Scott R Jones
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“Fresh Out of Mercy”: The Catastrophic Horror of Nick Mamatas
010 years ago
I don’t recall how I first encountered the writing of Nick Mamatas. I know it happened in 2007, a year that saw me greyed out and dull from a dead-end managerial job. It pleases me to think I may have been at work when it all went down. At work entailed surfing the internet for anything to cut the boredom, which meant vainly hoping that some intersection of my interests would draw from the electronic undermind a gem. A rare enough occurrence, but it happens. And this time it did.
Mamatas had released his Lovecraftian/Beat Generation mashup novel Move Under Ground online that year (under a Creative Commons licence, it had previously seen print in 2004 through Night Shade Books); a random search had pulled up the PDF for me. It didn’t even take me one chapter for the hook to set in my jaw: I had only recently completed a giant Kerouac kick, bottoming out with the bleak apocalypticism of Big Sur, and Move Under Ground tickled that over-sensitized first thought best thought spot mightily. I consumed it in hours, and read it again the next day. From the start of the novel, I could tell that Mamatas got Lovecraft. Not the beasties and the blasphemous books and the bumpf of HPL (though he gets those too), but the deeper themes, the sublime terror of Lovecraft that manifested not so much in the Old Gentleman’s actual writing, but in the thoughts that come to the mind after you read him.
Mamatas is like that, or at least he was in Move Under Ground, which had within its early chapters a scene wherein Kerouac bests a shoggoth by delivering a “soul kiss”, rapidly followed by harrowing imagery of a R’lyeh not rising from some far-off coordinate in the Pacific, but just off the coast of Northern California, calling to its shifting bulk the dead, soulless drones of McCarthy’s America in a steady stream of pale bloated bodies and the accumulated garbage of a young Capitalism. This was a psychic R’lyeh, a principle of consuming madness made real.
Now, the heart of what makes Lovecraft interesting is dead simple, and yet it can be a hard target to hit: the world seems to be a certain way, and then the Way It Actually Is is revealed. TO KNOW is the worst curse in the Lovecraftian universe. Mamatas gets this. His aim is truer than most.
Well, that was then. That was Move Under Ground, at least. And now? Innsmouth Free Press is releasing the collected Lovecraftian fiction of Nick Mamatas, THE NICKRONOMICON. Sadly, the scuttlebutt associated with this book is that this is it, folks, that’s all he wrote. There won’t be any more Lovecraftian work coming from Mamatas after this. Which is a damn shame, especially considering the new novella that was written specifically for the collection, On the Occasion of My Retirement. But we’ll get to that.
Mamatas is fond of the catastrophe, and that fondness is here displayed to great effect. What I mean by catastrophe is more akin to the mathematical theory than any disaster. What I mean by it is this: in Lovecraft’s fiction, the protagonists are in most cases already halfway into the world that will soon be fully revealed to them, either by virtue of their heritage or character or education. They are solitary scholars, recluses and bookworms, half-mad cultists. When the horrors come, as they must, the punch has been telegraphed almost from the first paragraph. Hence the infamous last paragraph of ultimate horror typeset in italics! in a good number of Lovecraft’s stories.
Not so with the stories here. Among the tone poems (And Then, And Then, And Then…), lovingly researched pieces of ephemera (Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights), and deft examinations of Lovecraft the Man and Collection of Awful Foibles (Jitterbuggin’, The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft) are some of the best tales in the genre, by anyone, and they are almost all catastrophic.
There is Wuji, in which a taiji student in late 60s Oakland undertakes a course of unusual martial training in order to help defend his neighbourhood in the middle of a turf war. It’s tricky to speak of the catastrophe in Nick’s stories without wandering into spoiler territory, but I will in this case and only as an example. There is a moment towards the end of Wuji where the narrator reveals itself to the reader. It’s a moment that can turn the entire narrative on its head, an aha! moment of cursed Knowledge. When it happens, it’s jarring, fantastic, and one of the best reasons to read Mamatas, that catastrophic moment when it all careens away to the left. In Wuji, the narrator simply takes over at the critical point: he’s been chatty and conversational throughout (Mamatas is a dab hand at dialogue) and so when the shift to first person happens, it’s smooth. (Well, maybe a spoiler of the narrator’s identity isn’t actually needed, now that I think of it. Go read it yourself!)
