White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Kelly Link is one of the best writers of our time: full stop. I can say more - I will say more - but I'll start with that bedrock. She's already one of the greats, from the work she's already produced. (And I say that knowing her first novel is fairly new in the world, and I haven't read it yet.)

White Cat, Black Dog was her new story collection last year, gathering seven stories from roughly the previous decade (including, as is traditional, one brand-new piece). Her previous collection was Get In Trouble, back in 2015; I know I read her earlier books but they were long enough ago that I might have read them for work, or just before this blog.

I'm tempted to write a bit about each story, but that urge drags me back to 1992, trying to capture every genre book I read on those fussy little pieces of paper for the SFBC (those who know, know) with a single log-line at the top for genre, a long plot description with all of the names clear and spelled correctly, and a short, separate editorial opinion at the end. It took me a long time to break the habit of writing about books like that, but short fiction always wants to drop me back into it:

Fantasy short-story collection, all based loosely on fairy tales, mostly reprint.

The White Cat's Divorce - A rich man's usual three unnamed sons are sent on various errands to win his fortune, over the course of several years. We follow the youngest son, who...

and so on drearily.

These are precise stories, told uncannily well. When I read these days, I keep an eye out for interesting passages to quote here on the blog - with this collection, I stopped and started dozens of times, wondering if I could quote some particularly devastating moment. Mostly, I couldn't - to explain the moment, it would have taken too much detail, too much explanation. The hallmark of a great short story is that it contains just the right words - no extras, no fluff, nothing extraneous. Link does that, over and over, here.

The collection does start with a white cat and ends with a black dog. Like so many other things, Link means that both literally and figuratively. A word or phrase will rarely have only one purpose in a Link story.

Look: just read it. It's a short book. It's been on multiple award shortlists and "best of" lists. Link has the narrative power of genre, the puzzling insight of fable, and the cuttingly pure prose of literature, all in one writer. You'll thank me afterward.

Hellboy in Love by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Matt Smith

I have completely lost track of the Hellboy universe: I have to admit that. Last time I paid attention, Hellboy was dead and had just gone to Hell, his former compatriots in the B.P.R.D. were dealing with their...I want to say third?...supernatural apocalypse, none of which they actually managed to avert, and the energy of the larger universe seemed to have been diverted into almost a dozen oddbar side-stories about characters like Mr. Higgins and Frankenstein.

It looks like Hellboy-verse books have continued to appear - and several audio dramas, just to make things even more confusing - but that they are all flashbacks or sidebars these days, and they all have series creator Mike Mignola involved to some degree but not doing more than co-writing. (Which Your Cynical Host takes to mean "approving the scripts and cashing the checks," possibly because the ongoing movie-reboot drama is taking most of his time.)

However the work gets divvied up, we got this book last year: Hellboy in Love, collecting five issues and three short series, all set in 1979 and featuring Hellboy's previously never-mentioned great love, the archeologist Anastasia Bransfield. (I say "never-mentioned," but the Hellboy universe is so continuity-besotted that she probably did get a footnote or two somewhere that I'm forgetting.) It's written by Mignola with long-time collaborator Christopher Golden, drawn by Matt Smith, and colored, as usual for this universe, by Dave Stewart.

And...they're pretty standard Hellboy stories, with an added flavor of "the girlfriend is along for the ride." Anastasia is smart and knowledgeable, though without any supernatural abilities or monster-fighting prowess of her own, so Hellboy has to keep her safe during the inevitable punch-the-monsters sequences, and I have to guess that her story eventually ends, however many years later, when Hellboy isn't able to punch one particular monster in time. (The monsters in the Hellboy universe are typically pretty nasty things, and the body counts, even in these somewhat more love-oriented stories, are quite high.)

So Helly and Ana meet cute on a British train when a band of goblins steal something valuable she's transporting, and they chase the goblins across hill and dale to the inevitable secret auction of supernatural materials organized by Shadowy Forces, where they retrieve the goods.

They enjoy each other's company, and so stick together in London afterward to do boyfriend/girlfriend stuff for a few pages before jetting off to Turkey to deal with murderous shadow puppets at a dig: that makes up the second story.

Anastasia's particular area of study is a semi-conspiracy theory - which, in this world, is clearly absolutely true - about an early-medieval global network of magicians and their methods of long-range communication. This theory has very little evidence, has been pooh-poohed by the finest minds of her time, and the reader is morally sure that not only is it completely accurate, but the organization still exists, is active, and probably at least mildly malevolent.

In the third, shortest story, there's another potential breakthrough - an ancient gigantic skull inscribed with mysterious messages in multiple wildly distant languages, which would prove that Anastasia's theory is true. And, of course, there's some kind of supernatural entity - Delilah, who was at the auction in the first story, and has some kind of demonic/vampiric thing going on - who wants the skull even more so, and is able to take it away.

My sense is that Anastasia's theorized ancient society of magicians is yet another still-extant, vaguely apocalyptic cult that threatens the whole world, and that we'll get subsequent stories to show how Hellboy thwarted and possibly destroyed them, though Anastasia nobly sacrificed her life in the process. I may be overly cynical here.

These particular stories are just fine, though the relationship stuff feels a bit shoehorned in, as if Mignola decided thirty years in that Hellboy really should have had a personal life at some point, and is now making up for lost time. And we all know the rules of flashbacks, especially long flashbacks about The Love of My Life. So expectations are definitely set, but this is fun and diverting for now, and a pleasant corner of this universe that isn't too burdened by the weight of apocalypse at the moment.

Gahan Wilson's Even Weirder

I'm pretty sure I read this book; I'm pretty sure I owned it. Gahan Wilson's Even Weirder is a 1996 Tor collection of Wilson's single-panel gags, mostly from Playboy (his best-paid and most prestigious venue for most of his career), and I was paying a lot of attention to everything Tor published in those days for the day-job.

(And was then, as now, a big Wilson fan too.)

Since then, I had a major flood at my house in 2011 that destroyed what I said at the time was 10,000 books - I may have overestimated a bit, but it was somewhere in that ballpark - plus all my records of that old day-job. So I have vague memories of this book, and I can't see how I could possibly have missed it, but the only thing I can point to is an entry in my reading notebook to say that I did read it on Halloween of 1996, a few weeks before publication.

That was a long time ago, and a book of single-panel cartoons isn't the kind of thing that sticks in the mind tightly to begin with. So I was able to read Even Weirder as if it were new to me this time.

By my count, there are 232 cartoons here, all presented in black and white, each on their own page. It's full of the usual Wilson material - nervous kids in nice clothes, monsters of all sorts with oversized features and appendages, various aliens and talking animals, more fiendish Santa Clauses than you would expect, sinister cultists and mad scientists, devils and Satan both in Hell and out of it, and two different gags about a wife bricking her husband up, Cast of Amontillado-style. There's also a whole lot of slightly more conventional setups: dinner tables, office desks, diner counters, jury boxes, streetscapes, men and their dogs, analyst couches and doctor's offices.

Wilson was one of the great gag cartoonists of his time - of all time, I'd go further - with a uniquely creepy, horror-infused style and a facility with all of the random wellsprings of humor and a point of view uniquely his own: jauntily, often shockingly and unexpectedly positive in the face of disaster and apocalypse, cynical at its core but not dwelling on that, and full of a whistling-past-the-graveyard jeu d'esprit.

This is a fine collection of his work - but I should also say that he was pretty consistent, and had a long career. The best Wilson collection is the gigantic magisterial Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons (which I also owned, pre-flood; I had it for about a year), but any of his collections are worth picking up if you see them. If you ever liked Gross or Addams, Wilson is right up your alley. (And vice versa, if you're already a Wilson fan.)

Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Ten years ago, Jeff Vandermeer published a whole trilogy in a year. That's always a dangerous, gutsy move, but I think it worked for him: both artistically and commercially, popping him up from a well-regarded quirky slipstream writer working mostly in the genre-fiction world into a solid position in the wider literary universe. Better yet: I don't think he changed the way he wrote or his subjects - he just got better publishing support and the kind of appreciative quotes that subtly imply this is not genre fiction, because it's good.

(Those quotes are always half bullshit - they were when Kingsley Amis made fun of them in the 1960s, and still are now - but they do their job, and I guess that makes them useful, even if they rely on a kind of reader who is paradoxically both fond of literary invention and skill and unable to see quality anywhere but a narrow plot of "good" fiction.)

The trilogy was called "The Southern Reach." The first book was Annihilation and this second one is Authority. (I'll get to the third book Acceptance eventually. It took me four years to get to #1 and six more for #2, so don't hold your breath.)

The whole series is about Area X: a coastal region in the Southern US - facing south, probably in the Florida panhandle - that had a transformational paranormal event thirty years ago. (The books take place in an unspecified time, probably slightly in the future from when they were published, but it's deliberately vague. Area X could have formed in the 1980s, or 2020.) A impenetrable - well, utterly destructive, as far as anyone can tell, which is nearly the same thing - border came down, except for one access point. Everything made by humanity inside Area X - except for one lighthouse - disappeared or was destroyed. Strange organic life has been growing there. There are other, weirder, less definable changes as well. Explorers into Area X come back transformed, if at all.

The Southern Reach is the organization - it rolls up to "Central," probably some acronymed agency we have heard of - that monitors and investigates and sends expeditions into Area X. They are themselves secret, as is Area X: the general population thinks there was some kind of ecological disaster, and everyone has been kept away from the region.

Southern Reach is also the name of their headquarters building, not far from the border of Area X.

Vandermeer doesn't write trilogies like most people do. Before this, he - to quote myself - "wrote three books about the city of Ambergris... the collection City of Saints and Madmen, the metafictional novel Shriek: An Afterword, and the detective story Finch." Similarly, Annihilation was a novel built from the journals kept by one woman on an expedition - called just "the biologist" there.

Authority is a third-person novel focused on "Control" - a career intelligence professional (OK, call him a spy if you want) named John Rodriguez, who has been sent to take over as Director of the Southern Reach and to investigate what happened to the Twelfth Expedition - the one chronicled in Annihilation.

Three of the four women of the Twelfth Expedition came back, appearing in random places far from Area X, without clear memories of their time there or their lives before the expedition. The one who didn't return, "the psychologist," was the previous Director of Southern Reach.

This book is partly about the conversations Control has with the biologist - he has not read her journals, the ones that formed Annihilation, and she can't tell him much of anything about what happened to her - partly about his troubles taking control of Southern Reach, where the assistant director, Grace Stevenson, is deeply loyal to the missing previous director and quietly blocks nearly everything he does, and partly about how he sifts through what the previous director left behind and what the rest of the scientific staff of Southern Reach can tell him.

Control learns that the most recent expedition was officially the Twelfth, but each numbered expedition was a series - the Eleventh had multiple iterations, and the total number of forays into Area X is well over thirty. And that Area X is not necessarily stable. And that, even thirty years later, the Southern Reach doesn't really know the first thing about Area X or the phenomenon or entity that created it.

He learns many things, plenty of them horrific, over the course of the novel, and loses control of Southern Reach in more than one way by the end. Like so many Vandermeer stories, it has creepy biological manifestations and a tone at most one or two clicks away from horror. It ends with a leap that I assume leads into the third book: it ends reasonably well for the middle of a trilogy, but it clearly is middle.

This is a creepy, unsettling novel, about something mostly unknown that just might be poised to destroy all of humanity and the entire biosphere of our planet - or maybe to do something even stranger, and potentially worse, than that. And Vandermeer does creepy and unsettling better than nearly anyone else: this is excellent in every way.

Falconspeare by Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell

I know that the books about the Mignola-verse - or maybe we should call it the Hellboy-verse? - have continued to pile up, even after its main character died a decade ago and the second main pillar book, B.P.R.D., ran through a fairly comprehensive and long list of apocalypses. But I am not sure what is going on there, since I seem to have missed a bunch of those books.

Thinking that I might want to get back in, I looked for a place to dip my toe. I found something that looked standalone, that was definitely short, and took a leap.

Falconspeare is a 2022 book credited to Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell - they previously did Mr. Higgins Comes Home (which I saw, back in 2018) and Our Encounters With Evil (which I have not, but will now look for) together. But when I checked the credits more carefully, Mignola did the cover and the whole thing is "based on characters created by" him and Johnson-Cadwell. Otherwise, Johnson-Cadwell wrote, drew, and colored the whole thing, with letters by Clem Robins.

Also: it's set (as was Higgins, which I had forgotten) in a vaguely Victorian world, a bit quirkier and nonspecific than the core Mignolaverse - oh, definitely full of vampires and other mythological monsters that need to be dealt with, but without, as far as I can see, the whole dude-from-hell and otherdimensional Lovecraftian gods and multiple-apocalypses thing.

So this was not, in the end, a way back into that universe, but is just fine on its own.

A group of intrepid vampire hunters had a heyday fifteen years ago - signposted by captions saying exactly that - but it is now fifteen years later, and one of them, the title dude, has been missing for a while. The others are summoned by a mysterious message to the usual Balkan landscape, meet their long-lost comrade, and hear his strange and compelling story.

There is a twist at the end, of course. And it's all in a quirkier register than the regular Mignola books -not quite as odd as I recall Higgins being, but just a bit pantomime, as if we all know how this story is going to go, so we can just sit back and enjoy it without worrying about anything.

Johnson-Cadwell has a much looser line than usual for Mignola collaborators: again, this is not unserious, but it's not overly serious the way most Mignola books are. I compared Higgins to Eurocomics, in particular the Dungeon books, and I still see that similarity here, that same viewpoint and style.

It's probably not for readers who want hardcore mythology and megadeath from Mignola - it's mostly not Mignola, after all - but for a lighter, more amusing read, it definitely hits the spot.

The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree

There is a humanoid ichthyic personage in this story - he's in the title, this is not a spoiler - and people who know modern horror may expect him to be some variety of Deep One. But he isn't, really: he's much more of a Gill-Man, though one less inclined to sudden violence than his filmic counterparts, and part of a large diverse society in a way we don't see (as far as I remember) in any of those movies.

So, what I'm saying: this isn't Lovecraftian.

I know! It's rare and unexpected for anything roughly in the horror vein to have a trope that could be Lovecraftian but definitively isn't. Just for that, Josh Rountree deserves kudos.

He deserves them for more than that, though: The Legend of Charlie Fish is a remarkably assured first novel, with two different and believable first-person narrators, atmosphere to burn, a great story to tell, and a flair for telling that story just slightly slant to make it more interesting.

My TL; DR would be: I don't generally like horror, and nobody much reads Westerns these days. This is a great horror Western that's well worth your time, short enough to easily read in a day.

For the more-detail version: Floyd Betts is a carpenter in Galveston, in 1900. He mostly keeps to himself, is good at what he does, lives a quiet life in a boarding house. And he has to go out to Old Cypress to bury his father, a spiteful alcoholic he's been estranged from for decades.

Meanwhile, in Old Cypress, lives a young family: the mother is disliked by the town as a witch, though she's never done anything to hurt anyone. The father grew up there, but has been tainted by association. And the kids are Nellie, twelve, and Hank, nine.

