morant, he later emigrated to the United States and became an editor for Harper’s Weekly. Rousseau was best known for an early proto-science fiction novel, The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917), but he also contributed a series of stories about a psychic detective named Ivan Brodsky to this magazine; eleven such tales appeared between September 1926 and July 1927. These have long been regarded as his “last hurrah” of quality fictioneering, since the 1930s saw him falling more and more into the formula trap as he became a staple of the “spicy” and “weird menace” pulps. Now Morgan Wallace’s Spectre Library has collected the tales of The Surgeon of Souls, as Dr. Brodsky was styled, in an attractive hardcover limited to a mere 200 copies. Genre historian Mike Ashley provides an informative introduction to the volume in which we learn that the Brodsky stories were in fact written around 1909, and are probably among Rousseau’s first efforts in the genre. It also made them contemporaneous with Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence stories, which were published in the United States the same year. Like Blackwood, Rousseau was a believer in the occult, spiritualism to be precise, and like Blackwood’s character Brodsky specializes in cases where the patient is afflicted with various spiritual ailments. This was a time when psychiatry was perceived as being somewhat akin to magic, something that becomes readily apparent if one has ever read much of C. G. Jung’s writings, but Brodsky’s portraits of people caught up in despair and confusion read like case studies. The problem with these and all psychic detective stories is that a detective story by definition indicates that a problem will be resolved at the end. That, combined with the writer’s evident belief that what he describes is a real possibility, and the stories lose much of the sense of awe and the numinous that weird tales evoke at their best. Nonetheless, these are highly competent examples of the type of story that this magazine published during its period of greatest financial success.

THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR
edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin J. Grant
(St. Martin’s Press, $35)

Any collection that styles itself as a “best of” anything naturally raises questions as to the general taste and standards of the editors. To put it another way, this is a perfect example of the old adage that you can always measure the intelligence of another person by the degree to which their opinions happen to agree with yours. I am happy to report that the 2006 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the nineteenth such collection, has been edited by geniuses. While I had not read every selection previously, a substantial number of stories that I had penciled in for my own list show u p in this collection, among them tales by Joe Hill, Reggie Oliver, Kim Newman, Mark Samuels, China Miéville, Howard Waldrop, and Jack Cady. Glen Hirshberg’s story “American Morons” is included, as is Barbara Roden‘s wonderful “Northwest Passage,” a tale of Fortean mystery in the Pacific Northwest that evokes both Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” without being in any way derivative of either. A valuable feature of this annual is the inclusion of surveys of the year in fantasy and horror, with coverage extended to include films and television, music, anime and manga. Horror and fantasy have become so widely published, with stories and poems often climbing over the ghetto wall and insinuating themselves into unsuspecting “mainstream” literary magazines, that it is almost impossible for any one person to stay on top of everything, but editors Datlow, Link and Grant provide an excellent selection of much of the best of the year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.