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.

Kij Johnson's THE DREAM-QUEST OF VELLITT BOE

I hadn't known how much I wanted to explore the world of H.P. Lovecraft's "Dream Cycle" alongside a middle-aged woman and an intrepid cat until I found myself doing so in Kij Johnson's absolutely delightful The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.

H.P. Lovecraft's famously weird (and unpublished in his lifetime, because not regarded by him as finished or even worth passing around to his friends) "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" has long been one of my favorite of his works, both for its underlying message that what most of us are discontentedly seeking beyond the everyday things of ordinary life, is actually that very same ordinary life properly understood and appreciated, and for its crazy imagery, its monsters, its perils, and its madcap, deadly armies of ghouls and Moon-beasts and kitty cats, who are fearless and fearsome in battle, the cats, and then, once the battle is over, instantly resume their more amusing pursuits of chasing leaves. And I'm really not much of a cat person, yo.

But so, Vellitt Boe. Right away she is a most un-Lovecraftian protagonist, for all that she is a Scholar (perhaps his very favorite profession): a professor of mathematics and science in the Women's College at the great, the ancient, the venerated University of Ulthar, a position she holds only with the greatest determination and discipline, for in Lovecraft's Dreamlands, of course, the idea of a female academic, of a female anything except for a witchy figurant, is unheard-of and absurd. In our world, a woman has to be twice as good to get half the respect a man does; in hers, those figures are blown right out of the water, both ways. But she's held on, and helped hold her little school together, creating a place where it's okay to be a smart, capable woman in Lovecraft's men-only imaginary world (which, because it's Lovecraft's Dream World, is also chock full of petty, capricious, moronic and devastatingly powerful gods that mess with things with such abandon that even, say, mathematical constants, to say nothing of things like physical measurements like distants, are subject to ridiculous variation and contstant change, making it extra hard for anyone, let alone a Lady Professor, to teach anything like math or science, really).

Until, until, a Dreamer comes along. Dreamers are, of course, people from our world, who visit Vellitt's in dreams, where they wield unbelievable power, radiate unbelievable charisma, frequently rise to the status of kings, if not godlings. And said Dreamer attracts the romantic interest of one of Vellitt's best students, and convinces her to run away with him to our, "real" world.

For reasons that aren't totally clear but that I immediately bought into because Dream Logic as well as Feminist Critique, the student's eloping with a Dreamer would spell disaster for the very existence of the Women's College (perhaps because it would reveal that even supposedly scholarly women are really, deep down, just looking for a husband to do all that hard thinking and planning and deciding for them and expose the whole idea of educating women as a wasteful scam?), so even before some Big Secrets are revealed, it becomes clear that the student must be retrieved and persuaded against her lover at all costs.

So off goes Professor Boe, who, before she settled down and got educated and became a professor, was a long-distance traveler and explorer, and also happens to be an ex of one Randolph Carter (hero of the Lovecraft story that inspired this tale), who once tried to pin her down as his forever "love" but whose love for her didn't actually respect her personhood or existence as anything apart from a placeholding figment of his dreams. Did I mention feminist critique? This is feminist critique, you guys.

But it's also a cracking good story, and a lovely one. Johnson's fondness for Lovecraft's amazingly detailed and thoroughly imagined Dreamlands quite possibly exceed my own, and she makes of Vellitt Boe's journey through them in quest of a way into the Waking World an absolute delight to read. A lot of familiar creatures and places are encountered along the way without ever feeling like retreads, and the refreshing character of Vellitt herself is one I'd read any number of stories to share.

I'm not someone who spends a lot of time or energy worrying too much about Representation in literature. I'm just in it for the fun stories and the writing. But even so, it sure is nice to see someone like me, a middle aged single, childless woman whom society is constantly questioning the worth of, at center stage in an adventure/quest story. Even if she isn't kicking ass (but here, she does. Oh yes, she does. Lady is pretty deadly with a sharpened piece of obsidian).

More, please.

Doctor, Doctor: Mark Morris' FOREVER AUTUMN

Sweet Jeebus, there's a lot to like about Forever Autumn. A lot! Like, it would be a great seasonal read, a fun horror novel, all on its own, without its being a Doctor Who novel. But, sigh, it's not only a Doctor Who novel, it's a Tenth Doctor, Doctor Who novel.

Forever Autumn -- and see, I even love the title! -- blunders right into Lovecraft territory (albeit modern day Lovecraft territory, a smallish* New England town with a history of weird stuff, a mysterious black tree, etc.) and acts like it owns the place. Kids have the wild hair to dig at the roots of the mysterious black tree, which is so ancient there are Native American legends about how it got there, and dig up a mysterious, creepy, kind of "fleshy" book full of strange names and lettering. It emits a weird green glow, and soon the town is enveloped in creepy green mist. Then tall, thin, tree-like skellingtons are walking around town at night throwing the whammy on unsuspecting citizens. I mean, hell yes!