Floyd finds Nellie and Hank in Old Cypress, orphaned, and decides to take them back to Galveston. Along the way they meet and save Charlie Fish: the reader knows all of that very early. I won't spoil who they save Charlie Fish from, or why those people want the fish-man back, but they do, and they follow.

Oh, one other thing. Ever heard of the Great Galveston Hurricane? It's on the way.

Rountree never says that Charlie's people have anything to do with the hurricane. He doesn't even really hint in that direction. But I want to believe it, for whatever apocalyptic reason: you may also want to believe that when you read Charlie Fish.

Oddly, this is a less quirky book than I expected, given the plot and the endorsement from Joe R. Lansdale. Nellie has a version of "the sight," so she can communicate, mostly empathically, with Charlie. But that, and Charlie's mere existence, are the only real fantasy elements. Rountree grounds all of the rest soundly in the mud and wood and heat of the time: these are realistic people in a realistic world, facing mortal danger from both nature and man, and living as best they can, according to their own lights and values. There's a surprising lot of philosophy for life in Charlie Fish, too, the hard-won standards of a life lived cross-grain to the people around you.

It's a short book that feels expansive, a Western that feels modern, a horror novel that feels hopeful. That's one hell of a Legend, and I recommend it.

I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is a genre-fiction writer, but this 2016 novel is not in the genre you might expect. It's a book about Lovecraftians rather than a book that is Lovecraftian. Nothing squamous or rugose shambles through the pages here; no one has a momentary vision of the depths of geological time and his place in the universe that sends him quavering into madness.

On the other hand, I'm not going to say the characters here are entirely sane to begin with.

I Am Providence is a murder mystery set at the Summer Tentacular, an annual horror convention devoted to H.P. Lovecraft and taking place in steamy August in (of course) Providence, Rhode Island. Anyone who knows Mamatas's online presence over the past two decades can guess that he does not have a positive and friendly opinion about those people and that scene and the whole concept of making Lovecraft central to a kind of literature or a fan lifestyle.

I am convinced that all, or maybe just most, of the characters in Providence are versions of real people in the horror/Lovecraftian world, though I was only tangentially connected there (and that fifteen years ago), so I'm not going to try to trace them. (OK, just one: Bhanushali is so obviously a gender-swapped S.T. Joshi that no one will miss that.)

Well, maybe one more, the central one: Panossian, the murder victim. He's dead on page one, and he narrates alternate chapters in first person, posthumously [1] - the even-numbered chapters are from a tight third-person POV on Colleen Danzig, a new writer coming to her first convention, expecting to room with Panossian and instead finding herself amateur-sleuthing her way around the BNFs. [2] Panossian is a gadfly, a deliberately annoying minor writer whose single novel, The Catcher in R'lyeh, is seemingly too clever by half (especially for the very traditionalist Lovecraftian crowd) and sank almost without a trace.

Panossian is Mamatas himself, slightly transmuted (Greek to Armenian, Move Under Ground to Catcher, etc.). That's the metafictional joke here: Mamatas is saying, somewhere between jokingly and honestly, "these people probably want to kill me for making novels like this and admitting Lovecraft was a massive racist, among other things."

Providence is not just a gigantic in-joke, but the in-jokiness is central. It rambles around the convention for three days, alternating between Panossian's newly-dead ruminations and Danzig's investigations, which ape the form of a play-fair mystery but end up more like a shaggy dog story. Frankly, there's no good reason for Danzig to care that much about Panossian's death, and spend all her time playing Nancy Drew - but that's the novel, so it's what she does.

It's OK as a mystery; it's killer as a stab in the back of Lovecraftians. "Is there a reason for a literate person to read century-old pulp fiction? For the most part, no, which is why most of it has been forgotten by all except obsessives and weirdoes." (p.3)

There are a lot of events in Providence; there's a lot of opportunity for Lovecratians to demonstrate the various ways they are obsessives and weirdoes; there's a lot of theorizing about the murder from various people. Mamatas is more or less in control of the plot, but there are several Signals from Fred, as when Danzig realizes, more than half-way through the book, that she's talked to several different uniformed cops but never even seen the detective running the case. That's the shaggy-dogness again; this is a book that rambles and wanders, to hit all of the scenes and ideas Mamatas had and to showcase all of these people in their (un)natural habitat.

I dog-eared a bunch of quotes while reading it: Mamatas is excellent at the cutting takedown, the epigrammatic attack. Here's some good ones:

• Hiram seemed harmless, but only in the way a heavily medicated inpatient at a lunatic asylum seemed harmless. (p.107) 
• Ranger was pretty important in Lovecraftian fandom, after all, since he had access to a photocopy machine and made his little 'zine, Dreamlands, with it sometimes. (p.189)
• Most people who are inexplicably confident despite being talentless and more than a little stupid have warm, affectionate parents. (p.232)

I didn't entirely believe in Colleen, the sleuth. I completely believed Panossian, the self-loathing dead loser. I somewhat recognized all of the other weirdoes and obsessives at the Tentacular. And I read Providence with some joy and multiple laughs and a lot of recognition. I think this book got a bad reception, because it's for that thin segment of fandom that both understands the jokes and can take them; fandom is famously humorless when it comes to itself. If you think you fit in that segment, check it out, but don't be surprised if you feel "attacked."

[1] To put in Panossian's own words, from p.4: "We dwell in darkness, anxious and panicked and alone without the benefit of senses or a future, and for who knows how long after death."

[2] Big Name Fans. Not entirely accurate: Lovecraftiana is a small, incestuous pool, and nearly everyone in it is a filthy pro, at least in their own heads. But Providence is a book all about in-group behavior and markers, so the term is appropriate.

Blackwood: The Mourning After by Evan Dorkin, Veronica Fish, and Andy Fish

In the Before Times, this would have just been the next four issues of an ongoing series called Blackwood - it reads that way, and my guess is that Dorkin and the Fishes would have been happy to just keep telling a bunch of these stories in one series rather than mucking about with re-launching a new mini-series with a new title.

They might not have wanted to do it monthly, on the old chain-gang work-until-you-drop style, but that's an entirely different question.

But, in the Now Times, everything must be new, and everything must have an Issue #1, and the attention span of any comics reader is assumed - probably with good reason - to be lower than the belly of a ground sloth. So Blackwood: The Mourning After was a "brand-new" four-issue mini-series, following up the original Blackwood series and collection a couple of years later.

But it begins immediately after the ending of the previous book, and deals entirely with the fallout of the events in the previous book, and in no way is meant to stand on its own: it's not a new story, not a separate story, just the next story of this place and these people. And that's totally fine for an ongoing, though it feels a little odd in our modern mini-series world.

And it does mean that if I want to talk about any of the plot, I'm going to either utterly spoil the first book or be very, very vague. I'm going to try to err on the side of vague.

So the cover shows four people, which includes three of the four main characters of Blackwood, but not the one who SPOILER in the first book. And there's one more person, who was a secondary but important character the first time out, but has more to do here - maybe he'll turn out to be part of the Scooby Gang in the long term. And, as the title implies, someone important is dead - let me refer here to the first book, which I said started "with some old guy who just did something magically dangerous and is now dictating his last words while Something happens to him" and note that there is an funeral coming up in a couple of days, nudge nudge wink wink.

We learn a little more about the faculty of Blackwood, the college ostensibly some vague liberal-arts thing (though really really focused on anthropology as far as I can see) but secretly a training-bed for new magicians, plus "psychic researchers, alchemical engineers, occult archivists." We also see another secret magic-based organization, I.N.S.P.E.C.T., who seem to be some kind of government agency - big guns, dark suits, humorless affect, the whole works. Blackwood and I.N.S.P.E.C.T. are not on the chummiest of terms, of course, and even less so after the revelations of the new book.

