Sorry to say I’m still not ready to start posting again BUT I have 12 pages inked and lettered. I grab a half hour here and forty-five minutes there. It’s hard to work up a head of steam. I think I said this before, but I’m aiming to finish the current sequence I’m on (it’s keeps growing) but should have it wrapped up in another two weeks. Then I will go back and start coloring, and as soon as I have enough in the bank to know that I won’t run into a situation like this last one again, I’ll start posting. No firm date just yet, but as soon as possible.
My mom continues to hang in there, though she is slipping away slowly. Fortunately, not a lot of pain.
Most of the reading I’ve done lately has been for my MFA, so there hasn’t been a lot of genre stuff on the agenda. Stephen King’s 11/22/64 was a snooze, and I’m in the middle of World War Z, which strikes me as more of a great marketing concept than a good read. I’m finding it pretty dull going, not so much from the clichés of zombie stories but from the pedestrian prose.
On the plus side, though, I just received my copy of S.T. Joshi’s I Am Providence, the two-volume HPL biography. At $100 it is an indulgence, but you have to do what you have to do. Don’t know when I’ll get time to read it.Oh, and here’s a word of waring for all of you who do business by mail: Delivery Confirmations are a waste of money and worse, a lie. I actually ordered Joshi’s book last month and it never arrived. I’ve dealt with the book dealer for years, great guy, and he sent me the tracking number. The Post Office shows that the book was delivered, so either someone stole it off my porch or it was delivered to someone else who didn’t bother to return it. I get multiple packages every week and I’ve never had one stolen before, so I think this is unlikely. I suppose someone could be lazy enough not to return a hulking big package that is addressed to someone else, but the real point of this is that all a Delivery Confirmation does is show that the package is delivered SOMEWHERE. They keep no other records, so for all we know it was left in a field somewhere. What the hell good is that? And here is the kicker: the USPS employee told me that the insurance I paid for ENDS with the delivery. So even though it was ‘delivered’ somewhere other than my front door, I am probably not going to be able to get the insurance for it. And they wonder why they are losing ground financially?
Anyway, have a good week. Until we meet again. Soon.
Hi, everyone. I thought it only fair to give you a little update. Things are still chaotic here, but I work on the book whenever I can. I have seven pages and most of an eighth inked and lettered, but coloring of course takes the longest. However, it’s also the easiest to do in short increments. To tell and pace a story, I have to get into a groove for a period. Doing a panel every other day keeps me all fragmented, but I am working it out. I’m right in the middle of a sequence now, with three-four pages left to go, so I’m going to finish that and then go back to start color. Still not going to set a date for the come back, but I wanted you to all know that it IS coming. And seriously, I think the best is yet to come. Keep the faith!
The Casebook of Miles Pennoyer by Margery Lawrence, Ash Tree Press, 2003
Excepting Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson, Margery Lawrence is far and away the best writer of those authors thus far examined in this series on occult detectives. Her evocations of location, from wild, rolling forests to conventional drawing rooms to the shattered remains of bombed-out London, and her ability to make some otherwise very unremarkable characters both believable and interesting deserves a big round of applause. Her stories in this volume are much longer than your standard occult detective tale, novellas more than short stories, and there are a scattering of moments of exquisite other worldliness and horror that rank with the best of the best.
All of which makes me wish that this talent had been used in the service of something beyond extended soap operas and occult pedagogy. While these six long stories, novellas really, are all eminently readable, they are still rather tame ghost or occult stories and don’t offer much to a horror fan.
Miles Pennoyer is a likeable, decent fellow, but, as usual, the least developed character in the series, as if possessing great psychic knowledge were enough. He is, for the most part, another know-it-all, though far less annoying than John Silence or Dr. Taverner. His chronicler, Jerome Latimer, is sharper and better developed than most of his kind, not quite so given to exclaiming “ Dash it all, Pennoyer, what the deuce is going on?”at every dip and turn in the investigation. He’s no more well-informed than Hubbard or Dodgson or the others, just more confident that his friend has things under control.