The catastrophe hits again in Real People Slash (a brutally funny account of one Socialist’s Lovecraftian enlightenment at the pincers of the Mi-Go), and in Dead Media (again with those Fungi from Yuggoth! but Mamatas has thought these beasties through and delivers a cosmic uppercut in the last paragraphs that’s delightful), and again in And Other Horrors (with Don Webb – a supremely twisty tale of mind-swapping and the implications of the Yith). Orrin Grey, in his clever Introduction to The Nickronomicom, notes that Mamatas has a thing for Lovecraft’s brain-raping critters and isn’t shy about using their own dread tactics, drastically moving perceptions around, both in his characters and in his readers. These shifts are true catastrophes, there’s no preparing for it, he does not telegraph his punches: one moment you’re in a squatter’s riot in Queens and the next you’re instantly freezing to death on the surface of dark Yuggoth. Mamatas is merciless.
It’s a mercilessness that comes to perfect fruition in the final novella here, On the Occasion of My Retirement. Mamatas lets all the tropes come out to play – cursed statuary, antagonistic Miskatonic professors, mind-swapping that shouts out to The Thing on the Doorstep) – but he also throws cutting-edge nanotube tech (VANTABLACK! I admit it: I swooned), predatory sexuality, freaking Kafka, deconstructions of key sentences from Lovecraft’s pen, and a dizzying amount of academic-speak (my wife, who works in Ivory Towers, confirms for me its authenticity) into the mix. The effect is hallucinatory, and again, the catastrophe is there, waiting, when the identity of the narrator, their goals, the very nature of what you’ve been reading, even… shifts. It all shifts horribly. Welcome, Vertigo! Hello, Horror! Following this particular catastrophe, then, comes another joy of reading Mamatas: his skill with a great ending… “And now, administrators and administrated, acolytes and initiated, students and drop-outs, hangers-on and soon-to-be-hanged, my prefatory remarks are over and my keynote lecture shall begin. First slide, please.”
FIRST SLIDE, PLEASE. Every shift and catastrophe experienced through On the Occasion of My Retirement leads to that final sentence, which is itself a fresh catastrophe, another profound shift that waits on the other side of that last period. Which is what Lovecraft, at his best, was all about: inducing thought, triggering fear through the correlating of contents. The real italics come after you put down the book.
Nick Mamatas gets it. And Innsmouth Free Press gets Mamatas. They’ve put together a marvellous book in The Nickronomicon: beautifully set, graced with interior artwork by GMB Chomichuk (pages from a book that don’t look like cheap Simonomicon rip-offs) and a cover by Oliver Wetter. If you enjoy Lovecraft even a little, enough to have grown tired of the rehashed Mythos slurry that passes for “weird fiction” these days, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of The Nickronomicon in your hands, and into the hands of your friends. Highly recommended.
THE NICKRONOMICON
Nick Mamatas
ISBN: 978-1-927990-08-7
Available for pre-order now from Innsmouth Free Press
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Scott R Jones is the author of the short story collections Soft from All the Blood and The Ecdysiasts, as well as the non-fiction When the Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality. His poetry and prose have appeared in Innsmouth Magazine, Cthulhu Haiku II, Broken City Mag, and upcoming in both Summer of Lovecraft and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.
“What’s the Frequency, Lovecraft?”: the Vibrational Horror of ‘YellowBrickRoad’ and ‘Banshee Chapter’
110 years ago
by Scott R Jones
in Reviews
I’m currently reading through the slush pile for RESONATOR: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond, up to my neck in stories of dread machines that tweak human perception just enough to allow other dimensions to be experienced. I mention this only to give you a sense of where my mind is at these days. Probably editing this book has tweaked me somewhat towards seeing what I’ve come to call “frequency” or “vibrational” horror in two recent movies that could, without too much conceptual massage, be seen as the grandchildren of Lovecraft’s tale From Beyond. The films in question are YellowBrickRoad (2010) and Banshee Chapter (2013), and both have as their central horror not physical monsters from this (or any other) world, monsters encountered by entering a physical space, but a kind of creeping psychedelic paranoia surrounding the idea that the monsters of other planes, coterminous with ours, are always here, in our space, waiting for us to see them. We need only adjust the frequency, and there they are, right over our shoulder, or already in our heads. Indeed, the second film I’ll be talking about, Banshee Chapter, makes specific in-media reference to Lovecraft’s story. Both films are highly effective mash-ups of traditional narrative and found-footage techniques.
