Tag Archives: Dark Fantasy Horror

Escape from Yokai Land

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Escape from Yokai Land [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Charles Stross, related to the Laundry Files series. (For some reason there’s covers images for this floating around that say the title is “Escape from Puroland”.)

Stross Escape From Yokai Land

I only got around to reading this novella in 2023, despite my usual promptness in reading new installations in Stross’ Laundry Files series. It was published in 2021, and concerned events set in 2014, prior to The Delirium Brief. It was a sort of nostalgic reading experience for me to go back before the New Management and read one of Bob Howard’s adventures from those halcyon days when Case NIGHTMARE GREEN was merely terrifyingly imminent. This one hews far closer than most to the Ghostbusters paradigm of horror-comedy, even admitting as much in so many words (61).

In this tale, secret agent Bob is newly acceded to the responsibilities and powers of his recently-deceased mentor. He is dispatched to Japan to tie up some loose ends, and the results are typical: computational demonology meets eschatological kawaii-cum-kaiju, with a side order of scarily competent para-human local contact whom Bob is not attracted to because he is conscientiously married (though separated).

There was a little more general exposition on the Laundryverse than I needed, but considering that I basically read the whole book in two sittings, I can’t complain.

Hadon of Ancient Opar

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Hadon of Ancient Opar [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Philip Jose Farmer, illo Roy G Krenkel, with essays by Frank Brueckel and John Harwood.

Farmer Hadon of Ancient Opar

Hadon of Ancient Opar is a “prequel” to the Tarzan books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, if the term can be applied when the respective narratives are separated by a chronology of some twelve millennia! The story is set in and around the empire of Khokarsa, a civilization surrounding the interior seas of prehistoric Africa. 

During the events of Hadon, Khokarsa is on the cusp of potential change into a violent partriarchy from a matrifocal culture ruled by priestesses, with the eagle-headed goddess Kho being supplanted by the flaming god Resu. (The story thus bears interesting comparison to Aleister Crowley’s ancient Egyptian fantasy “Across the Gulf.”) Khokarsan religion involves a stunning frequency of blood sacrifice as a matter of routine, and the culture combines a high bronze-age level of technological development with totemistic, quasi-tribal social organization. 

The story begins with the youth Hadon going to compete in the great games of Khokarsa that are supposed to produce a suitor for the High Priestess of the empire. (Thus, the winner could become king.) Hadon encounters many obstacles to his ambitions, but remains a virtuous hero throughout the book. He is loyal to the old regime of Kho, and when a partisan of Resu proffers a paraphrase of Exodus 20:5, he characterizes it as “insanity” (159). There is a frank acceptance of sex in Khokarsan culture, but Hadon’s adventures here involve much more violence than sex.

Appendices to the book provide about twenty-five pages of maps and chronology, but they are largely superfluous, and they appear to have been the product of Farmer’s development of the Khokarsan context from the article “Heritage of the Flaming God, an Essay on the History of Opar and Its Relationship to Other Ancient Cultures” by Frank Brueckel and John Harwood in The Burroughs Bulletin. Roy Krenkel’s dozen or so illustrations for Hadon are ink renderings in a loose style, that were probably dynamic and exciting in the originals, but mostly come across as muddy and incoherent in their reproductions here. 

The most important observation I can offer to potential readers of this book is that it is not a stand-alone novel. It ends with a cliffhanger, and the sequel Flight to Opar takes up at the very instant that Hadon ends. Farmer repeatedly implies that he is kicking off a long series of books with Hadon, but Flight was the only other Khokarsa/Opar book to be published during his lifetime. It appears that Christopher Paul Carey has subsequently brought further materials into print, posthumously developed from Farmer’s MSS.

Flight from Nevèrÿon

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Flight from Nevèrÿon [Amazon, Publisher, Local Library] by Samuel R Delany, part of the Return to Nevèrÿon series.

Delany Flight from Neveryon

The third volume of Delany’s Nevèrÿon stories was supposed to be his last, although there is a fourth book in the trilogy. Flight from Nevèrÿon has three numbered sections, the third of which consists of two appendices and makes up half the book.

I read and enjoyed the putative body text of “The Tale of Fog and Granite” and “The Mummer’s Tale,” both of which built on the the characters and settings of Delany’s previous stories, within the established fictional context of the antediluvian realm of Nevèrÿon, while carrying forward a project of postmodern theorizing embedded in the narratives.

The acme of the book, though, and perhaps of the whole series, was longest piece, “Appendix A: The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, or, Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part Five.” This part features a complete Nevèrÿon story centered around an AIDS-like plague and the social responses it provokes. Interleaved with that story are several other registers of writing, including lightly fictionalized anecdotes from Delany’s own life, a running account of his gay junky acquaintance “Joey,” tail-devouring criticism of the book in hand by the imaginary academic S. L. Kermit, and a closing note about the public health facts of AIDS as they were understood at the time of writing in mid-1984.