The Casebook of Miles Pennoyer is the first of two volumes collecting Lawrence’s Pennoyer stories. (Ash Tree Press has published three other collections of Lawrences’s supernatural fiction, The Floating Cafe, Nights of the Round Table and The Terraces of Night.) The second volume has not been scheduled as yet.
The first story, “The Case of the Bronze Door”, gets off to an eerie start as Pennoyer visits an old friend recently married and returned from the East. On his travels, the friend purchased a large antique Chinese bronze door and had it installed along one wall in his apartment. Since that time, trouble has been brewing between him and his wife, who loathes and fears the door.
Even Pennoyer can immediately see that his friend is obsessed with the door and the psychic doctor’s own keen senses detect a destructive force beyond the door. He knows that if he were to break the lock and open the door he would not find the wall behind it but the entrance to another world.
As Pennoyer relates the tale, he off-handedly refers to several of his technique, all of which are enticing : the Ritual of Hloh, the Min Yiu process, the Yimghaz test. None of these is ever mentioned again, at least in the five remaining stories.
The moment building to the opening of the door and its mysteries are first rate, reminiscent of the best Carnacki adventures. Any hopes for a thrilling denouement are quickly dashed, however, as the doors open and a beautiful Chinese princess enters the room. The story quickly devolves into that of a romantic triangle spread out over several reincarnations and thousands of years. Though the Chinese princess is fierce and obsessed with reclaiming her lost lover, Pennoyer sets things right by talking her out of it! It seems Pennoyer is also a reincarnated soul from that same period and at one time was the woman’s teacher. Pleading patience and the time needed for the young man to work out some misdeeds from his previous life, Pennoyer convinces the girl to go back behind the door and wait until the natural reunification on the psychic plane.
Yawn.
“The Case of the Haunted Cathedral” pretty much gives up its game in the title, and paints a pretty tedious portrait of the psychic detective’s job, essentially a prolonged stakeout. It’s the least affecting story in the collection. The dark reasons behind the haunting are strained and Pennoyer’s involvement in the climactic exorcism amounts to sitting in the pews while sending psychic support to the officiating priest.
One recurring Lawrence archetype in these stories is that of the money loving, social climbing, cold hearted upperclass bitch that tries to control all those around her for her own selfish ends. “The Case of Emma McLeod” presents the prime example of this in the character of Lady Angus, lately married to a friend of Pennoyer’s. She is one of the most powerful characters in the book, yet she serves little purpose in the story save to put pressure on her maid servant, the homely, love-starved and lonely Emma McLeod. Almost from the moment we see her tending the wounded paw of a stray dog in the forest, the denouement is clear. Pennoyer is at his most ineffective, a largely passive bystander who fails to offer any useful help to the maid despite his liking and sympathy for her. The story is not a failure; in fact, I enjoyed it despite its fairly preachy tone, but as an occult detective tale, its almost not worth noting.
“The Case of the White Snake” is another story that delivers an example of Lawrence’s prowess as a writer of the fantastic, offering an entertaining read and a few moments of true wonder despite an outcome that is fairly predictable and a plot which, minus its occult elements, would serve as a thread for As the World Turns. The coincidences which bring an unidentified orphan and her lost father together at a country orphanage run by Pennoyer’s cousin are minimized by believable, sympathetic characterizations, but the resolution could have been handled by any modestly talented detective.
At eighty pages, “The Case of the Young Man’s Scar” is the longest tale in the book, and again it is a testament to Lawrence’s writing skills that this otherwise tepid tale holds one’s attention. A young man with an unusual scar on his arm, a scar that lately has been turning red at odd moments, seeks Pennoyer’s aid. Unless the strange circumstances of the scar can be cleared up, the young man feels he cannot marry his true love, the daughter of one of Pennoyer’s old friends and fellow occultist.