An I.N.S.P.E.C.T. team is coming for that funeral, and various people are planning for the funeral and/or for secret magical rituals designed for fiendish ends, because of course they are. Our four heroes are in the middle of that, partly because of magical shenanigans in the first book, partly because they are nosy, and partly just because their are the heroes of this story, so we follow their viewpoints.

There is another big magical foofaraw at the end of this book, as there must be. A gigantic unpleasant entity is summoned from Somewhere, an evil actor gets hold of a Powerful Artifact and threatens to do Unspeakable Things, and there's a big confrontation in the college library, which is roughly as cool as you are hoping it will be. (Do I mean the confrontation, or the library itself? A bit of both.)

Like the first book, I found this zippy and fun, and this time writer Evan Dorkin has a little more time and space to start fleshing out the world, which I appreciate. Oh, it's still a thriller, so the action-plot takes precedence, and the artists (wife-husband team Veronica and Andy Fish) do good work there, with a lot of room for moody, creepy colors on top of their already pretty-darn-moody line art.

As I said, it would have been nice if this were still a world where Evan Dorkin and the Fishes - and doesn't that sound like a weird ska band? I bet Dorkin is amused by that - could do these more regularly and build their mythology more quickly. But we never get the world we want, and the world we have does have two solid Blackwood stories in it so far, so it's not all bad.

Escape from Yokai Land by Charles Stross

This one is a "Laundry Files" book. Not all of the books with that logo on the cover are, in the purest case, but Charles Stross's publishers have decided to keep using the logo for anything set in the same world for simplicity's sake. (See my post on the novel Dead Lies Dreaming for more details, and to begin a link-trail back earlier in the series.)

Escape from Yokai Land is a flashback, or a previously-untold story; it covers what happened to "Bob Howard" on his trip to Japan just before the events of The Delirium Brief. It's also a novella, which is not always clear to a purchaser, so understand that: this is a shorter story, only eighty pages long. But, if you want more of Bob, this might be the only dose for a while.

As readers of the series know, this is a Lovecraftian universe: horrible many-angled ones lurk just outside our world and are trying to get in to eat the brains of humans and do even worse things. More seriously, such incursions are easier the more people and computing devices are in the world, as well as the traditional "when the stars are right" - and all three metrics are trending hugely up as this series hurtles towards what will be at least a minor apocalypse.

Bob is the current host of an entity called The Eater of Souls for good and sufficient reasons. Luckily, he's in as full control of that entity as is possible. Slightly less luckily, he's a fairly new host; his predecessor was killed in the line of duty the year before. (The undertone being: even a powerful, skilled, old sorcerer with a scary thing called the Eater of Souls in him can get snuffed out in this world.)

Bob has been requested by the Miyamoto Group, which seems to be the Japanese equivalent of the Laundry - the fully or quasi governmental body that manages supernatural stuff secretly for their country and snuffs out all of those budding apocalypses - to do a every-four decades check on their local warded sites, and eliminate some current yokai (local folkloric creatures) manifestations. The previous host of the Eater did not leave a good impression during his visit in the 1970s, though.

More seriously, a big manifestation is bubbling up, and Bob will need to contain it, with the aid of his local liaison officer.

That manifestation is centered on a theme park in Tama New Town, and will manifest as something that the book almost consistently calls Princess Kitty. (There are a couple of "Hello"s lurking, which I gather the publisher's attorneys missed in what may have been a late and rushed review.) As Stross says in his short afterword, this is the story that asks: "What if The Color Out of Space were...Pink?"

The Laundry books are often amusing, on the borderland of funny, in a buried, whistling-past-the-graveyard way; this one slots into that stream and is full of quirky little touches having to do with "Princess Kitty" and Japan in general. It is short, and entirely focused on this one short trip of Bob's, but it does just fine in its length.

Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross

I'm a year late and not as enthusiastic as I thought I would be: this will likely be short.

I've loved all of the previous books set in this world, but I had a hard time getting into Dead Lies Dreaming. This is not a "Laundry Files" book, partly because that government organization has been disbanded and partly because it's about other people doing other things. But I didn't think I was particularly invested in Bob Howard as a protagonist, or that particular government agency, so I was happy to dive into the story of some other people, relatively normal civilians, in a world sliding into a pick-and-mix of Lovecraftian apocalypses in the middle of the past decade.

(See my post on The Labyrinth Index for the most recent of the original series, and links backward to previous books.)

So: Nyarlathotep, more-or-less (an avatar of him, at least) is Prime Minister of the UK, which makes this world not quite as dystopian as you might think (human beings can still go about their lives mostly untroubled!) but still noticeably dystopian (pyramids of skulls in public parks! several other Lovecraftian death cults are jockeying for power, some apparently through mass sacrifices of their own!). Also, every bad thing about our real world is also happening in fantasy form, since Charles Stross is a mostly realistic writer who has never seen a horrible thing he didn't immediately incorporate into a novel.

(I've long wondered how he manages to get out of bed in the morning: his creative muse, at least as seen from the outside, tends to the bleakest of the bleak and the darkest of the dark.)

Living in this shitshow are our cast: four young people squatting in the ruins of a palace that used to belong to the family of one of them (Imp, Game Boy, Doc, and the Deliverator); an ex-cop now working in private security (Wendy); and Imp's older sister Eve, the personal assistant to a evil billionaire. (But I repeat myself.)

All of them are also sorcerers of some power, or possessors of mid-level superpowers, depending on how you want to look at it. This probably means all of them have extradimensional beings already snacking on their brains, because that's how power works in Stross's world, but they're young enough not to show any effects yet, and the real apocalypse could easily come along before the many-angled ones manage to eat too many brain cells.

Or they could die from other things: it's a dark, dangerous world. Living long enough for magical Alzheimer's to kill you can be seen as the good outcome. (Have I mentioned Stross's worlds are really really dark? I may be understating the case.)

I think their powers are all clear in Stross's head, but I kept mixing up the four squatters, and never quite got straight what each of them can do. It felt like several of them were mostly "really good at persuading people," though that's mostly their leader Imp's thing.

In fact, it took a long time to get the four squatters' names and personalities clear in my head: Stross jumps from real names to goofy code names to physical descriptors to emotional descriptors as he writes about them, and it took me a while to get that The Deliverator is Del is Rebecca is the Black woman. (Also, Imp is an asshole - charismatic visionary subcategory, so with an explanation, but still an asshole - and all of the four are damaged needy whiny bastards a lot of the time.) They also all get introduced in a high emotional register, so they emote madly at each other for the first two or three chapters in which they appear.

Anyway, these four people that I'm supposed to relate to but initially found deeply annoying and confusing are running a series of big robberies, despite a magic-powered surveillance state that uses summary execution as the answer to any crime more serious than failing to pay a TV license. They are doing this to fund a movie that Imp plans to direct, because of course he does. Their powers are sufficiently good that they have gotten away with it up to now, and have nearly what they need for the movie, so it's maybe One Last Job And Then They Can Retire.

Wendy runs into them during one of those robberies, causing a rapid transition from "cop attempting to catch them" to "co-conspirator and Del's new girlfriend," and their skills and some huge coincidences get all of them pulled into Eve's schemes on behalf of her horribly, horribly evil boss. There are also a few large men toting powerful firearms, who are mostly in the narrative to provide danger for a while until they get killed by each other or more horrible things. All of those characters travel through a house larger on the inside to get to a Dreamlands version of past London, where the big ending happens.