In addition to the intended reflections of 1980s New York in Nevèrÿon, Appendix A brings up occasional irruptions of Nevèrÿon in 1980s New York. But my favorite passage of “Plagues and Carnivals” was section 9.6, detailing relations between the Mummer and the Master of the academy. In these seven pages (261-7) Delany tacitly supplies an interpretive frame for the canon of Classical Greek philosophy from Heraclitus through Plato. It’s an impressive feat and delightful for the informed reader.

“Clearly the Nevèrÿon series is a model of late twentieth-century (mostly urban) America. The question is, of course: What kind of model is it?” (377) The far shorter Appendix B collapses into the more “factual” and explicatory matter of the author’s reflections on the three volumes, answers to readers about the nature of the “modular calculus,” citation of sources and inspirations, theory of semiotics/semiology grounding Delany’s writing, and a list of Delany’s corrections to the three books then in print–when he thought that the work was “complete.”

Quantum of Nightmares

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Quantum of Nightmares [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Charles Stross, book 11 of the Laundry Files series.

Stross Quantum of Nightmares

“Eve wasn’t the big sis he’d grown up with, back when they were a perfectly normal family with a dad who was an oneiromancer and a mum who wrote code that tore holes in reality.” (60)

Quantum of Nightmares is the second of the Tales of the New Management set in the superpowers-and-sorcery 21st-century dystopia built in the Cthulhvian espionage series The Laundry Files. It picks up very directly from the conclusion of Dead Lies Dreaming. Where the first New Management book used Peter Pan as a key point of reference for both the Lost Boys supervillain crew and thief-taker Wendy Deere, this sequel similarly exploits Mary Poppins. I think the title’s metrical mirroring of “Spoonful of Sugar” is no coincidence.

The satirical elements of the book are as searing as those of any of its predecessors, and they center on “innovative” human resources and supply chain techniques at a FlavrsMart supermarket branch. Within the plot of the story, the commercial dehumanization is unsurprisingly not unrelated to an eldritch cult. (The motivation for parallel, if less extreme, phenomena in the “real” world remains a frustrating enigma. Probably an eldritch cult.)

These books have many and diverse dramatis personae, and the third-person narration shifts among them as viewpoint characters often and rapidly. After two volumes, though, and accounting for the foreshadowing in the latter, the larger plot hangs on Eve Starkey, corporate climber and hereditary sorceress.

The return to the characters and situations of the previous book helped both of them for me as a reader. While they don’t (yet?) have the heft of the old Laundry story arcs, the Starkey antics under the regime of the Black Pharaoh have now acquired some real coherence.

Tales of Nevèrÿon

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Tales of Nevèrÿon [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Samuel R Delany, book 1 of the Return to Nevèrÿon series.

Delany Tales of Nevèrÿon

At first glance, the title and table of contents for this book make it look like a set of disparate fantasy stories in a shared setting, but it is in fact an integrated novel. Each “Tale of” people and doings in Nevèrÿon ends up linked to the others on multiple levels, and all of them take place over roughly a single generation.

This fantasy is imaginative, but far less “fantastic” than most. There are no supernatural elements, no storybook giants or fairies.* If Tolkien’s Middle Earth was a step closer to our world than Dunsany’s Pegāna, Delany’s Nevèrÿon is a considerable stroll in our direction. I was a little puzzled by the characterization of this book in the appended note on the author as “sword and sorcery,” since there is certainly no sorcery in it at all. But on reflection, it does represent a new turn for the sort of fabulous prehistory supplied by Robert E. Howard’s seminal stories of that genre, and I can easily imagine that Delany was responding to them (among other fictions and factualities) when writing Nevèrÿon.

The appendix (“Some Informal Remarks on the Intermodal Calculus, Part Three,” alluding to the appendices of his prior science fiction novel Triton) summarizes some fictional scholarship to place Nevèrÿon in our actual (pre-)history, via the study of the apocryphal Culhar’ Text. The effect of this retroactive framing–in combination with the philosophical motifs of the main text–is positively vertiginous.

The epigrams for the individual tales are drawn from post-structuralist philosophy, while the book as a whole is paradoxically concerned with the imagined origins of cultural systems: language, money, gender roles, slavery, politics, and so on. There are nested stories and digressions that highlight these concerns, but the characters of the general narrative are unusual and vivid, and the setting is carefully developed, so that the book doesn’t degenerate into a string of deconstructivist parables.

Those chiefly seeking escapism from their fantasy reading should avoid this book, while philosophical readers will find much to enjoy in it.

_____

* I realized on my return to this review that the key characters Gorgik and Small Sarg might be read as a “giant” and a “fairy” respectively. But not in the customary fantasy sense.

The thing gets no stations out here, no rabbit ears needed. We don’t need networks and programming; we need only noise. We need only snow, electromagnetic noise, man, semut bertengkar as Indonesians say, which translates into something like “war of the ants.” Radio waves, cosmic microwave background radiation.

Caitlin R Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Kiernan Agents of Dreamland no stations no rabbit ears networks programming only noise snow war of the ants radio cosmic microwave background radiation