Robin D. Laws' NEW TALES OF THE YELLOW SIGN

Man, do I love me some King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers' most famous contribution to the Weird Fiction milieu of the early 20th century. "The Repairer of Reputations" is one of my favorite short stories of all time, with its bizarre blend of off-the-wall "predictions" (it was written in the late 19th century, and set in the "future" of 1920 and not a breath of any such thing as a World War, with or without a Roman numeral, appears, for instance), familial/"dynastic" intrigues, unreliable narration, cosmic horror mythology and the titular character himself -- man, that stuff never fails to delight me.

So yeah, I'm one of those people who lost her freaking mind when I realized the first season of True Detective was totally throwing around bits of Yellowiana like "lost Carcosa" and the Yellow King. Wish there'd been more of that. I'd be totally down for TD having continued to explore a world in which, say, some idiot Hollywood producer greenlights a lavish feature film adaptation of "The King in Yellow"* and mass insanity sweeps the globe, and whatnot. Alas.

But I'm not alone, obviously, because here we have it! New Tales of the Yellow Sign brings the Yellow King/Carcosa mythos into the 21st century, kind of like Amanda Downum's Dreams of Shreds and Tatters did last year. Except more so. So much more so.

The stories herein draw a great deal on the alternate history outlined in "The Repairer of Reputations", using it as a jumping off point for re-imagining the 20th century the way Harry Turtledove might if he wanted to write Weird Fiction. Thus, while the World Wars we remember don't happen, variations on them do, but result, not in the rise of the modern secular/democratic nation-state, but in a tightening of the grip of hereditary monarchy, or of totalitarian dictatorship. Or both. The dystopian feel of a Police State is an undercurrent in every page of these tales, giving them an extra helping of dark glamor they didn't really need, being Yellow Sign stories and thus plenty darkly glamorous already, but do just fine with.

There's probably a little something for everyone here. Usually at this point, when I'm writing about a short fiction collection, I highlight a few of my favorites for special praise, but it's been more than a week since I finished this for the first (but I guarantee not the only) time, and I still can't sort out what my favorites were. Which is to say that I liked them all. Laws pulled off a tour de force of expanding and updating Chambers strange little throwaway alter-verse, and I hope to Hastur he's not done doing so.**

*To clarify, the short story collection of Chambers' that inspired all this is called The King in Yellow. One of the matters the KiY mythos, which figures in just three of the stories, covers, is the existence of a play called "The King in Yellow" which basically evokes cosmic otherworldly supernatural forces by its very text or performance and drives everybody who reads it, let alone sees it, insane forevermore.

**And yeah, I know he's busy inventing amazing award-winning games and writing modules for other games and hosting and appearing as a guest on podcasts and whatnot but, hey, he started it. Nyah.

Stepan Chapman's THE TROIKA

This one came to me via Story Bundle's Weird Fiction bundle, and it sure is! It's maybe the weirdest thing I've encountered since The Bed Sitting Room, and I don't mention that crazy film/play by mere chance.

The Troika, quite unlike the Alastair Reynolds book by the same name that I just adored, is only science fiction in that it takes place on some other planet with three purple suns and seemingly endless desert. So, you know, think Jaku or Tatooine or...

No, it's nothing like those, either.

This is WEIRD, weird fiction, you guys. Something more akin to, say, magic realism than the big cosmic space operas that are a staple of my reading. Because get this.

There are three characters, and only three, and they are a car, a dinosaur and an elderly Mexican woman. That's right. A jeep (with solar panels and whatnot to allow it to run indefinitely, and I do mean indefinitely) named Alex, a brontosaurus named Naomi, and a leathery, white-haired woman named Eva. They're on an eternal trek through an unknown desert for unknown reasons, and they have been for centuries. Oh, and every once in a while a big ol' storm rolls through that, in addition to all of the annoyances and hazards one might reasonably expect from desert storms, also has the bonus effect of ripping the characters' souls out of their bodies and then dumping those souls back into one of the bodies at random. So, for instance, the first time it happens, Eva becomes the jeep and Alex the old lady, but Naomi stays a brontosaur. So right away, it feels like a sort of sister-story to The Bed Sitting Room; this could be what that family is like hundreds of years after it undergoes its strange transformations after Britain's "nuclear accident." But here, it's not played for laughs.

Got that?

