Cosmic Horror Lineup
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher. A horror novel set in modern-day smalltown America, though I can best sum it up with an equation: House of Leaves + Algernon Blackwood's The Willows + a little dash of Annihilation = this book.
Kara, a thirty-something graphic designer in the midst of an overtly friendly but low-key depressing divorce and with few job prospects, decides to move in with her uncle and help him run his small and extremely weird museum, the 'Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities and Taxidermy'. Which is basically just a house stuffed full of inexplicable clutter, from a giant Bigfoot statue to a "genuine" Feejee mermaid to stuffed mice dressed in tiny armor to a collection of thimbles of the world. All goes well enough until a small hole appears in one of the walls. In an attempt to patch it, Kara and her new friend Simon, the gay barista from the coffeeshop next door, discover a mysterious hallway behind the drywall where there is definitely not enough room for a hallway, which leads to a world full of willow trees and things that shouldn't exist and multidimensional creatures that can do much, much worse things than merely eat you.
Kingfisher does an excellent job at evoking cosmic horror: the unknowable, the wrong side of reality, the just plain wrong. Which is fascinating, because now that I'm thinking of it, I can't really name many recent novels that go all in for cosmic horror, and none at all that manage to make it this scary. Because for as creepy as 'The Willows' is, its 1907 language is hard to sink into - at least for me it is. The Hollow Places very much does not have that problem. Kingfisher has done a wonderful job at taking the ideas from that story and making them entirely her own. She also is great at wringing pure terror out of some very innocuous places - an empty schoolbus, a taxidermied otter, a strangely labelled MRE.
So the horror here is A++. I can't quite say as much for the characters; both Kara and Simon felt a little flat to me, a little like fanfic cliches. But that's a very minor compliant for a book that I sped through and would highly recommend.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Now let's review my other cosmic horror read of the week!
The Fisherman by John Langan. Cosmic horror set in modern-day upstate New York. Also it's kind of a retelling of Moby Dick, if Ahab was an evil immortal wizard.
Abe ("Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe", goes the opening line) lost his wife to cancer after only two years of marriage; the method he discovers to get himself through the short-term grief and long-term loneliness is fishing ("Some years ago, never mind how many, I started to fish"). He shares this hobby with Dan, another young widower. As they spend their weekends and afternoons fishing the many streams and rivers scattered throughout the Catskill Mountains, they eventually hear of one with an unusual reputation: Dutchman's Creek. Dutchman's Creek flows out of a reservoir that covers an abandoned town, a town where once, in the 1850s, a man tried to raise his wife from the dead, and later, in 1907, another dead wife came back wrong. The connection between these two events seems to be a strangely ageless man, a man with knowledge beyond the human ken, a man called Der Fischer for the lack of any other name to give him. (“From hell’s heart," he shouts, when stymied of his catch, "I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”) He also - I know you will be shocked by this turn of events - tragically lost his wife and children centuries ago, and is determined to get them back. If Abe and Dan find Dutchman's Creek, unmarked on any map, will their wives also return, or will they fall through to another, more fundamental, dimension?
The Fisherman is related through layers of story: Abe addresses the reader in direct narration, telling us the local legend he heard from a diner cook, who recounts what he heard from a reverend, who's gathered information from a nearly senile widow. Langan does an excellent job at capturing the rhythm of oral stories, the little slips and twists of dialect that make it feel like you can actually hear Abe's voice. The writing throughout is really wonderful, full of vivid images and sensory details.
The horror here is very much of the cosmic sort: questions of mortality, glimpses at the immensity that lies behind our reality, creatures too big and too ancient for humans to comprehend. Which ends up playing surprisingly well with The Fisherman's other big theme, the horror of the ocean: humans with the flat gold eyes of fish, buildings standing empty below a mile of water, immense creatures half-glimpsed through dark water of an unknowable depth. Plus, you know, the straight-up gore of a fishhook lodged in flesh.