I liked all of the sentences, found the paragraphs pleasant, and read all the way to the end. But this one wasn't as compelling a read as some of Stross's earlier books have been for me: the characters weren't appealing enough to offset how dark and miserable his worlds always are. Frankly, I didn't like any of them all that much - Wendy was fine; I kept hoping she would bug out and find a more interesting plot among people less aggressively boho and whiny - and so wasn't as invested as I wanted to be in seeing them not get killed by the over-the-top combo of Peter Thiel, Harvey Weinstein, and Aleister Crowley that is the villain of the piece.

That all sounds like the definition of "a me problem." If you think you would be any more amenable to a boho retelling of Peter and Wendy in a crapsack mostly-contemporary Lovecraftian London, Dead Lies Dreaming is one of the best books to read as an introduction to Stross's no-longer-Laundry-centric world.

My Pretty Vampire by Katie Skelly

Sometimes there are books you're pretty sure won't really be for you. But they have quotes from people you like (say, Jaime Hernandez and Nate Powell), and the art is interestingly stylish, and it's about sexy vampires, so you think "how could that not be for me?"

And then it turns out you were right.

Such is Kate Skelly's My Pretty Vampire, a stylish retro vampire movie in comics form, full of blood and cartoon boobs and '60s-looking fashion. It's really good at what it does, but, as I suspected, what it does is not something I was all that excited about.

Clover is a vampire, held captive by her brother Marcel (who I thought was also a vampire, but looking back at the book, I can't find a place that shows that explicitly - so leave it as a maybe) and cared for by their housekeeper (?) Elsa. But she wants to be free, so she breaks out one day.

It's not clear what she wants, even to Clover herself. But she does seem to be compelled, in that usual vampire fashion, to kill and drain the blood of basically everyone she meets, which makes the rest of the book pretty repetitive. She's not a metaphor for anything, or particularly conflicted about drinking blood: she just wanders from one place to the next, slaughtering people and then licking blood delicately off her fingers or the corner of her mouth. (She is often half-naked for that part, since it's that kind of story.)

Marcel sends some kind of bounty hunter after her, and that provides a bit of plot. And it all ends in a way that would allow Skelly to tell more stories with these characters, if she wants to.

But it's a book that's mostly about the style and that horror-movie concept of vampires: the eternal, unquenchable thirst, the inherent sexual frisson of it, a few nods to the idea of vampires needing to control themselves and stay hidden. Clover is not a character who will grow or change, and other people are changed by her only by becoming dead. So I liked looking at My Pretty Vampire, but, as I suspected, in the end it really wasn't my kind of thing.

(One subtle thing I did like a lot: Clover clearly has to ask to enter new places, in that old vampire way, but Skelly never underlines that or makes it too obvious.)

But this could easily be your kind of thing: again, it's quite good at what it does, and Skelly has a great loose line and uses stark blocky color to great effect in this book. It is very distinctive and specific and strong - all of those are impressive things.

Phantoms in the Attic by Richard Sala

Don't come to this book expecting comics, despite my tag. Oh, there are two short strips at the end, because Richard Sala was a cartoonist at heart and had material that would fit, but that's not the point of the book.

Phantoms in the Attic is an art book, mostly collecting a bunch of full-page images. Some are monochrome, a few are black-and-white, but most are in Sala's usual softly creepy watercolors. I think the physical book is in a fairly small format, but I read it digitally: so, for me, it was exactly the size of my device, like every other book I read that way. (Reading digitally is excellent in some ways, but turns into a procrustean bed for anything heavily designed or full of art.)

As usual with Sala, it's all horror-tinged, with familiar monsters menacing very Sala-esque young ladies. Some of the monsters are creatures: vampires and werewolves and swamp monsters, ghosts and devils and mummies. But just as many are arguably human: maniacal children, slavering serial killers, depraved and deformed maniacs. What they have in common is that urge to attack and destroy cute barefoot girls - it's the core theme of Sala.

I say "girls" because Sala's female characters all skew young, and it seems deliberate. His men are sometimes young (and usually clueless) and sometimes old (and usually fiendish), but his women, evil or good, are all fresh-faced and clean-limbed and perky, in the first flush of youth. The man had a type, or at least his comics did.

Phantoms has nearly a hundred pieces of art like that. They're individual illustrations, so they're more static than Sala's comics pages: even the ones that depict a moment of action look more posed, and most of them are either montages or vignettes or just quieter moments.

You will recognize, I hope, most of the major characters - Sherlocks and Santa Clauses, monsters from this old horror movie or that one, various folkloric beasties - as they menace their particular girls, or cavort in their own image-spaces. If you're someone who would not recognize any of those creatures, Sala is very much not a cartoonist for you.

And, of course, Phantoms is an art book by a cartoonist, so it's audience will be a bit more limited than other Sala books. It doesn't tell a story: it just collects a bunch of unconnected pictures. They're all very nice pictures, and they're all exceptionally fun and Sala-esque, but you need to be a Sala fan to begin with to want this much unconnected Sala.

Lester Fenton and the Walking Dead: Unsettling Zombie Love! by Kyle Baker

That is an awfully long title for something that was an eleven-page anthology story. (Fast Forward #2, from DC in 1992) But it's the title we have, and it was republished as a book, clearly reformatted from larger pages but still flowing well, by creator Kyle Baker under his Quality Jollity imprint, in 2017.

So that's Lester Fenton and the Walking Dead: Unsettling Zombie Love! The bulk of the book is a flashback: we begin with Lester in his middle years on a date, but a random zombie attack leads him to tell his origin story.

Young Lester was a nerd, in what seems to be the Movie '50s, who is invited to the prom by popular and gorgeous cheerleader April, for mostly self-esteem-boosting reasons (hers, not his). Meanwhile, Lester's father, who just died, surprisingly turns back up at the house, speaking in a stilted manner but moving around and seeming to be at least a horrible mockery of alive. In fact, a number of people who are supposedly dead are walking about, and at least half-assedly trying to hide the supposed-to-be-dead thing.

It all comes to a head the night of the prom, obviously. Lester must battle the zombies, and defeat their immediate leader, his own father. (Their ultimate leader is of course Satan, who makes an appearance.)

This is all told in Baker's Why I Hate Saturn style: panels more or less placed in rows, but without a lot of traditional panel transitions, and long, humorous dialogue presented below the panels in hand-drawn lettering. The tone is arch and knowing, the dialogue is self-aware and hilarious, and the situation is silly in wonderfully make-fun-of-the-cliché ways. This book packs a lot of funny into its pages.

It's still a short thing, obviously. It was an eleven-page story. But it was a very dense eleven-page story, on what I think were larger pages than these, so giving it a bit more space to breathe is good. And Baker is killer when he's really cooking with his funny material, which he definitely is here. So maybe not entirely a lost classic, but definitely a really funny genre book you've probably never heard of.

Poison Flowers & Pandemonium by Richard Sala

First of all, it's sad to see this book, because we know it's the last of Richard Sala's work. He died suddenly last year - and, it seems, at least somewhat mysteriously, which is grimly appropriate - and there won't be any more of his work ever again.

Sala was original, brewing up a mixture of horror movies, penny dreadfuls, and plucky young (barefoot!) heroines into a gorgeously-watercolored mixture that would be welcome to fans of Charles Addams, Gahan Wilson, or Edward Gorey but was uniquely Sala. Some of his best books, and places I'd recommend starting if you don't know his work, are The Chuckling Whatzit and Delphine and Mad Night.

