Lovecraftian Novels That Are Both Loving and Crafty: Part One

I don't always go in for H.P. Lovecraft pastiches and tributes, where authors or artists get to play with the Provincetown's denizen's Cthulhu mythos and have fun with his monsters, but lately, I have been drawn to them and have started seeking them out. The Lovecraft game is a fun one, and it goes like this; the majority of H.P. Lovecraft's work is n the public domain, hence the annual deluge of Lovecraftian goods, including books, short stories, statuettes, plush toys, video games, role-playing games and films. So any author who wants to play with his toys can.

In my recent reading, I have discovered some Lovecraftian tributes that are enjoyable treasures for anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the old boy’s Cthulhu mythos. These are Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground and I am Providence, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, Stephen King’s Revival and Victor Lavalle’s The Ballad of Black Tom. While each book is noteworthy in its own right, here are my impressions and analyses of Nick Mamatas’ novels. I'll get to reviewing the others in good time.

Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground (Simon & Schuster)

When I explained to a good friend that someone published a book that mashes up the Beat Generation holy trinity of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and the Cthulhu mythos, my friend assumed that book was written solely for me. This book is Move Under Ground. In Move Under Ground, Mamatas tells the yarn from Kerouac’s voice, jettisoning the use of Sal Paradise and other fictionalized names and pseudonyms that Kerouac employed in his sprawling, cadent works. Picking up at about the beginning of the novel Big Sur, Mamatas blends Lovecraftian monstrosities and cosmic horror with the rambling, run-on sentences and musings of a writer who has drunk too far, and is helpless to halt or even slow his decline.

Mamatas, on the horn, blows the tune in long, winding solos that carry Kerouac and Neal Cassidy across the U.S., pitting them against the cosmological forces of darkness that are sweeping across the country and, presumably, the world. Some sections are a little dense, but others are rewarding and beautiful, fusing facts about Kerouac’s life  and the Old Ones, the Deep Ones and Nyarlathotep. In one such instance, Kerouac treks into San Francisco from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin at Big Sur. However, Jack cannot hitch a ride from likely the very same people who snapped up On The Road, ensconced now in a middle-class suburban lifestyle and raising kids. This failed hitchhiking scene segues into an attack of the undead, with Kerouac trying to fend workaday zombies off. 

Spoiler Example of Solid Speculative Writing:
Hands down, my favourite scene involves Jack and Bill Burroughs trying to hop a train and ride the rails. For Ti' Jean, it's old hat to run up to a moving train car and leap on. But for Burroughs, this proves a complicated and daunting physical feat. Jack resorts to running with Bill and throwing him, actually freaking throwing him, at train cars, and concussing him  as a result.
End of Example of Solid Speculative Writing. Carry on....

It’s some trick to carry for an entire novel, but Mamatas nails Kerouac’s voice, his alcoholism and his musings and wanderings and wonderings, free-spirited sex, drugging and desperate quest for calmness, grounding it all in an all-out confrontation with old gods come to take back the Earth at last. The ending is bittersweet for anyone with knowledge of Kerouac’s decline. As it’s fall in the book and real life and I know that after Big Sur, Kerouac was too far down in an abyss of alcoholism to recover, living in the home he bought for Mamère with royalties from On The Road, and this inevitably saddens me. Still, I am impressed with the bizarre fusion Mamatas has succeeded at alchemizing. If only I’d thought of it first....

Nick Mamatas’ I am Providence (Simon & Schuster)

Clearly, Mamatas loves him some Lovecraft, even though Providence came out in 2016, twelve years after Under Ground, and in the acknowledgements he claims this will be his last Lovecraftian mythos novel. Here, Mamatas mercilessly satirizes the conference-going subculture set with a whodunit murder mystery set in Providence, Rhode Island, at the Summer Tentacular (a name I cannot help but grin about each time I consider it). As many other reviews have already indicated, the story has two beats, the murder victim whose face was sliced off in their hotel room, and Colleen Danzig, a conference-goer and up-and-coming weird fiction writer.

Many readers of the book draw comparisons between the lambasted fans or editors or writer and academics and the frequenters of these conferences (i.e.: the annual Necronomicon). A disclaimer: While I am progressively more familiar with Lovecraft’s work and him as a subject each passing year, I have never attended any of these events. However, I do recognize Danzig as a possible composite avatar (a Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassidy, if you will, as she is the novel's heroine) for prominent weird-fiction writer Molly Tanzer. The murder victim Panossian I see as a possible fictionalized Mamatas. Mamatas gently balks at these comparisons between his characters and real-life personalities, and that’s alright. Readers can draw their own conclusions. I should also add that I have never met either author.  

The book received flack from the Lovecraftian community, with some members railing against the thinly veiled composite depiction of its members. The novel has not endeared Mamatas to many of the Lovecraftian set, galvanizing some into the anti -camp or amusing readers in the pro-camp who enjoy the inside jokes and how Mamatas pokes fun at everyone, including himself, it should be noted. However, as a piece of fiction, it must stand on its own, and considered on its own merits.

The hilarious stand-offs between fans and writers, the depiction of theme parties where guests must guess which story the party theme is based on, and the panels arguing about Lovecraft’s sexism, which dismiss any female opinions in the room, however, ring true from other conferences I have attended.

Still, satirical or not, Mamatas writes with a keen eye for human foibles, a thread of post-mortem nihilism and sadness, and with an almost British sensibility for the absurd in describing his subjects. The ending’s a jilting one, but arguably reflects the perspective of the deceased. The cosmic horror aspect of the book is subdued background for the tableau of characters that Mamatas mercilessly satire. There’s fun in here, and sadness, and an obvious and tempered and conflicted love for Lovecraft. This, at the core of the novel, makes it worth the trip.

Both Move Under Ground and I Am Providence are dense with references and are worth pursuing, whether you are a fan of Jack Kerouac's writing, of the Beat Writers, of Lovecraft, of horror, or of whodunits. If you enjoy all these things, then you're in for rich and entertaining reads.