Oh, and for added fun, they tend to refer to themselves as a family, with Eva ("originally" the old lady) as the mother, Alex ("originally" the jeep, but carrying with him memories of working in a warehouse in 20th century Chicago on good old planet Earth) as the father, and Naomi (brontosaur) as the daughter. And they bicker like family. They bicker like only a nuclear family that's been stuck with one another for hundreds of years can bicker. Like a family utterly dependent on one another (but, it seems, especially on whomever's inside the brontosaur body, which has to pee every night in the jeep's radiator and feed some of her lichen-cud to the old lady every night, too).

Told you it was weird.

But what all that described weirdness does not convey is what weirdly compelling fiction it is. And how well it all just works. Which is to say that The Troika is a textbook example of surrealism done right. Dream sequences blend into schizophrenic episodes blend into (kind of) straight narrative, all at the same high level of prose artistry and competence. No matter how strange a passage gets (an early Aztec-flavored dream sequence full of fish-headed men and women of various species sacrificing one of our characters in spectacularly weird and grotesque fashion, being a good example of this. For instance), it has an underlying logic and coherence. Everything is a metaphor. Nothing is a metaphor. The reader kind of gets to choose at what level to take things as metaphorical.

Amanda Downum's DREAMS OF SHREDS & TATTERS

It's not in any way a secret that Dreams of Shreds & Tatters is meant as author Amanda Downum's extension of the Yellow King/Carcosa mythos developed by Robert W. Chambers and played with by the likes of Machen and Lovecraft. Just look at the cover. Indeed, I entered into this worried that it might all be a bit too on-the-nose and in-your-ribs. But I trusted the people who recommended this to me and kept going, and found it all no more unsubtle than the first season of True Detective in that regard.

I won't say that Downum has achieved a perfect modernization of Chambers weird oeuvre, for all its concern with artists and galleries and the new Europe of Canada, but rather that Downum has achieved something I find actually quite more satisfying; she's tackled the Yellow King as Tim Powers would, bringing the weird and the uncanny and the unholy and the numinous squarely into a plausible modern setting, peopled with sympathetically sketched modern characters who are themselves dealing with modern issues. All while extending the touchstone mythos just enough, and blending it beautifully with "real" mythology, chiefly the stories of Orpheus and the Maenads.

Downham's King is thoroughly part of the Yellow Book tradition. As one of the other archetypal figures we encounter describes him: "The King fancies himself a patron of the arts but he'll take anyone he can, anyone talented and foolish enough to find this place. He offers them visions. If they survive that he gives them power. In exchange for service."

The first to succumb to the King in Yellow's blandishments is Blake, a promising young artist who followed a lover and the prospect of greater recognition for his talents to Vancouver, where he has fallen in with a gallery owner, Rainer, who is more than he seems. But it's only when Liz, the best friend he left behind, follows her nightmares as to his fate across the continent to that city that we even begin to see Blake's true predicament: under Rainer's guidance, he has created a work of art that bridges the gap between the world of the King in Yellow and our own. By the time Liz catches up with Blake, his lover is dead and he's in a coma. And Rainer and girlfriend Antje are not being super forthcoming about all that.

Then there's Rae, sort of this book's Dondi Snayheever, a young goth-ish woman who has gotten hooked on it substance called Mania, which brings its users to the parallel and horrible world of Carcosa, here imagined as a city on a doomed planet orbiting the red giant star Aldebaran. It's in describing Rae's experiences that Downum really goes batty with the prose (which, really, you're going to read this novel for the prose and imagery more than for anything else):

"A shudder wracked her, strong enough to bring her to her knees, doubled over on the cold floorboards. Darkness spread through her veins, blue - black worms squirming under the skin of her wrists. Her teeth tingled and her mouth tasted of copper.* Her jaw ached with the effort of holding back a wild bacchanal cry."

No one escapes unscathed, including the reader. If, like many left hankering for more of his Yellow Majesty after last year's televisual exploration, or if you're getting antsy waiting for Tim Powers to crank out something new, check this one out. It'll take the edge off those cravings for a bit. It worked for me!

*These people taste copper a lot, by the way.

Netflix Finds: Erik Eger & Magnus Oliv's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF EVIL

I like a mockumentary almost as much as I like a documentary, especially when it's got lots of layers of complete WTFery. So I'm pretty much exactly the audience for something like Erik Eger & Magnus Oliv's One Hundred Years of Evil, which concerns itself with a (fictitious) researcher and documentary filmmaker's pursuit of proof that Adolf Hitler not only survived World War II but came to America and continued to mastermind evil in his adopted homeland.