What we have here today are his last four stories - some miscellaneous work that (I think) was already planned to be collected together even before his unexpected death. It's a nice big package; it looks lovely; each of the stories is fun and deeply Sala-esque. It's Poison Flowers & Pandemonium, and the bittersweet nature of publishing it after Sala's death is perhaps the most exquisitely Sala-esque moment in his entire career.

In order, those four stories are:

"The Bloody Cardinal 2: House of the Blue Dwarf" is a sequel to the first Bloody Cardinal book, also published originally as a webcomic, although it's less focused on the title character (either of them). A typically Sala heroine, Phillipa Nicely, is caught up in a group of fiendish types when an acquaintance of hers enlists her in an attempt to swindle them. It all gets vastly more complicated, of course, but there's a full-page listing of characters up front to help keep track of them as they get machetes to the brain in turn. (People die often in Sala stories; he tells bloody monster movies in comics form.) This one has a lot of energy and I think is more successful than the first Bloody Cardinal, but still could have used a little more space and careful pacing - my sense is that webcomics weren't the best format for Sala, who did somewhat better work when he could rework groups of pages or entire stories together.

"Monsters Illustrated" is mostly a series of full-page illustrations of monsters in action, with a very thin frame story (involving a plucky barefoot girl in danger [1]). The monsters are not named precisely to explain who they are, but readers will likely recognize many of them, and I suspect really devout readers could place every single one of them.

"Cave Girls of the Lost World" is another frame story, and almost a self-parody. A young boy discovers a bottle on the beach, inside which is a fantastic story of a planeload of private-college girls who found themselves in a savage land (not The Savage Land) full of dinosaurs, cavemen, and Bat People. The cave-girl story is told in hand-lettered prose (as if on weathered parchment) on left-hand pages, with full-page illos of the bare-breasted girls battling the various dangers of their lost world on the right. Sala has a fun wink at the very end; I wonder if he had hoped to expand this out to something larger?

"Fantomella" is another one of his stories of an avenging young woman, in the vein of Violenzia. It's set in a dystopian world, and is almost entirely the title character fighting her way up the tower HQ of the masters of this crapsack world, killing colorful lunatics along the way, mostly with her ubiquitous knives. (Though she does mix it up a bit as she does along.) This one is fun and energetic, but very much in a style Sala has done multiple times before.

So all of it is solid and all of it is deeply Sala-esque, and no one else could have made any of these four stories. I wouldn't rank any of them as the best in his career, but it's all solid mid-rank work. Again, I wouldn't start Sala here, but it's certainly a great way to send him off, since we do have to send him off.

[1] I don't know what the deal was with Sala and women's bare feet, but he regularly has his heroines wandering around cities, doing things otherwise normally, without shoes. Other people's kinks, man!

H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness by Gou Tanabe (2 vols)

Adapting a book is always a tricky thing, especially in a format where you're turning words into pictures. (Radio dramas, I suppose, have somewhat different issues.) And when the author you're adapting is...um, shall we say overly fond of long, ornate, elaborate words in general and detailed descriptions in particular, getting those pictures to resemble the mental images from those words gets even tougher.

And that's just for just the adaptor -- every reader will interpret "partly squamous, partly rugose" a little differently, so how will they take your pictorial description?

All of that is to say that adapting H.P. Lovecraft into a visual medium is a tricky thing. There have been some movies, a few of which have been more-or-less successful. He's been a bit better served in comics, which is much more of an auteur medium to begin with -- for example, I.N.J. Culbard adapted four long Lovecraft stories into graphic novels about a decade ago, each in its own style, and all successfully. (Well, successfully to my eye, since that's the point I just made.)

Not long afterward, the manga-ka Gou Tanabe embarked on a longer adaptation of Lovecraft's novella "At the Mountains of Madness" in 2016-17, in twenty-three chapters (plus prologue and epilogue) and over six hundred pages. That was published as two volumes in English translation last year: The First Volume and The Second Volume. I'm not clear on what the original Japanese publication schedule was, but my guess it was the usual: the chapters appeared individually in some magazine or other (weekly or monthly), and then objects closely resembling these two books came out as tankobon.

This is a very faithful adaptation -- Tanabe uses a lot of chunks of Lovecraft prose, both to set up chapters and as narration over his pages, and the length allows him to get all of the events of the novella into his adaptation. He also keeps the 1931 setting and all of the technical details the same, which other Lovecraft adaptations don't always do. So, if you're familiar with the Lovecraft story -- and that's the audience for this book, obviously -- Tanabe's version won't surprise you in the storytelling.

The art, though, might surprise you, particularly if you have an outdated view of what "manga art" looks like. Tanabe uses a very detailed style here, with lots of blacks and washes, and he clearly draws the fantastic elements of Lovecraft's story while often keeping them in shadow to suit the dark caves and cyclopean ruins the characters wander through. For Western readers, getting used to manga-style "reading backward" might be an issue to begin with, but Tanabe's panel flow is clear and he sticks to boxy, square panels with occasional splash pages -- there's nothing here to throw off people who aren't regular comics readers.

As for the story itself: it's that Lovecraft staple, the man of science describing events that led him (always him, always a very particular kind of him) to learn Things That Man Was Not Meant to Know and putting them down on paper in hopes that everyone else will listen and never go back there again. In this particular case, it's an Antarctic expedition, out of Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University [1] in Arkham, Massachusetts, with specialists in a variety of disciplines (geology, biology, and so on) planning to explore, collect samples, and do some basic science.

But instead they find calamity and an escalating series of discoveries: bodies of a totally unknown type leading to a giant previously unknown mountain chain leading to a vast ancient city beyond those mountains where two of the team will find....well, that would be telling.

The thrills and joys of Lovecraft are in those moments of discovery, where the veil is lifted, bit by bit, on visions of deep time and unexpected creatures. Tanabe is good at translating that feeling into comics, and his page count and the generally unhurried pace of manga pages serves him well here -- there's enough space and time to go step-by-step with Lovecraft through all of the stages of disbelief and dawning understanding.

So this is a good adaptation. "Mountains" is one of Lovecraft's less-problematic major stories, and Tanabe silently eliminates any vaguely racist stuff about the swarthy crewmen of the expedition's ships. (I don't remember anything specifically, but Lovecraft was vaguely racist all the time, so I'm assuming there's at least a few sentences to make a modern reader wince in "Mountains.") And Tanabe's art style is a great fit for Lovecraft: he's detailed in a dark, horror-tinged way, and can make the ancient architecture and alien creatures creepy and menacing rather than just funny-looking.

I understand Tanabe did one book of shorter Lovecraft adaptations before this, and has been adapting other Lovecraft stories since then, so, odds are, if this sounds appealing, you'll have more than just this story to enjoy.

[1] Go, Pods!

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

I never really noticed there were no women in Lovecraft's Dreamlands. In my defense, it's often difficult to notice things that aren't there: the dog that didn't bark, the people who aren't represented. But if you're the one left out, you will notice.

Kij Johnson noticed.

And what good writers do about things they notice is to rewrite it their way: to do a better version, to incorporate their own lives and experiences and thoughts, and show the world what they can do. (And then they also leave some things out, deliberately or not, because no book contains all human experience or ever could -- so someone else, sometime later, may feel that same urge to do it better once again.)

The result was her 2016 novella The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, which is Lovecraftian in its own way but definitely has more women in it, and cares much more about the thoughts and fears and lives of women, than Lovecraft's original Dream-Quest. (It may care more about women than all of Lovecraft's stories put together, frankly.)

The title signposts that, quietly. Lovecraft's original was a Dream-quest to a place; Johnson's is a dream-quest of a person. Boe is a middle-aged professor at the relatively new and still fragile Women's College of Ulthar University, having settled down after a more exciting and adventure-filled youth. She's awoken late one night: her student Clarie Jurat has run away with a man.