Overall, The Fisherman is more haunting than terrifying, though one image of jaws the size of skyscrapers reaching up out of the ocean will definitely stay with me. It's an excellent depiction of loss, and the choices people make because of it. (Though I did have a minor issue in that we've got a hell of a lot of men with dead wives, and remarkably few women dealing with their own grief. On the one hand, Langan's clearly got a motif. On the other hand, if only it wasn't such a cliche of a motif.) It's a gorgeous evocation of upstate New York, a place I've only visited once or twice but which I now really want to go hiking in (not much of a fisher, sorry). In short, it's a good book! I've been meaning to read it for ages and I'm very glad I did. This entry was originally posted at https://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/589361.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Kara, a thirty-something graphic designer in the midst of an overtly friendly but low-key depressing divorce and with few job prospects, decides to move in with her uncle and help him run his small and extremely weird museum, the 'Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities and Taxidermy'. Which is basically just a house stuffed full of inexplicable clutter, from a giant Bigfoot statue to a "genuine" Feejee mermaid to stuffed mice dressed in tiny armor to a collection of thimbles of the world. All goes well enough until a small hole appears in one of the walls. In an attempt to patch it, Kara and her new friend Simon, the gay barista from the coffeeshop next door, discover a mysterious hallway behind the drywall where there is definitely not enough room for a hallway, which leads to a world full of willow trees and things that shouldn't exist and multidimensional creatures that can do much, much worse things than merely eat you.
Kingfisher does an excellent job at evoking cosmic horror: the unknowable, the wrong side of reality, the just plain wrong. Which is fascinating, because now that I'm thinking of it, I can't really name many recent novels that go all in for cosmic horror, and none at all that manage to make it this scary. Because for as creepy as 'The Willows' is, its 1907 language is hard to sink into - at least for me it is. The Hollow Places very much does not have that problem. Kingfisher has done a wonderful job at taking the ideas from that story and making them entirely her own. She also is great at wringing pure terror out of some very innocuous places - an empty schoolbus, a taxidermied otter, a strangely labelled MRE.
So the horror here is A++. I can't quite say as much for the characters; both Kara and Simon felt a little flat to me, a little like fanfic cliches. But that's a very minor compliant for a book that I sped through and would highly recommend.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Now let's review my other cosmic horror read of the week!
The Fisherman by John Langan. Cosmic horror set in modern-day upstate New York. Also it's kind of a retelling of Moby Dick, if Ahab was an evil immortal wizard.
Abe ("Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe", goes the opening line) lost his wife to cancer after only two years of marriage; the method he discovers to get himself through the short-term grief and long-term loneliness is fishing ("Some years ago, never mind how many, I started to fish"). He shares this hobby with Dan, another young widower. As they spend their weekends and afternoons fishing the many streams and rivers scattered throughout the Catskill Mountains, they eventually hear of one with an unusual reputation: Dutchman's Creek. Dutchman's Creek flows out of a reservoir that covers an abandoned town, a town where once, in the 1850s, a man tried to raise his wife from the dead, and later, in 1907, another dead wife came back wrong. The connection between these two events seems to be a strangely ageless man, a man with knowledge beyond the human ken, a man called Der Fischer for the lack of any other name to give him. (“From hell’s heart," he shouts, when stymied of his catch, "I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”) He also - I know you will be shocked by this turn of events - tragically lost his wife and children centuries ago, and is determined to get them back. If Abe and Dan find Dutchman's Creek, unmarked on any map, will their wives also return, or will they fall through to another, more fundamental, dimension?
The Fisherman is related through layers of story: Abe addresses the reader in direct narration, telling us the local legend he heard from a diner cook, who recounts what he heard from a reverend, who's gathered information from a nearly senile widow. Langan does an excellent job at capturing the rhythm of oral stories, the little slips and twists of dialect that make it feel like you can actually hear Abe's voice. The writing throughout is really wonderful, full of vivid images and sensory details.
The horror here is very much of the cosmic sort: questions of mortality, glimpses at the immensity that lies behind our reality, creatures too big and too ancient for humans to comprehend. Which ends up playing surprisingly well with The Fisherman's other big theme, the horror of the ocean: humans with the flat gold eyes of fish, buildings standing empty below a mile of water, immense creatures half-glimpsed through dark water of an unknowable depth. Plus, you know, the straight-up gore of a fishhook lodged in flesh.
Overall, The Fisherman is more haunting than terrifying, though one image of jaws the size of skyscrapers reaching up out of the ocean will definitely stay with me. It's an excellent depiction of loss, and the choices people make because of it. (Though I did have a minor issue in that we've got a hell of a lot of men with dead wives, and remarkably few women dealing with their own grief. On the one hand, Langan's clearly got a motif. On the other hand, if only it wasn't such a cliche of a motif.) It's a gorgeous evocation of upstate New York, a place I've only visited once or twice but which I now really want to go hiking in (not much of a fisher, sorry). In short, it's a good book! I've been meaning to read it for ages and I'm very glad I did. This entry was originally posted at https://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/589361.html. Please comment there using OpenID.