The fun starts right in the opening credits, where we keep seeing an improbable yet euphonious name over and over again: Idelfonso Elizade, named as the auteur but not, it turns out, an actual person. But soon we're immersed in stranger things as our researcher character, Skule (quoth my roommate "Dude, I wish I had a name as cool as Skull") starts unearthing secret after secret, his discoveries and interviews intercut with "found footage" in which, for instance, our maybe-Hitler sitteth on the (camera) right hand of Joseph McCarthy almighty, bobbing his head right along with everybody's favorite Red Scare menace as he lectures about the insidious threat of Communism in post-war Amurrka or makes a brief and totally deadpan stage appearance with a troupe of transsexual singers for whom he served as a roadie for a while.

Meanwhile, Skule starts getting harassed by unseen forces eager to keep the truth hidden and starts getting entertainingly paranoid in an almost Blair Witchian fashion. And the hilarity continues. My roommate and I laughed our asses off. You might, too.

If I have a criticism, it is only this: too many of the performances were a little too on the nose, spoiling the illusion that this actually was a documentary. No one ever made the amateur mistakes of looking into the camera, no one ever stumbled or paused in delivering their lines, it was all just a little too perfect, and thus obvious that these were actors playing crazy sources and not just crazy sources. But perhaps that, too, was intentional, a further sending up of the documentary format and its conventions? I'm just not sure.

Ned Beauman's BOXER, BEETLE #OneBookAtATime

Nazis! Nazi memorabilia collectors! Boxers! Boxing promoters! Insects! Entomologists! Sufferers of trimethylaminuria! People who have to work with and smell them!The ecosystem of Ned Beauman's Boxer, Beetle is complicated and repulsive, but wound up not being quite as compelling as other reviewers have made it sound.

The novel intertwines two narratives and two timelines in the now-classic format of a historical narrative being chased down by a modern explorer. In the 21st century, we have a young man named Fishy (so named for his unfortunate, genetically-determined body chemistry and the odors it produces), who conducts internet auctions of historical artifacts at his day job, and has a special sideline in the Nazi memorabilia trade for a hobby, and whose latest mysterious pursuit (alongside a nasty gun-toting freelancer who is killing his way to a new find) leads him to start exploring the story of a British entomologist, fascist and eugenics enthusiast and the diminutive Jewish boxer whom the entomologist manipulates into becoming the subject of some, err, special research in 1936.

Trimethylaminuria is neither played up for laughs (something I was kind of expecting-with-a-cringe from the novel's earliest pages) nor presented as a subject for our compassion or pity (though in real life lots of sufferers wind up committing suicide as a result of the social isolation it tends to impose, the Gordon Crisps of the world aside) as it stands in, in the modern timeline, for all of the things about humanity eugenicists want to eliminate (in 1936, of course, they're much more blatant and reprehensible about it). For Fishy it's just a fact in his life, albeit one that has dealt him out of the reproductive sweepstakes far more effectively than anything the eugenicists of yesteryear would have dared to dream of. He's got bigger concerns as the novel unfolds, like surviving and escaping from his weird captor. Or so it would seem as the novel gets going, but then Fishy and the gunman disappear except for quick and pointless interludes. Fishy's disorder winds up being kind of a punchline for the novel, but otherwise, there really isn't much point to his being in it. Which is a shame.

Meanwhile, Philip Erskine's story (1936) is a study in multiform ickiness, not because he specializes in  carrion-eating/carnivorous insects,  but because of his and his family's matter-of-fact fascism and anti-semetism and, while we're at it, classism. For Erskine is a character straight out of Michel Houellebecq, that French novelist I so love to hate and hate to love. Amid all of his other passions and pretenses are little observations like this one, made while he tries to address the difficult problem of how to masturbate when sharing a cabin and a bed with a professional colleague: "Why couldn't one just go to the doctor every month to have one's semen, this irrational fluid, syringed off like the pus from a boil."

This long before he is shown regarding a semen sample demanded from his boxer specimen as "ootheca", a term usually reserved for the egg case of members of that insect family that contains mantises and cockroaches, thus demonstrating just how human he thinks Seth Roach isn't (and lest one think Roach is by any stretch of the imagination a sympathetic figure or victim, he's just biding his time until he can go out again and get rip-roaring drunk and beat the crap out of whatever "toff" is foolish enough to take him home. There's rough sex, and there's what Roach does. Yikes.).