YellowBrickRoad (2010)
written and directed by Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton
starring Clark and Cassidy Freeman, Anessa Ramsey, Laura Heisler
Not unlike its precursor, The Blair Witch Project, much of the initial horror in YellowBrickRoad arises from the fear of losing oneself in a wild place: being alone, and hurt, in the woods, with people you have learned not to trust. Anyone who has spent an unwanted emergency night in the forest will feel this film on that level. (I have, and did.) The plot: an obsessed filmmaker and his wife (and a standard-issue crew of photographers, cartographers, wilderness guides, a psychologist, an intern, and one townie keen to join the expedition for reasons of her own) set out to solve a 70-year old mystery that had been covered up by the military and recently declassified. In 1940, the population of an entire New Hampshire town dressed in their best duds and started a walk along a trail that led into the northern woods. Most vanished from the face of the earth, others were found horribly mutilated, and one resident managed to return, but died insane and rambling about music that only he could hear.
It’s this aspect to the story that moves YellowBrickRoad into “frequency horror” for me: the evil the film crew encounters on the trail is intangible, ever-present but non-local, and insidious. When, three days into their expedition, the crew begins to hear old-timey dance hall music, it comes from everywhere, and nowhere. The intern reports that her GPS is on the fritz: the device reports them as being in Guam in the morning, Paris by noon, Barcelona by evening. Similarly, the cartographers (a brother and sister team) begin to experience difficulty keeping their coordinates coordinated: the numbers work going up the trail, but are radically skewed on the return. “The land is like liquid,” the brother states.
Not only the land, but also time and their own internal psychic experiences become malleable. Personality flaws and grudges are blown into high relief, and under the influence of the music, cracks begin to appear in their minds. Memories are no longer reliable or even accessible, simple cognitive tasks (as tracked by the team psychologist) become increasingly difficult, frustration and anger and confusion build and build until someone snaps and the killings begin.
But even that is not the central horror. For a lesser flick, it might be. Kill-crazy madman with a machete stalking innocents through the bush is a standard trope. But in YellowBrickRoad, that madman, and all of his companions, know that something is terribly wrong. And by the time they get him secured and are preparing to save themselves, it is already too late. Whatever it is that is affecting them on the trail (cosmic radiation? geomagnetic fluctuations? ghosts of the dead townspeople? God? It is never explained, which is wonderful, a good nod to Lovecraft, and to the scriptwriters credit) turns up the volume and they are plunged into as disruptive and terrifying an alteration of reality as I have ever witnessed on screen.
Essentially, the terror of YellowBrickRoad is auditory in nature. Sound is the evil thing in the woods: monstrously loud, deafening, shake-you-to-your-knees, make-your-ears-bleed sound. It leaves no room in their heads for anything other than the desire to escape that hellish noise. And it is hellish: a thrumming, discordant, spiking roar that on a decent sound system or coming through good headphones will make you wince and feel sick with vertigo. (Big kudos to the sound design people on this film.) Nothing can stand against this aural assault, which seems malevolent and calculating. Imagine the BWAAAAAM noise from the film Inception, jacked-up on steroids and angel dust, just waiting for you to almost get your bearings before jumping you from behind. It’s like that. To borrow from another Lovecraftian narrative, imagine the Colour Out of Space as a sonic entity. Sanity and reason, relationships and ethics, everything breaks and dissolves beneath it. The group splits, and splits again. The madman breaks free and escapes, and begins to hunt them all down. The ones he can’t catch suicide by various gruesome methods. It all ends in awful, destructive noise and madness and death.