But then the Tenth Doctor, and his beautiful but boring-as-paint-drying companion, Martha Jones, show up, and start mugging for our attention. And here's the flaw. Novels and Big Finish have rehabilitated Doctors that I've not been too fond of for me, so I had at least some expectation that maybe this, my first Tenth Doctor novel, would maybe do the same. But no.

This book managed to make the Tenth Doctor worse! As portrayed by David Tennant -- who has been marvelous in everything else I've seen -- the Doctor is frenetic, twitchy, disconnected (if the Ninth Doctor is the PTSD Doctor, the Tenth is the ADHD Doctor. Unmedicated) and shouty. He's a distraction rather than a star or a protagonist.

As written, he's all of these things, but turned up to eleven (heh). Author Mark Morris must have been under special orders to emphasize all of these qualities, because in these pages the Doctor can't stand or sit still for even 30 seconds. Maybe because, without an actual actor with biology and whatnot to accommodate, there really are no limits to how spastic he can be? When he doesn't even have to take a breath?

I dunno.

What saved this book for me -- remember, to date I've only ever DNF'd one Doctor Who novel -- was the setting, and the incidental characters. The kids are kind of stock characters, but have personality enough to be enjoyable; the early victim of the novel's main monsters is compassionately portrayed (bonus that one of the kids knows better than to take him lightly as a figure of fun), and the novel's temporary companion, an elderly woman whose family has always had something a bit witchy about them, is a delight. Like I said, this would have been a fine, possibly Bradbury-ish read without the Doctor Who elements.

The climax is fun if kind of telegraphed from a long way off (*cough* Chekov's Evil Clown Costume *cough*), the monster-aliens, a delightfully weird riff on the Pumpkinhead, are cool and genuinely creepy and the book quite a good read. I would have absolutely adored it with pretty much any other Doctor/Companion team; as it is, I merely liked it a lot.

As for my Arbitrary & Mercurial rankings, they don't change a lot. I just get to add a few elements.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis

Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth
Third
Eleventh
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Romana II
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Nyssa
Samantha

Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric

Rose
Peri
Ian
*Most of you would probably drop the "ish" but I'm from a town with a population under 1600 souls, and spend a lot of time in even smaller burgs, so this town, which is apparently populated enough to allow a year-round dedicated costume shop to not only survive but flourish, it's small-ish. In a true small town, you make your own costumes, or you buy them at the nearest big box store (well over 100 miles away) or luck into them at a second-hand joint if your town's business community manages to support such a thing.

Ian Tregillis' NECESSARY EVIL

So, here's me, tucking into the third volume of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed Triptych after having thought for two volumes that I was reading a trilogy of cool Lovecraft-flavored alternative history where bio-mechanically engineered Nazi uberpeople were pitted against heroic British warlocks, only to finally, finally penetrate the fact that what I've really been reading this whole time is the ultimate Phildickian exploration of what it would really mean to the world as a whole if an actual honest-to-Yog pre-cognitive had surfaced in our midst, by whatever means, ca the early 20th Century. Well, that and a little time travel thrown in, so said pre-cog can correct some things she missed the first pre-time pre-around. As it were.

Gretel, Gretel, Gretel. The Romany girl who was warped into being able to see all of time, but was so warped by the very people who were busily exterminating entire races of people, including her own, so developed an extreme instinct for self-protection and so searched every possibility in all of World War II for the best possible outcome for her except WHOOPS there was one WORLD ENDING WHOOPS end result that she hadn't really seen (or hadn't really taken seriously) and so for her last trick she manipulates another of our main characters, poor old Raybould Marsh, into making HIS last trick a trip into a whole new universe that... Look, I'm spoiling bits of the first two books here, but like the warning on the very top of this blog says, WARE SPOILERS.

Anyway, suffice it to say that in this new universe, it is World War II all over again, and, in this universe, there are now two Marshes, the one "born" in this universe and the much older, spectacularly scarred, embittered, sad, lonely and really kind of hopeless Marsh that survived Bitter Seeds and The Coldest War. To assist the reader, sad old Marsh's passages are told in the first person, while era-approriate Marsh stays in the third person. But to further twist the reader's brain, we get long passages from Gretel's multiplied points of view -- a difficult narrative feat that Tregillis pulls off very well, which is good because otherwise this book would just be a hot mess instead of a satisfying conclusion to this series.

What really sells me on this last book is that this brave new world is pretty much exactly our world, as far as historical events go. In Gretel's and Old Marsh's world, for instance, the Little Ships never happened, and Britain lost an entire army at and around Dunkirk. Which means that we really are seeing that the world Gretel couldn't mess with is the "real" world*. I dig this. I dig this right to the hot melty bits.