Like A Study in Scarlet, the explanation is so complex that it is related as a story within the story, and while interesting, it also hovers just above that soap opera level with its romantic triangle and romanticized notions of ‘Red Indian’ mysticism. The standout character, Francine Legros, is the ultimate expression of Lawrence’s evil woman, driven by shallow yet powerful motives. But there is no terror in the story, just a mystery with occult overtones. Pennoyer has little to do but apply a few psychic balms along the way.
“The Case of the Leanabh Sidhe” has a climactic scene of terror that rivals the best of the best, though the story surrounding it, well written and told, is still a fairly drawn out tale of a changeling. Interestingly, Pennoyer gives a nod to the Electric Pentacle as a defensive device, but unable to use one in the wilderness where he he faces down the King of Fairies, he uses a Holy Rope instead. I have no idea if there is such a thing as an Electric Pentacle or whether this was a bit of a nod to Hodgson’s Carnacki, but it softened me a little more toward Pennoyer.
These stories first appeared after World War ii, and the war is referenced several times, but the spirit of times past inhabits every nook and cranny. A nostalgia for an England lost forever? Or simply the best setting for these types of tales?
In the end, if the tension and horror are what you seek, this is not the book for you. Pennoyer is more a psychic Marcus Welby than an adventure hero. These stories are the workof someone who, in a gentle but direct way, are advertisments for the occult cause. But if you’re a fan of genre fiction in general, you’ll pass a handful of enjoyable hours with Ms. Lawrence’s creation. I’m looking forward to the second volume, and to reading her other collections.
Shiela Crerar, Psychic Investigator, by Ella Scrymsour, edited by Jack Adrian, Ash Tree Press, 2006, in a limited edition of 500 copies, $44.00
Christopher and Barbara Rodens, the dedicated fanatics behind Ash Tree Press, bestow so great a gift on fandom by publishing rare and obscure supernatural fiction in beautifully designed limited editions that it seems almost curmudgeonly to write a less than glowing review of one of their books. But some works are obscure for 
a reason other than poor marketing. Much as I am personally glad to have all these stories to read, that doesn’t rescue the mediocre and worse from their lack of quality.
The six Sheila Crerar stories are a case in point. They first appeared in the Blue magazine from May to October, 1920. The Blue itself is so obscure that you are unlikely to ever run across a copy yourself outside of a very thorough English library, or the stacks of a major and long-time collector. The Crerar stories, along with most of the stories that appeared in the Blue, have never been reprinted. Unless the editors happened to get a cast-off story from a popular writer like A.M. Burrage, the quality level of the fiction was apparently snake-belly low.
But these six stories have been rescued from oblivion by Jack Adrian, and author Scrymsour manages to insert a number of interesting notions into her first several stories before running out of steam. And outside of Luna Bartendale, the psychic heroine of Jesse Douglas Kerruish’s The Undying Monster(1922), I can’t think of another female psychic sleuth, and certainly none prior to Sheila Crerar.
The first story, “The Eyes of Doom”, presents not only an origin story, however maudlin, but a few enticingly scary scenes. And over the course of the series, Sheila develops a shallow-as-veneer relationship with a smitten admirer, Stavordale Hartland(!) which culminates in marriage, officially ending the series (though some enterprising young author might consider picking that thread up and running with it. “Excuse me, dearest, supper shall be a bit late this evening as I have a gibbering spirit to lay to rest in the west of Scotland.)”
In “The Eyes of Doom,” where a young Sheila, perhaps 18 or 20 years old, has been left an ‘orphan’ by the death of her uncle, she turns to psychic sleuthing solely out of the need to put bread on the table. Leasing the ancestral manor of her uncle to pay off debts, she wonders how she will make a living and goes to London, where she finds there is no work to be had. As her account dwindles, she is approached by a mysterious, elderly man, never seen again, who advises her to use her psychic gifts for the benefit of mankind. With no better proposals on hand, she promptly puts an ad in the paper…and waits. And waits. And just when it seems like there will be no answer, she gets a summons to return to her beloved Scotland to put the ‘Kildrummie Weird’ out to pasture.