Now, there is a meta- aspect to the film as well, one that plays into the ending, which many have found disappointing. The title is meant as a clue: it is said that the original townsfolk, disillusioned by the Second Great War and wishing to escape into the fantasy of the films they watched religiously in the towns theatre (The Wizard of Oz being a favourite) were called into the northern woods by the evil force that resides there. In one of the opening scenes, the declassified coordinates for the mysterious trailhead take the confused team to that very same theatre, where they meet the townie girl who leads them to the actual trailhead and accompanies them up the trail. By the end, we’re left with the team’s leader, the filmmaker, following his obsession to the “end of the trail” and abandoning everything and everyone he ever valued along the way, only to find himself walking into that same theatre again, where he is presented with a horrific Silver Screen vision of the end of all things. It’s a weird Ouroborous of an off-note, and as mentioned, one that many viewers of the film found unsatisfactory, but at the end of the day I think what we’re looking at in the final scenes of YellowBrickRoad is the internal experience of a man finally losing everything, including himself, to utter horror.
Banshee Chapter (2013)
directed by Blair Erickson
starring Ted Levine, Katia Winter, and Michael McMillian
The horror of Banshee Chapter is less vague in its origins, and targets its victims more specifically. In the film, beings from another dimension have influenced military scientists to synthesize a version of DMT (which, in case you don’t know, is in its normal state already the most powerful psychedelic known to man, and endogenously produced in trace amounts by our pineal glands), which is then used in covert MKUltra-style research, administered to unsuspecting hippies and radicals and the like, with disastrous effects. A modern researcher into these experiments manages to procure a sample of the drug, takes it, and disappears, leaving only disturbing footage of his drug trip and notes toward a book on the subject, notes that reference mysterious “numbers stations” and broadcast relays in the desert. Not long after his disappearance, a journalist friend of his, obsessed with learning what’s happened to him, begins to put the pieces together.
Her journey takes her to his so-called “friends in Colorado” who provided him with the experimental drug. The second act takes place in the house of a Hunter S. Thompson-esque character (played with scenery chewing gusto by Ted Levine) and if you’ve ever been so unfortunate as to experience chemically altered states in strange environments with hostile people, then these scenes will certainly resonate with you. (I have, and it did.) The paranoia ramps up considerably here, with double-crossings and betrayals and general drug-induced mind-fuckery weirdness, until the agenda of the other-dimensional beings becomes apparent: the DMT acts as a radio receiver for the beings from beyond, who then enter this reality and wear humans like suits. Again, the evil comes to us through a tweak in our perceptions, a change in the frequency of our being.
Much as with the creatures in Lovecraft’s From Beyond, seeing these beings means they can see you, and the third terrifying act is a mad and ultimately futile scramble in the desert to locate the secret government broadcasting station that allows the beings access to our world. The Thompson character even goes so far as to drop a complete synopsis of From Beyond on the journalist before a pivotal scene, which almost seems too meta to work, but it does, somehow. Banshee Chapter fulfils the early promise of Lovecraft’s story, and in the process treads some interesting ground rarely seen in current horror. Like YellowBrickRoad, there’s no way to actually escape this evil, since it is vibrational in nature… if you’ve ever been spooked by the idea that radio waves are in fact passing through you right now, loaded with music and information and god knows what else, then this film understands you. These things are everywhere, they are at your elbow even now… like the nameless protagonist in From Beyond, once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them. “It would help my shaky nerves if I could dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me.”
Personally, I’d like to see more treatments of this theme, as I think it’s a really effective way to “transmit” horror to the viewer. What are your favourite “frequency horror” films? Enjoy the trailers for YellowBrickRoad and Banshee Chapter below, leave your thoughts in the comments, and if you’re feeling suitably inspired, consider submitting a story to our RESONATOR: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond anthology!
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Scott R Jones is the author of the short story collections Soft from All the Blood and The Ecdysiasts, as well as the non-fiction When the Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality. His poetry and prose have appeared in Innsmouth Magazine, Cthulhu Haiku II, Broken City Mag, and upcoming in both Summer of Lovecraft and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.
What’s In YOUR Resonator?
010 years ago
by Scott R Jones
in Submissions
We’re down to that just-under-the-wire time for getting in a submission to the latest anthology from Martian Migraine Press, RESONATOR: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond. The open subs call ends November 15 2014, a little less than two months from now. As editor of the book, I’m very pleased to report that the slush pile is quite healthy! Robust, even, with plenty of great stories from a wide range of authors (some very well known, some new, all amazing) with unique styles and interpretations of Lovecraft’s seminal story, From Beyond, and the featured bizarre “resonator” technology first pioneered by the megalomaniac Crawford Tillinghast. All that being said, there are still some things we would love to see appear in this book, so take the following bulleted list as inspiration and get writing!