That would be bad enough in the only-vaguely-modern society of Ulthar; it could be enough to have the Trustees shut down the whole Women's College and give up education for women as a bad idea. But it gets worse: that man is a dreamer, from the waking world, and may be taking Clarie there, never to return. And Clarie is the granddaughter of an Elder God from the cold wastes of Kadath, who sired a daughter years ago during a brief time in human form. That god, like all of the Dreamland's gods, is small and petty and cruel, insane and unfettered and massively powerful, jealous and possessive and punitive, detached and dreaming and liable to destroy cities on a whim.

So Vellitt sets off to intercept Clarie and bring her back. Not for Clarie's own sake: the waking world might well be better for her. Not even for the College. But because Clarie leaving the Dreamlands will most likely result in a god's Doom utterly destroying all of Ulthar, as so many other places in the Dreamlands have been randomly destroyed by other gods for reasons even lesser.

It's a long journey, as it must be: episodic and extended, across as much of the breadth of the Dreamlands as Johnson can manage. She races first to the closest gate to the waking world, and finds an unlikely old friend there but no passage through. And then she has to cross the world as quickly as possibly to find another old friend -- one with a name Lovecraft readers will recognize -- while hoping that Clarie's grandfather has not awakened, or been awakened by other scheming gods, to see what has happened.

Johnson writes evocatively, with a few echoes of Lovecraft's language but more often plain descriptive words: gugs are "like elephants" rather than some elaborately Latinate word that means the same thing. But she does touch on the places and creatures and societies that Lovecraft did: that's one of the main purposes of this novella. She's rewriting this world, to give it space for women and their stories.

This story, in particular. Vellitt Boe is no one's Everywoman: she's particular and gnarled and skilled and thoughtful, a woman with a lot of life behind her, full of choices she believed in at the time and still understands now. And her Dream-Quest is more than just an answer to Lovecraft; it's a full story in its own right, a parallax view on the Dreamlands and its people, full of thoughts on things Lovecraft may have implied or left unspoken or not even thought about.

The world needs more Dream-Quests; I'm glad we got this one. I hope to see more soon.

The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

The thing about the end of the world is that worlds end every day. And not just in the teenage-drama sense, either: every death is the end of the world for at least one person. Usually more than that.

So Charles Stross's "Laundry Files" series continues in The Labyrinth Index, the ninth novel, even though its world -- at least as much as the series started out as a secret history -- has definitely ended. The Lovecraftian Singularity is continuing, with an avatar of Nyarlathotep as the Prime Minister of the UK and other players assembling around the world.

But humans are still around and mostly unchanged -- the PM in particular has a soft spot for them, though perhaps primarily because he wants masses to worship him -- and so human stories go on, after the end of what used to be their world.

Mhari Murphy is arguably not a human anymore, but she looks like one, so let's give her the benefit of the doubt. She's a vampire, which is to say the carrier of a nasty but beneficial supernatural parasite: as long as she keeps it fed through a blood-link with other minds it can eat, it won't eat her mind. She's also, because of that fairly recent state and a history with the Laundry, now the Baroness Karnstein, a member of the House of Lords, and head of that house's Select Committee on Sanguinary Affairs -- which is to say she's responsible for ensuring the rest of Britain's useful vampires continue to be fed from the blood of unfortunate others so that they can continue to do the work the PM and Laundry need them to do.

(If you're lost -- and you easily could well be with the ninth book in even a loose, mostly new-reader-friendly series like this one -- you could see what I wrote about the previous book, The Delirium Brief, and from there follow links further back for as much more depth as you feel inclined to chase.)

But Mhari is about to get a more difficult job, from that creepy, vastly-less-human PM. You see, the UK's traditional closest ally has been acting strange and distant recently -- even more so than usual. The PM thinks that country has been captured by its own Laundry-style agency, which has thrown in its lot with a much nastier and more dangerous Elder God than himself.

(Those comparatives of "dangerous" and "nasty" here are being used in a way pretty far beyond human norms, I admit.)

And so Mhari has to assemble a team quickly, entirely from a list that PM gives her, infiltrate a foreign country as secretly as possible, so she can find and extract the missing President of the USA. Although, when her team arrives in the States, they find that no American can even remember that they ever had a President....

The Laundry series has always had a whistling-past-the-graveyard appeal, but that's been sharpening with the last couple of books, as the real world has itself gone traipsing through some more boring graveyards. Stross's twisted mirror of our own world has become even more shattered as we've all seen just how horrible, stupid and dysfunctional our governments really can be. And it's culminated here: where the Deep State is not only a real thing, but actually in the thrall of the dread lord Cthulhu.

Labryinth Index will be a slightly odd read for most Americans, since it's inherently about the USA from an outside viewpoint. That viewpoint is generally admiring -- well, as much as you can admire your friend who has become captured by a Cthulhu death-cult -- but it is definitely distanced, and the America in Labyrinth Index is a foreign land not just for Mhari and her band of oddball agents, but for the few beleaguered Americans who remember what a President was.

I wouldn't start the series with this book: they generally stand alone, but too much has gone before, and we're deep into the apocalypse at this point. But it's a great series, full of compelling voices, written straight down the middle of that dark no-man's-land among SF, fantasy, and horror. If any of the above sounds intriguing, find yourself a copy of The Atrocity Archives and start there.

Book-A-Day 2018 #364: Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Cosmic horror can come from anything. Humanity's place in the larger cosmos is so contingent, so uneasy, that the slightest change could doom us all. Every serious SF reader knows that bone-deep: the universe is indifferent to all kinds of life, and life is often hostile to other life.

Jeff Vandermeer, though, is the only one I know who would think to apply those principles to a wildlife refuge near his home. What if that land was alien somehow, I imagine he thought. What if something happened to make it different, to make it hostile? What could happen next? What could emerge?

Annihilation is the story of that land, a fictional version of the St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge or a fictional space inspired by it. In this first book of Vandermeer's "Southern Reach trilogy," it's Area X: a region cut off from the rest of the world for three decades.

Well, that's the story the twelfth expedition into Area X knows. It could be wrong. Maybe they've been lied to. A secretive government organization, given all power over a bizarre and frightening outside-context problem inside the US, isn't necessarily going to be telling the whole truth now, are they?

There are four women who make up that expedition; one other backed out just before they left. For reasons sufficient to the Southern Reach, they are known only by their roles: the biologist, the anthropologist, the surveyor, the psychologist. The psychologist is their leader, as much as anyone is. The biologist is our narrator. We're reading the journals she kept during that trip: all expeditions are required to have all members write down their experiences as they go. (Vandermeer doesn't play up the "and only I am escaped to tell the tale" aspect -- the biologist is too focused on her duties and with understanding the strangeness around her -- but the format locks in those comparisons to Poe and Lovecraft.)

Annihilation is set entirely in Area X. It opens with the expedition already on-site, having passed through whatever barrier or frontier exists under some kind of hypnosis. They're not sure how they got there, and they know that there's a very good chance they won't come back. The second expedition killed themselves; the third killed each other; the eleventh reappeared mysteriously outside Area X simultaneously and died of cancer within weeks. Those are the ones we know about specifically: it seems unlikely that all of the others made it back unscathed.

Area X is full of strangeness, and that strangeness quickly infects the expedition. The strange things are biological, or seem to be, and the biologist struggles to even describe what she is experiencing. That's cosmic horror, too: that sense of existential wrongness, of things broken so badly they can't be understood and can barely be described in rough sketches.