From that point on, the story devolves into a fairly stock ghost story, with generational deaths, ancestral misdeeds and spirits craving justice, except that the actual appearance of the weird itself is powerfully imagined:
As she sat, she became aware that someone was looking at her, and she turned sharply round.
A pair of eyes was gazing at her, eyes so mournful, so full of grief that Sjeila felt her own fill with tears of sympathy.
And as she met the piteous gaze, she became suddenly conscious of the fact that the eyes were not framed by a face! She rose with a startled exclamation of horror, and turned away, but to her right another pair of eyes appeared, eyes this time that were mad with hate; eyes so filled with loathing and malevolence that Sheila backed away from them in fear. But now the whole chapel seemed filled with the ghastly sight. Eyes with expression, eyes without! Eyes kind, eyes cruel! Eyes imbecile, eyes fanatical! Eyes with every expression in them that man could conceive.
Sheila put out her hands to beat the swelling mass away, but even as her arms were extended in front of her they were caught in a ghostly vise, and she was dragged to the vestry door.
“The Death Vapour” is so complex for a fifteen page story that it would take almost as long to describe it as to read it. The primary gimmick is the will of a recently deceased gentleman that stipulates his wife must remain in the house for a full year after his death in order to obtain the inheritance. Mysteriously, all the crucifixes have been removed from the house. Add a ghost that can only be seen in a shaft of moonlight, a vicious attack on Sheila that leaves her slimed, badly burned and blind, with something invisibly dining on her blood,plus a hidden crypt, monks walled up alive for performing the Black Mass and a just plain nasty ex-husband and it’s just a ding-nabbed shame that the story isn’t better than it is. But it never drags, I’ll give it that.
The quality takes a big dip in”The Room of Fear” as a room that has been sealed up for ages proves NOT to be an ideal guest bedroom, due to the ubiquitous iniquitous crime performed there centuries before. quakity then falls of a cliff to land on “The Phantom Isle.” I swear, it just doesn’t pay to be a lineal descendant of anybody anymore; despite the gruesome history of the family and the island, this adventure almost has more in common with Brigadoon than standard ghost story fare.
“The Werewolf of Rannouch” is the biggest missed opportunity in the collection. It is even more jam-packed than “The Death Vapor” and reads almost as if it were a synopsis for a novel. It starts in medias res, with Sheila already on the job, tracking down a mysterious killer in the wintry countryside around the little village of Dhuvhair. Cattle and sheep, pigs and dogs and chickens have been found disembowled, their throats torn. Thye first assumption is a mad sheep dog, but the disappearance of children calls for closer scrutiny and darker theories.
Of course, Sheila’s first thought is that it is a werewolf, though her conception of the creature is unusual:
“It is another form of the “Jekyll and Hyde” theory, that’s all, only a much worse form. The astral spirit leaves the body in a sleeping condition, while it assumes an animal shape itself. Thus free, it roams round the world at will and lengthens its existence by drinking fresh, warm blod drawn from a new kill.”
When she first gets sight of it, she, true to her nature, charges it, but it escapes. Still she stays on the case, and though the period of time isn’t tied down definitely, internal evidence points to the passing of at least several weeks.
The identity of the werewolf is apparent from the first page of the story, though Scrymsour manages the deft trick of almost leading the reader astray with two other suspects before falling back on the secret that only the characters in the story could fail to have guessed.
“The Wraith of Fergus McGinty” is one of those unusual and usually unsuccessful “nice” ghost stories, where the spirit of a faithful servant looks out for the best interests of another of those pesky heirs. The story stands out more because it officially wraps the series up, as Sheila decides to forego further ghost huntings and grant Stavordale’s heartfelt wish to love, cherish and protect her until death they do part.
