Tag Archives: Media Tie-In – General

Mask of Silver

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Mask of Silver: An Arkham Horror Novel [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Rosemary Jones, part of the Arkham Horror series.

Jones Mask of Silver

Mask of Silver is the first properly jauniste “Arkham Horror novel,” which is to say: Of the now ten full novels (not counting the separate run of novellas) based on the Arkham Horror games, it is the first to center itself on the lore stemming from Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow. According to Chambers’ stories collected under the same title, The King in Yellow was a play which inculcated madness in its readers, and so it served as a model for Lovecraft’s equally fictitious grimoire the Necronomicon.

There is none of Grandpa Cthulhu’s Yog-Sothothery in this story, aside from the town of Arkham itself. The Necronomicon, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Mi-Go and the rest are entirely absent. There is one mere unconvinced mention “that alien entities colonized the South Pole” (286) from an unreliable secondhand source, alluding thus to “At the Mountains of Madness.” The title of The King in Yellow is never mentioned, but the book brims with its tropes and characters: the sisters Camilla and Cassilda, the mask, the king, the cursed play. In this story, the play is serving as the basis for a silent film in the Hollywood studio system of 1923, with the cast and crew undertaking a location shoot in Arkham at the family manse of the auteur Sidney Fitzmaurice.

As with other Arkham Horror novels published in recent months by Aconyte, the player-character investigators of the games appear only in peripheral, supporting capacities–this time these include photo journalist Darrell Simmons, Ashcan Pete the drifter, and Pete’s dog Duke. Agnes Baker’s predecessor at Velma’s Diner, the waitress Florie Wilson, plays an important role. The narrator of Mask of Silver is costume designer Jeany Lin, and there are a number of other vivid new characters introduced as members of the film company. Author Rosemary Jones has clearly done worthwhile research into the work of silent film production and the experience of Chinese-Americans in the early twentieth century.

Jones portrays Arkham as the site of a multigenerational struggle between male occultists (including Miskatonic scholars) with their alien sorceries and a network of women defenders of the quotidian community. The Californian “movie folk” are assimilated to both sides of this combat. As a costumier, Jeany is tasked with providing the important mask, and she only gradually becomes aware–in ways that most of the cast is not–that there is a menacing ceremony providing the narrative infrastructure of the “terror film.”

With its theme of artistic creation and its slow and ominous build to a final catastrophe, this novel has more in common with The Last Ritual than it does with The Wrath of N’kai, to compare the other recent volumes in its series. (It is also close kin in flavor to the recent novella Dark Revelations.) But there is no direct continuity of plot or character with either, and except for its epilogue, this one is set earlier. It is a capable addition to the Arkham Horror franchise, but my main enjoyment of it related to its hypostasization of the mythos around The King in Yellow, which was quite effective.

The Last Ritual

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Last Ritual [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by S A Sidor, cover by John Coulthart, part of the Arkham Horror series.

Sidor Coulthart The Last Ritual

The Last Ritual is the second of a series of novels set in the Arkham Horror game milieu and published by Aconyte Books. Like the first, it features a protagonist who is not one of the stable of player character investigators from the games, along with important cameo appearances from established investigators–in this case, Preston Fairmont, Calvin Wright, and Norman Withers. The principal character of The Last Ritual is artist painter Alden Oakes, a scion of the French Hill Arkham elite.

This tale is set in the 1920s, and the prose offers no howling anachronisms, but the telling shows influences of more recent horror fiction. At the same time, the imposition of a frame story in which Oakes narrates his horrific experiences to a cub journalist put me in mind of 19th-century horror greats Poe and Bierce. Although Oakes starts his tale in France, the bulk of it revolves around a modest number of locations in Arkham, Massachusetts. The charismatic Surrealist Juan Hugo Balthazarr serves as a focus for enigmatic menace.

The mood and pacing of this novel is very different from its predecessor The Wrath of N’Kai. Where the earlier book had a real pulp adventure feel, despite its supernatural elements and shady settings, The Last Ritual is definitely weird horror through and through. Oakes is no hardened he-man, and his epistemological inadequacies lead to vacillating personal loyalties as well as profound fear and confusion. Author Sidor resists clarifying for the reader any number of the painter’s strange experiences, and the outcome of the story is not at all like the one in the other book.

Incidentally, you might think from seeing online images of the excellent cover art by John Coulthart that the cover is a shiny foil affair, but it is in fact a flat matte cover with clever art deco styling in suggestive hues. The building that dominates the cover is the Silver Gate Hotel, around which much of the story revolves.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, and found it to be one of the best in the various Arkham Horror fiction series.

Wrath of N’kai

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Wrath of N’kai: An Arkham Horror Novel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Josh Reynolds, part of the Arkham Horror series.

Reynolds Wrath of N'kai Arkham Horror

Wrath of N’kai is the first of a new series of licensed novels from publisher Aconyte Books set in the Arkham Horror game milieu. Unlike the recent investigator novellas from the game publisher Fantasy Flight, this one is at full novel length. It also lacks an established player character from the game for its protagonist. Instead, it has international adventuress and “gentlewoman thief” Countess Alessandra Zorzi as the principal investigator of the story. She is assisted by plucky trans-man cabbie Pepper Kelly. Neither of these have appeared in the games as far as I know. But the setting is unmistakably the Arkham of the games: various player characters do appear, such as Harvey Walters, Preston Fairmont, Tommy Muldoon, and Daisy Walker. Organizations like the O’Bannion gang and the Silver Twilight Lodge are also important to the story, which takes place entirely within the city limits of Arkham, starting with Alessandra’s arrival by train.

Despite ample stigmata of the Arkham Files universe, the narrative continuity of this story has in one case been better conformed to the original pulp-era literature. The underearth kingdom of K’n-yan is here given as lying beneath Oklahoma as it does in “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop and H.P. Lovecraft. The game designers had transferred K’n-yan to Mexico in the adventure “Heart of the Elders” for the Forgotten Age cycle of Arkham Horror: The Card Game. The plot of Wrath of N’kai centers on a scrimmage for a mummy recovered from K’nyan by a Miskatonic University archaeological expedition.

Author Josh Reynolds is a veteran at writing fiction for game universes such as the various Warhammer worlds, and he has also written some occult adventure in his “Tales of the Royal Occultist” novels. His reading in the relevant literature is signaled by clever allusions like Alessandra’s mentor Nuth (lifted from a story by Lord Dunsany). Wrath of N’kai has a lively pace, and I often read multiple short chapters at a single sitting. It is definitely more pulp adventure than weird horror, despite the Lovecraftian praeternatural elements. The prose isn’t highly polished, but it is engaging. I enjoyed it, and I would be willing to read a sequel about Alessandra’s adventures beyond Arkham.