So, like Arslan before it in my reading this year, this is a fairly repellent and ugly book, but this time unredeemed by beautiful prose. Beauman takes great, gleeful pleasure in giving us a close look at some of the greatest ugliness humanity has ever produced, and at the people who allowed it to flourish largely because they were happy to admire it from a distance. Erskine, for instance, is, in addition to all the other icky things he is, such a fan of Adolf Hitler's that he goes so far as to breed a stronger, nastier, more belligerent strain of an eyeless beetle he originally discovered in a cave in the Poland the Fuhrer is soon to invade, all so that there might be an insect worthy of being named after his hero.

And then there's the boxer, all four foot eleven of him, nine-toed Seth Roach, descended from immigrants chased away by pogroms from the environs of the cave where Erskine found his breeding stock, the kind of gay man who embraces the idea that his preferences are considered perversions and who not only lets himself get roped into being Erskine's study subject, but into coming along to a fateful conference that is supposed to be about artificial languages (think Esperanto, only weirder and more fiddly) but winds up being something rather more vile.

But hey, sometimes, at least, Boxer, Beetle is funny, as when we come, midway through the book, to a description of Erskine's ancestral home, which his father had determined to modernize so thoroughly that it would still be modern in a hundred years. Rube Goldberg isn't in it. I could have maybe used more of this kind of thing for my tour through the slime -- especially in a novel that is promoted as "hilarious." Had I been looking for belly laughs instead of bugs, I might have been annoyed at the paucity of the former (as it was, I could have used more of the latter, but that's what Daniel Evan Weiss' debut was for. And Tyler Knox's for that matter). As it stands, well, this is the first novel of a young man of undoubted talent but who maybe bit off a bit much for his first project. His second, The Teleportation Accident, was long-listed for the Man Booker this year, and sounds interesting enough for me to give it another chance, but on the strength of the subject matter more than of his writing as I've seen it so far.

Anyway, it doesn't sound like it's quite as filthy.

Richard Lester's THE BED SITTING ROOM

The Bed Sitting Room Directed by Richard Lester



Damn it, I'm pretty sure I just went insane. Either that or Richard "Superman II" Lester did back in 1969. Or both.

I like a weird movie. Terry Gilliam always makes me smile, and never so much so as in Brazil (except maybe also Twelve Monkeys). Alejandro Jodorowsky makes me scratch my head in (mostly) that good way. Stanley Kubrick is always entertaining, especially when he's romping through Doctor Strangelove. And long have I been a Monty Python fan -- so long I can't remember not being one. Because my mother is that awesome.

While I can't say I've ever seriously asked myself what would happen if we took all of the above, ran it through a blender (with a good dose of the Philip K. Dick of Dr. Bloodmoney) and filmed the result, it would appear that someone else did -- and many years before a lot of that stuff even existed: in 1969 Richard Lester, who would later make two Christopher Reeve Superman movies and a lot of other junk, teamed up with the original authors of the stage play, Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, and made this utter farce, The Bed Sitting Room.

The Bed Sitting Room is an absurd picaresque that follows a handful of characters through a Britain that has been utterly destroyed by a "nuclear misunderstanding" that may or may not have had its origins in a dispute over how much rent the nation owed the Chinese for continued occupancy of No. 10 Downing Street. Of the estimated 20 people who remain alive, the nearest in line to the throne is a Mrs. Etheyl Shroake, whose name and residence cause no end of metrical dilemmas to those who sing the revised national anthem and who looks most uncomfortable seated royally on a horse. Fortunately, she doesn't have to much as she is the least interesting figure, with the least screen time in the film. Yeah, it's like that.

What we have instead of a dotty suburban dame trying to rule the rubble is a family who live on a still-running train in the London Underground, who emerge into the wasteland above only when the parents finally decide it's time they found a nurse to help daughter Penelope have her baby -- she has been pregnant for 18 months after all. And that is not their only cause for hurry; whatever bomb destroyed Britain has left behind powerfully weird mutagens; a Peer is transforming into the titular bed sitting room, a sergeant into a dog, and as for Mummy and Daddy, well!

All of this madness is handled with pure British aplomb even as ridiculous lines are delivered: "I always knew my inside leg would lead to power" being, perhaps, my favorite, except, perhaps, when Peter Cook, in a move way prefiguring his iconic appearance in The Princess Bride, dons a mitre and performs a farcical wedding ceremony amidst the rubble of St. Paul's Cathedral.

And hey, it won a Hugo award!

To watch this film is to constantly wonder if it is real, so fantastic is its melange of ideas and images and slingshots into the boffo. It's streaming on Netflix right now; if you think you can stand this much awesome, you owe it to yourself to go have a look.

But avoid beverages unless you like spraying them all over the living room.