Despite the basically hack writing, there is an odd attractiveness about Crerar. She tends to rush towards every evil spirit she meets, like the spring on a rat trap at a very heavy rat; this makes her either incredibly brave, or stupid. None of Carnacki’s careful preparation for her, even after she is almost killed by such a move in “The Death Vapor.” She has no well organized theories of psychic phenomena, which is preferable to the long-winded, cobbled-together nonsense of one John Silence, but still unsatisfying. Yet somehow, she still manages to come across as more interesting than most of the cardboard sleuths that stalk this peculiar fictional niche. Perhaps it’s her youth and incredible naiveté that does it. In any case, I’d read any new adventures that turned up, whether by Scrymsour or an admiring fan.
As is usual in these psychic detective volumes from Ash Tree, the most entertaining part is the long introduction (it takes up 28 pages of the volume’s roughly 130 pages) by editor Jack Adrian. It rambles around more like a fireside conversation than an actual essay, but Mr. Adrian convinced me long ago that absolutely no one on the planet knows more than he about popular, and in particular, supernatural, fiction and the magazines that featured them from the 19th century through the 21st. I am hereby starting a campaign for Mr. and Ms. Roden to commission a complete history of at least the popular fiction magazines from 1880 to 1960 from Mr. Adrian, so that all this incredible information can be found in one place instead of having to hunt through dozens of introductions to piece it all together.
Sâr Dubnotal vs. Jack the Ripper, anonymous, translated by Brian Stableford, Black Coat Press, 2009
The Conquistador of the Invisible!
The Napoleon of the Immaterial!
The Grandmaster of Psychognosis!
I’m not going to kid you, this is at best cheap dime novel fiction, originally published in 1909, but how can you not like a story that jumbles up haunted houses, buried yogis, Jack the Ripper, spiritualism, possession, gruesome murder and the Flying Dutchman? Who ever said that story had to make sense? Norvell Page got away with this same technique for years in The Spider magazine. And even Raymond Chandler said that when things got slow or complicated in a detective story, just have someone come through the door with a gun in their hand.
Whether the entertainment factor of this serial novel is due to some unseen underlying strengths in the characters and story or to Brian Stableford’s translation, there is an energy and sense of the weird that is missing in far too many more famous occult detective stories. The byline actually says “adapted by Brian Stableford rather than “translated by”, but though he slips in a reference to the Necronomicon, a Saamaa Ms. that recalls Carnacki’s favorite ritual and, I suspect, moved the hero’s London HQ to Cheyne Walk, overall the prose reads quite authentically for the period. It’s hard to fake the insane, by-the-seat-of-your-pants plotting and state-the-obvious dialogue.
Sâr Dubnotal, aka Severus el Tebib, originally appeared in a series of twenty paper covered booklets over the course of 1909. Although Black Coat Press’s promotional material refers to them as pulps, they are closer in format and writing style to our Nick Carter and England’s Sexton Blake dime novel adventures.
The stories were written anonymously, and except for the five novels that make up this collection, all were stand-alone tales. Needless to say, the originals are very rare, so rare in fact that no copy of the middle novel of this serial, issue no. 8, could be located. The events are summarized in the body of the following novel, but, as in most dime novel fiction, the loss doesn’t weigh very heavily on the comprehension or enjoyment of the storyline.
Like Nick Carter, and later, Doc Savage, the Spider and the Shadow, Dubnotal has a band of 
stalwarts who assist him. Rudolph is his redoubtable assistant, a student of the master’s mysteries and the man who keeps the bags packed for the almost constant immediate travel needs; Annunciata Giametti, a nervous psychic who seldom speaks on her own and, in a rare bit of character development, gives the impression that she would really rather not go through this stuff again; Naini, a Hidu servant; and Otto, Frank and Frejus, three investigators (German, English and French) who are masters of their craft, who have left private careers to do the master’s bidding. The friendly bickering amongst them casts the shadows of Monk and Ham.
Trying to coherently summarize the outrageous, convoluted story is a fool’s errand. Each episode’s storyline is distinct from the others, though without the sense of having been planned out that way; there is far too much obvious flailing about in the plotting to indicate much planning of any kind. It’s possible that the books weren’t even planned as a serial to start. So let’s give it an incoherent summary….
