Michael Shea's MR CANNYHARME: A NOVEL OF LOVECRAFTIAN TERROR

"If he's sinking to hell, it's definitely to a poet's inferno."

I first encountered the weird fiction stylings of Michael Shea in an anthology, which included his short story "Fat Face" - but that tale is probably my least favorite entry in Cthulhu 2000 and my least favorite Michael Shea as well. While it contains most of the elements of Shea's oeuvre that people love -- seedy downtown life, inexplicable horrors, bizarre monsters and lots of moisture -- there was something about it that just made me say "eh," and move on.

Enter the venerable, the wonderful H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, in which Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey have been conducting their "Strange Studies of Strange Stories" for over a decade (and it took them most of it to come up with that tagline, bless them), one of the few shows out there of which I never skip an episode, teamed up with Patton Oswalt to evangelize the hell out of Michael Shea's explicitly Cthulhu Mythos fiction, collected now in a terrific volume called Demiurge: The Complete Mythos Tales of Michael Shea and I became a believer!

And yeah, "Fat Face" is not a good example of this stuff. 

With Mr. Cannyharme, we get to see if the combination of Michael Shea and the Cthulhu Mythos can sustain a whole novel. Spoiler: it totally, totally can.

The novel is written as an homage to one of Lovecraft's own stories, "The Hound." You know the one. The one in which the characters are terrified to discover that "the apparently disembodied chatter was in the Dutch language" (Italics very much HPL's). Mr. Cannyharme isn't just "The Hound but 1960s San Francisco," though. He employs "The Hound" as inspiration, as a springboard rather than a model to slavishly copy.

If anything, Mr. Cannyharme makes me think more of Fritz Leiber* than of Lovecraft, specifically Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, which pits a moderately successful but down-on-his-luck writer of novelizations of TV shows against a dead wizard whose magic was woven from the very geography of the city of San Francisco. 

Mr. Cannyharme takes place in that same city, several social classes down from the beautiful art deco apartment building of Leiber's tale. Shea's characters inhabit an old-fashioned transient hotel. Most of them are closer to death than they are to life with a few dazzling exceptions -- a pimp, Razz and especially his employee DeeAnn, who considers sex work to be the best work and has a good "tight five" of witticisms about it to break the ice and change the mind of anyone who thinks otherwise, are particularly fun to read about -- and none more so than the title character, a little old man bent almost double who shuffles around the city during the day handing out weird little tracts to people of his choosing, but otherwise keeps to himself. Or does he?

Pitted against the horrors, along with Razz and DeeAnn, are Jack, the hotel's graveyard shift desk clerk who is pounding out a novel on an old Olympic typewriter and pining for his ex-wife between calls to buzz in the hotel's residents after hours and to supply them with illegal drugs; a very haunted and lost young woman named Brittany who trades sexual favors for her rent (but only with Jack) and is in turn one of Jack's best customers for her comforting "blankie" of drugs that let her hide for a little while from the horrors of her abused childhood and her growing awareness that something really, really isn't right about their building; and a few side characters, such as the barely teenaged daughter of the hotel's perpetually bickering husband and wife managers, the Patels, who run the place on behalf of some richer Patels and turn a blind eye to the rest of the goings-on in the building.

Shea loved San Francisco, lovee especially its seedy underbelly, and it shows on every page. Street scenes full of hustlers and junkies and every other kind of low-life bring out the lyric poet in him for paragraph after paragraph of rhapsodies that are as intoxicating as the contents of Jack's little baggies.

But the drugs Jack is slinging these days are mostly uppers, so even when we're just enjoying the scenery, it's energetic and invigorating:

Down in the street outside the Hyperion, Jack just stands there a moment, taking in the early evening. The candy- colored neons are coming on, the signals blaze, all the tail-lights and headlights river and roar, and above it all a first shy star or two gleams in the purple sky. The sidewalks throng, the working stiffs -- many Latins and Easterners -- threading through the low-lifes... He's right where he should be.

But this is no Visit Beautiful San Francisco tourist copy. Zoom in on individuals and it's even more, ah, vivid:

Below the man's gaping mouth a second bloody mouth gapes still more widely. Sliced meat its lips, and gore its pendant spittle, hanging in crusty drapes down both the man's shoulders.

I mean, yuck, but I've also got to admire the craft, here. And it's this craft that is at the heart of the novel; Cannyharme first ensnares his victim-accomplices by means of poetry, possibly tailored to each reader, and some of those he so ensnares, if they've artistic pretensions already, themselves reach new heights of expression. And Shea doesn't just settle for telling us that their output has improved; he shows us exactly what they've written, indulging in even crazier word-lust and imagery in whole passages of demented verse that would be the best thing about this novel of everything else weren't so good.

And yes, I cried happy little tears for the little world of resistance the novel's handful of survivors build for themselves in the last chapter. Their victory is hard-won and temporary, but as in the denouement of almost all of Shea's Mythos stories, they know they have a fighting chance if they stick together. And keep an eye out for a being in a wildly patterned Hawaiian shirt. Oops, that last bit didn't age super duper well, but c'est la guerre. 

So yeah, Shea gives good novel. And my resolve is redoubled to keep seeking him out. I hear good things about this fella Nifft, for instance.

*But,  of course, Leiber was inspired by Lovecraft. He just hated the world a lot less than cranky, prejudiced misanthrope Howard did.