*Except there are still warlocks and Enochian and Eidolons and stuff in it. They've just been circumvented by, uh, [REDACTED]. He.

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.

Ian Tregillis' BITTER SEEDS

If Tim Powers and H.P. Lovecraft somehow managed to reach out to one another across the dark and malevolent vastness of time and space to write a cosmic horror story set in World War II, the result might be something very like Bitter Seeds, the first volume of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed trilogy (or triptych, as the marketers of these books seem to insist on calling it).

Of course, Powers did write a World War II novel all his own, the wonderful spies-and-genies romp Declare, of which it was difficult not to think while following the adventures of Milkweed (itself so very reminiscent of Mike Mignola's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, of Hellboy fame) and their unspellable (I'm lazy and lacking bandwidth so I'm not gonna look it up) Nazi German counterparts. Fortunately, I was not making the comparison to Tregillis' detriment; Bitter Seeds is as enjoyable as any Powers novel, and as well written, even though it's telling a very different tale.

The story begins at the tail end of World War I, when unsavory types are scouring the battle-ravaged countryside of Belgium and surrounding lands, harvesting orphans like so many rotting cabbages. Some weird doctor, one Westcarp, is paying good money for young children delivered to his orphanage. Several children, including a brother and sister, Klaus and Gretel, are so delivered to their sinister and mysterious fate.

Meanwhile in England, a boy about their age is subjected to mysterious and unsavory experiences under the supervision of his noble grandfather, a duke, whose son one presumes was a casualty of war but at least died with the requisite heir and a spare. The boy getting experimented with -- Will -- being, of course, the spare.

The Germans, led by Westcarp, it turns out, are trying in their mechanized and industrial way, to duplicate the magical milieu of Will and his grandfather, who, we learn, are warlocks. Warlocks being humanity's self-appointed negotiators with the Eidolons*, who arrange the "blood price" that has to be paid whenever somebody wants to break the laws of physics. Usually it's just a fingertip, occasionally it's your sanity, etc. -- really just depends on how big a violation you're wanting to effect.

The negotiations are carried out in a terrible, mind-bending language called Enochian, which you can only learn if you start really, really, young -- hence Will's weird childhood.

But Westcarp is not down with that ish. Westcarp has decided that electricity can take the place of Paranormal Pimsleur. And so Gretel and Klaus and their fellows wind up with wires surgically implanted in their skulls, connecting their brains to batteries they have to tote around in order to use the powers they have honed through years of unspeakable experimentation.

So yeah, English wizards versus Nazi cyborgs. What's not to love?

And I'm not even touching on the character drama, of course, which is where Tregillis comes closest to Powers' style and substance. If you love Powers' stories, you're going to love this. If you love mid-century settings. If you love wizardry. If you love war stories. If you love Nazi Weird Science schlock. There's something for pretty much everybody here.

And it's all set up for the next novel, in which, naturally, the Soviets are obviously going to be much more involved. They want to violate the laws of physics too, you guys. Which path will they take? Or will they forge a new one as we head into a Lovecraftian Cold War.

I'm so down to find out. So very down.

Many thanks to the wondrous Paul Weimer (@PrinceJvstin on Twitter), who told me about these books over a cup of coffee on a whistle stop visit last summer.

*This is where the Lovecraft comes in, of course, in that the Eidolons are basically Great Old Ones, unknowably vast alien inimical Others who exist on such a scale that we are like bacteria to them, and they're pissed off because they're all out of hand sanitizer.

Podcasting Zelig: You thought I was kidding?

On a lot of my online profiles I refer to myself as a "podcast crasher." I've allowed my own podcast to fade because it's a lot of work and I've got no local help, but I still get a kick out of doing stuff on other people's podcasts.

Above is my latest appearance, in the triumphant return of "Calls for Cthulhu", the Great Old One's call-in talk show. I asked a very provocative question -- so provocative that Cthulhu, in his terrible rage, admitted that he is responsible for the film version of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

If this is your first time seeing this great little show, check out the rest at the creator's YouTube channel.

Other 'casts I have crashed include...

Orange Alert - reading an awesome story by Jeremy C. Shipp

Several appearances on Shadowcast Audio, a horror anthology podcast - reading stories by Shipp and other authors.

I've also had bit parts in a few podcast novels over at Podiobooks.com, including that of a distraught mother who needs the heroine's help in Starla Hutchins' lovely fantasy novel The Dreamer's Thread.

And of course there is my own podcast, now mostly defunct, but it may soon revive in a weird form late in the year. See if it doesn't.

I love doing story narration and voice-overs and am always happy to help. If you need me, find me on Twitter.