Book One , The Haunted Manor of Crecc’h-ar-van, revolves around a haunted house that looms above a French seaside village. Mysterious deaths claimed the lives of two of the former occupants, Count de Tréguilly and his aging father. Only the Comtesse Tréguilly and her two daughters survived and they left the province after the first reported sightings of the ghost(s). The house has been unrentable since that time.
Sâr Dubnotal, vactioning with his entourage in the area, looks into the haunting first in order to show up a pushy non-believer in the holiday crowd, but as details reveal themselves, his unerring sense of justice comes to dominate. For love of a mysterious Russian noble, the Comtesse betrayed both her father-in-law and her husband, murdering both of them for the inheritance. Sâr Dubnotal takes up the trail.
The master villain beind it all, Tserpchikopf, whom we will discover is also a master hypnotist, the King of the criminal gang known as the Chessmen AND Jack the Ripper (Pile it on thick, o Anonymous One!) is off stage for this first act.
Book 2, Tserpchikopf , the Bloody Hypnotist, has Sâr Dubnotal following the trail to Paris, where Tserpchikopf is working Parisian spiritualists with his hypnotism act — the two ideas are essentialy merged into one here. Sâr Dubnotal exposes him, thus earning the Russian’s undying enmity.
Book 3, The Astral Trail, is the missing novel. The synopsis in Book 4 peels the psychic onion down another layer, revealing that Tserpchikopf is the criminal mastermind/master strategist behind the Chessmen, a criminal gang that has been plaguing Paris.
That next novel, The Quartered Woman of Montmartre, kicks off with a gruesome murder, as an unknown woman is found quartered in a hotel hallway, having been tied between an elevator and its cage; the force of the moving car tore her apart. The police are baffled, and to make matters worse, the body of the unidentified woman is stolen out of the morgue by a mysterious Man in Black wielding awesome hypnotic power. Could it be, dare we say, I think we might, Tserpchikopf?? The woman was the former Queen of the Chessmen, now replaced by the Comtesse.
Without any apparent rhyme or reason, the trail veers to London in Book 5, Jack the Ripper. Tracking the fiend to one of his underground layers, the heroic group are soon compromised and arrested as a collective Jack the Ripper. Fortunately, Dubnotal has a signed note from one chief of police or another and goes along with the gag only to draw Tserpchikopf out into the open. The ruse succeeds, but through his mastery of disguise, Tserpchikopf manages to escape their clutches once again. Surprise! It’s only temporary! While in custody, Dubnotal, via Annunciata, sent a telepsychic message to Frejus, one of his investigators. Frejus tracks the villain even as he (Tserpchikopf, of course), thinks he is evading Dubnotal’s reach! Frejus tracks Tserpchikopf to Whitechapel, where the villain is leading yet another false life, this time as a friendly and evidently helpful neighborhood doctor!
Playing on this compassionate side of the fiend, Dubnotal lures the doctor into the local saloon, where Annunciata, in a gesture worthy of Harry Potter, flicks her wand and suspends Tserpchikopf against the ceiling. Tearfully, Tserpchikopf announces that he set up the Ripper murders to distract Sâr Dubnotal from tracking him down on the other charges.
You figure it out.
And there is still one novel left to go!
Book 6, Posthumous Hatred relates the sad fate of the Comtesse – you remember her, don’t you? — and Tserpchikopf’s 
attempts to inflict his nasty temper from beyond the grave.
Like Doc Savage, Sâr Dubnotal has a rehabilitation center, Redemption Island, where those criminals capable of being taught a new life are sent rather than to jail. The Comtesse de Tréguilly, also knwon as Azilis, has been there for many years – did I fail to mention that this long adventure takes place across the span of 15 years, from 1890 to 1904? — and she is now well enough to be reunited with her daughters, whom Dubnotal has had raised privately — did I mention that he also possesses great wealth, drawn from his discovery of how to transmute metals into gold and ‘exploitation’ of the pearl beds of Ceylon?