- Don’t just make your piece about squishy monsters from beyond. In the original story, Lovecraft hinted at whole worlds available to the awakened pineal gland of those who fell beneath the Resonator’s malign, enlightening influence! The reader is given glimpses of strange architecture, unthinkable landscapes, uncanny angles. What’s the weather like over there? Sure, it’s a dimension of squishy monsters… but what other denizens exist in the beyond? Are there intricacies to the ecosystem that we haven’t been made aware of?
- And speaking of denizens, and architecture, might it be possible that sentient beings exist in the beyond? Would they have certain arcane technologies of their own? What books do they read? Is there a “beyond” version of the Necronomicon? Are there versions of Alhazred there, and what blasphemies would they get up to? Or scientists, scholars? Perhaps they have ways of coming here? And if so, would we notice them when they do? What are their goals in accessing our plane of existence?
- Back to monsters: falling prey to an extra-dimensional mollusc is bad, natch… but what other drives might these creatures have? Would they have other needs? To get all scriptural on you, consider: a mollusc cannot live on warm flesh alone (well, maybe they can!) and perhaps they might have other ways and means of interacting with humans when they encounter them. Is possession possible? Would there be benefits to hooking-up with a mollusc?
- Indeed, what are the psychic costs of going beyond and surviving the experience? For that matter, what would the mental and spiritual pay-off be? People don’t just build and fire up a Resonator for shits and giggles! (Although, if you can give us a story about casual Resonator use ¬– talk about your “gateway drug” – we’d be stoked!) Are there physical alterations that occur once the body is pushed into other realms? We’re thinking here, obviously, of that nasty pineal stalk waving around like a perverted little worm in Stewart Gordon’s film version of the story…
I like big glands, and I cannot lie!
… but what other types of mutation or powers might occur or be granted by going beyond? Would Resonator use affect how a person thought, or moved, or had sex? Could the molecular structure of a person be changed? Might a sting from a beyond-jellyfish alter your genes?
- Technology! We want to see classic Resonators, absolutely… but we’re also interested in new machines. How big is your Resonator? Lab or attic or cavern-sized? Bigger? Lots bigger? Or miniaturized? A pocket-Resonator? Smaller than that? Besides opening up human perception to alternate realities, what else might a Resonator be good for? Are there medical applications? The classic Resonator affects the pineal gland, so clearly there’s fun brain-science avenues to explore, but might there be other applications? What would the military do with Resonator tech? Could it be weaponized and what would such a weapon look like? What would Bill Gates (or someone Bill Gates-ish) do with it? My god! Imagine downloading a Resonator App from the Google Play store!
- Don’t feel limited to a certain period in history, either. (Yes, the 1920s-30s, looking in your direction.) Break away from HPLs standard model and timeframes: we want to see Resonators and their mad users in every era.
- Finally, the thing that I, personally, as editor, would love to see: MORE FEMALE AUTHORS. And more female perspectives. More LGBQT perspectives. The male beast (and I’m one of them, so I know whereof I speak) tends to dominate in tales of dark magic and strange tech and this is something I’d love to at least tweak towards the double-X end of the spectrum, if not to a great degree, at least a bit. So far, the percentage of female authors in the submissions is hovering round 2%. It may be too late in the game to change this, what with the deadline looming as it is, but I’d love to try. So, if you’re a lady who writes (or know one… or nine!), please please consider sending us your work.
Whatever your persuasion (as a writer, a human being, a non-human being) we’d love to read what you’ve got. If it’s good, we’d love to publish it in RESONATOR.
Submission guidelines and payment details are here.
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Scott R Jones is the author of the short story collections Soft from All the Blood and The Ecdysiasts, as well as the non-fiction When the Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality. His poetry and prose have appeared in Innsmouth Magazine, Cthulhu Haiku II, Broken City Mag, and upcoming in both Summer of Lovecraft and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.