This is a creepy, disquieting book, full of horrors both psychological and external -- horrors that are both psychological and external simultaneously, horrors that are horrible because they are both. The biologist is as reliable a narrator as we could hope for, but that's not much. Vandermeer's career-long interest in fungi and other strange growths pays off in Annihilation: he had been writing about creepy things much like this for years, and here transmuted those obsessions and concerns into a slim, taut novel that delivers perfectly on its promise.

There are two more in the trilogy: I'll need to find them. (There's also a movie; I'm vastly less likely to spend any time on it.)

Book-A-Day 2018 #361: Pim & Francie: "The Golden Bear Days" by Al Columbia

I can't tell you what's the deal with Al Columbia. Maybe no one can.

He famously was going to take over from Bill Sienkiewicz on the Alan Moore-written Big Numbers comic nearly thirty years ago, but had a nervous breakdown (maybe), disappeared (sort of), and destroyed all of his finished art (almost certainly). His career in comics since then has been occasional, with short pieces in anthologies and other random appearances. As far as I've seen, this is his only book-length publication.

Pim & Francie: "The Golden Bear Days" came out just about a decade ago, collecting material about the title characters that Columbia had created over many years before that. It's not a graphic novel.

It's not a story of any kind. It's a lot easier to list the things Pim & Francie isn't than explain what it is: it doesn't have any finished stories, any complete narratives, any obvious through-line.

There's no explanation for the random artifacts in the book, but I like to think of it this way. Imagine there was an animation studio, back in the early days -- late '20s, early '30s -- more influenced by Grand Guignol than happy musical theatre. Imagine that their main characters were two child-sized figures, Pim and Francie. Imagine that unnamed studio generated a number of cartoons and comics stories about those characters, full of horrors and terrors. Imagine that work was suppressed, violently, and almost entirely destroyed. And imagine that someone -- call him Al Columbia -- assembled what was left three generations later, with haunting, tantalizing hints of the stories of Pim and Francie.

You can imagine a coffee-table book, telling the history of that studio, with scraps of memos and release dates for the material, wrapped up in a narrative explaining who the people behind Pim & Francie were and what they did. Columbia provides none of that here. All he gives us is the art: sketches, torn comics pages, random animation cells, model sheets, sketches for background art or covers, isolated vignettes, things that might be comics panels or might not. All of it is only barely in sequence, if at all. No stories are complete; no stories are explained; no stories are more than a handful of isolated moments.

Pim and Francie's world is full of death and mayhem of all kinds: self-inflicted, since we see these "children" being horribly cruel to themselves and others; supernatural, with the child-snatching Cinnamon Jack and some kind of forest-dwelling demon-witch they call "grandma;" and just plain human, as in the knife-wielding Bloody Bloody Killer. Pim and Francie are occasionally perpetrators, often about to be victims, and regularly onlookers at something that is about to happen. The overall town is of ominousness and menace; this is a world stuffed top to bottom with horrible things, and there can be no end to them, no safe place for children...or for whatever Pim and Francie actually are. Sometimes they're with what seem to be friendly, loving grandparents -- but those are also clearly ineffectual and unable to protect the moppets from the horrors of the world.

Pim & Francie is a monument to something, but it's hard to say what. It's a window into an alternative world of entertainment, one more sadistic and cruel than our own, presented as torn pages, coffee-ring stained art, and random scraps. I don't know if Columbia has an overall vision for this project: if there's anything larger than a bunch of horrific and ominous moments. But the moments he has presented here are powerful, and the atmosphere is like no other book I know. And he's a killer draftsman in that rubber-hose '30s style. If all that intrigues you, you might as well check it out. There is nothing else like Pim & Francie.

Book-A-Day 2018 #343: B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vols. 11-13 by Mike Mignola and various collaborators

Mike Mignola's fictional world is big and capacious; I find I come back to it intermittently and in big clumps, rather than trying to keep up with all of the strands as comics or books are published.

So this will only be the third post I've had on the B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth overall storyline, even though that's been running since 2010: I hit the first three books in 2014 and then the next seven a year later. And there have already been two more books published to finish up Hell on Earth since then -- plus one to start up the next account of the ongoing apocalypse, The Devil You Know.

(Other, related stuff: the last two Abe Sapien books this May, a bunch of earlier Abe books in 2015, and a link to random posts on single volumes.)

This lassitude may have to do with the bleakness of this storyline: Hellboy may have died stopping the immediate end of the world, and some people may be still alive, but the Apocalypse has happened and gigantic alien monsters rampage across the world, tens of stories tall and mostly invulnerable to whatever conventional weaponry is left. It's hard to root for the people fighting the rearguard action so at least a few people can die of more natural causes before humanity is inevitably snuffed out.

These three books are more closely related than the big middle of Hell on Earth was -- this picks up on the thread of some of them with the new Hulk-ish Black Flame and his rule of NYC, and actually sees our heroes of the BPRD attack him directly. (They've been so defensive so for long -- quick! go to this place where an apocalypse megafauna has appeared and kill it, at whatever cost! -- that it's surprising to see them actually plan something.) As has been usual for a while, all three books are written by Mignola with John Arcudi, and there are different art teams for each story arc.

So the eleventh volume, Flesh and Stone, with moody art from James Harren, has the usual interrelated stories -- Fenix and Panya and the rest back at BPRD HQ in Colorado, trying to run the war and start a vegetable garden (because supply chains, as I've been complaining for a few years, have got to be blown to hell by now); a strike team under Johann clears out a small town while taciturn field agent Howards get some kind of magical power boost; sometime back in prehistory, a guy who looks just like Howards gets some monster-fighting experience and, yes, a magical power boost; Russia is getting overrun with the giant monsters and deathless Director Iosif is considering releasing Varvara; and the Black Flame is doing some kind of strange experiments in NYC with his team of soldiers and scientists.

But those stories do seem to be moving closer together, even in this volume, and things happen that aren't just "monster appears, kills a couple of field agents, and is defeated at great cost."

The next book is Metamorphosis, focusing on Johann: he's creeping his men out with his habit of using their corpses during field ops, and that's not surprising. Through a complicated series of events in two time periods, he tries to enter the vril armor from Sledgehammer 1944 -- yes, every last little bit of the Mignola-verse is connected; you can't avoid reading any piece of it if you like any of it. The art for the first three issues collected here is by Peter Snejbjerg, which is a bit too crisp and standard-comics for my eye, and the last two issues are drawn by Julian Totino Tedesco, who is closer to the doom-haunted standard BPRD look.

Then End of Days feels like it's wrapping up at least some of those plotlines: Liz Sherman and Johann in his new fancy suit (Spoilers! I guess) have a big fight scene with the Black Flame in NYC, which ends up feeling like more of a win that the BPRD has gotten in a long time. But, of course, at the same time one of the actual Ogdru Jahad -- a mountain-sized creature, one of seven gods of the apocalypse, and not just their merely monstrous spawn -- has manifested in Kansas, and even the new Liz & Johann team can't touch it. The other plotlines from Flesh and Stone move forward, though -- Howards, Iosif and Varvara, Fenix and Panya -- so maybe they will together provide some hope for the last two volumes. This one is drawn by Laurence Campbell, who is the very moodiest and darkest of the current gang of BPRD artists -- that's entirely appropriate, and works well.

This is still a lot of middle -- and, worse for any potential new readers, middle separated by a couple of dozen books from any beginning. You could potentially begin at the start of Hell on Earth, ten volumes earlier, but that was very middle itself. Really, to get here, you need to start at the beginning of BPRD and Abe Sapien at the very least, and probably Hellboy. This is an intricate and detailed world, but that means that there's a lot of backstory. Every reader needs to decide if getting into that detailed world is worth it -- particularly when so many of the details are so horrific.