Yet she (or possibly, her conscience) is haunted by the demonic spirit of Tserpchikopf, a larva, according to the odd definition of the author. On the voyage back to France, accompanied by Naini, the passenger ship is beset by a mysterious fog bank, out of which sails the Flying Dutchman — honest! The phantom ship passes through the passenger ship, its sole purpose apparently to deposit a large black Newfoundland on deck. It is immediately friendly to the Comtesse. (In a later lunatic passage, Sâr Dubnotal surmises that the black Newfoundland actually booked passage on the Flying Dutchman for this very purpose.)
Yes, Tserpchikopf is back, his agenda less clear than at any time previously in the tale; he quickly abandons the dog’s boneless carcass to take up residence in one of the Psychogogue’s pet birds.
How can I even do justice to the battle of birds that follows? Yes, battle of birds. An owl and a curlews, Dubnotal’s pets, one possessed by the spirit of the Bloody Hypnotist, the other by the long-buried yogi, Ranijesti, whom the good Sâr occasionally calls on for help.
But wait! There’s more! Azilis dies upon meeting her children, crushed by the shame of her past actions. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Sâr Dubnotal finds it fitting that her sould should be forever paired with Tserpchikopf’s, so that she might prevent his larva from doing any more harm.
As goofy and stilted as the ‘story’ is, some weird, evocative scenes are salted throughout the narrative:the aforementioned encounter with an unfriendly ghost (the anti-Casper?) in a family crypt, a conversation with a buried Yogi, both transmitted through the reluctant Annunciata; the details of the murder, the morgue at the police station, Jack the Ripper’ underground layer, and even the vision of the Flying Dutchman.
As is the norm, Dubnotal has little characterization. His ‘powers’ are vague, ranging from launching “effluvia” at people he wishes to hypnotize (the term refers to a psychic liquid that carries the mesmeric influence) to psychic empathy, but he relies mostly on his mediums and a few mechnical devices like his psychic camera/projector.
Black Coat Press is the brainchild of the L’Officier brothers; thanks to the miracle of print on demand, they have done us all a great service by making incredibly obscure French fiction available, as well as new tales and a history or two. The adventures of the Nyctalope, the Blak Coats, Fantômas and others are both reprinted AND continued by a stable of writers. A few of these gems are targets for future reviews.
The only downside is that for their relatively high price ( Sâr Dubnotal vs. Jack the Ripper is $24.95 for 355 pages), the BCP proofreading is embarrassingly bad, often with two or three typos to a page, They are all of the kind spell-checkers wouldn’t catch — widows for windows, grinds for grounds, and so on; they can easily be figured out, but to have so many is really annoying.
Evening things out a bit, even if you don’t enjoy the bad fiction as well as I do, there are the terrific and informative introductions that detail the history of the magaazines and characters. Stableford’s introduction to this volume includes a survey of French occult history that is more than worthwhile.
Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels by Mike Mignola & Ben Stenbeck, Dark Horse Books, 2010, $17.99
It’s not often that Mike Mignola fails to deliver an entertaining story, but nobody bats 1000. But even his decidedly uneven first novel, Baltimore, had flashes of his immense talent. This first in what presumably will be a series of Edward Grey graphic novels falls flat in almost every respect, though I am willing to allow that future stories might reveal some carefully hidden clues in this 
one that are too inscrutable for me at this time.
Oddly, considering the sparseness of dialogue in Hellboy, In the Service of Angels is talky – never a good thing for a comic book. There is so much explanation, exposition and back story that I found myself skimming over it, then having to go back and reread it lest I miss something important. I didn’t. There are also a lot of pious religious quotes that all muddle together despite being from diverse texts. I don’t believe a word of it, also not a good sign.
Though Dave Stewart uses his excellent color sense to keep Grey in the Hellboy universe, and Ben Stenbeck’s artwork has just enough Mignola in it to be familiar yet enough flair to stand on its own, there is a remarkable lack of atmosphere. Despite all the Victorian details, I never feel like I am in Victorian London.
The origins of events that will happen ‘later’ in the Hellboy and B.P.R.D. books provide the foundation for this story, but even if you aren’t keeping up with those books, there is little here you haven’t seen before: an ancient lost city, troglodytes, a little spiritualism. Twists and turns feel lead-footed even when they are interesting.
Far and away the biggest drag on the book is Grey himself, a humorless, dull fellow, Christian yet neither a fiery Puritan ala Solomon Kane nor an eccentric like Carnacki. His own defenses against the powers of darkness are some rather tired, prayerful soliloquies and silver bullets, though neither are particularly effective; he gets the most bang out of a pagan Hyperborean sword, and though he expresses mild misgivings about it, his religious beliefs are evidently liberal enough to accommodate it. A love interest struggles to develop between Grey and a medium, there is evidence of a hellish curse attached to the ‘witchfinder”, and several of his previous cases are briefly related, but none has the originality one is accustomed to savoring in a Mignola book. Even the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra, so interesting in B.P.R.D., lacks intrigue, its agents showing up at opportune moments like stock villains. Two new characters, the Captain and Gustave Strobl, don’t have a lot to offer either.
The story is told in normal fashion until the very last page, when it abruptly switches to a literary past tense, as if there was some rush to wrap the story up quickly, condensing the rest of Grey’s life into a couple of paragraphs.
Hellboy has evolved over the years and, as I said, it’s quite possible that future stories will take Sir Edward Grey down some more obscure and interesting paths, and reveal some incidents in this story to have been set-ups for more intriguing possibilities. But Hellboy was also interesting from the very start. Grey has a long way to go to catch up.
Mike Mignola, with his game on, can hurry Grey along. .I hope he’ll double-time it, I really do. The world needs a really top-notch Victorian occult detective.
..And that is where we have to leave the story for awhile. I’d like to give you a date that I’ll be back, but the uncertainty around my mother’s deteriorating health –she’s in hospice now– keeps me from making promises. Please know that I am continuing to work on the comic, I just can’t meet the one page a week deadline right now. I have three pages inked, and I’m laying out more, but the coloring is what takes the most time. Rather than put up a page sporadically, I’d rather wait until I can get back to a regular schedule.
The Walking Dead is still dragging its feet (ouch) and giving us too little forward momentum per episode, but it’s still one of the best series on tv. I tried catching up on Fringe, but even with the return of Mr. Jones I can barely keep my attention focused on it.
For my job I am developing some curriculum for 3D modelers and animators who want to go into games. Games are not really my generation, so I have some catching up to do. I got an xBox for Christmas and a couple of games. The only one I’ve made it all the way through is Bioshock, and let me tell you, it was terrific. For $14, the price of the game used, I got more enjoyment and more emotional involvement than the last ten contemporary horror films I’ve seen. I have Bioshock 2 waiting for me, as well as Dead Rising, but I am really puzzled as to why there are no Lovecraftian games, or so few and so unpopular that I’ve been unable to locate them.
Don’t forget me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Joseph Payne Brennan has always had the reputation of a greatly under appreciated master of fantasy, a poetic stylist that just never managed to break into the front ranks. 
Stephen King, Les Daniels and Charles Grant are just a few of those front ranks to cite him as a major influence. Arkham published three collections of his stories and poetry, while Donald M. Grant published nine.
Lucius Leffing, Brennan’s private investigator and psychic sleuth, features in four of the Grant books, three short story collections (of which this is the second) and a novel length adventure, Act of Providence. They are highly regarded in fandom.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself struggling through a series of weak tea Holmesian pastiches, just an ever-so-slight notch above basic fan boy fiction. Given that this is some of Brennan’s later work, I would expect this to be among his most professional if not most interesting book.
More disappointing, only two of the eight stories in this volume are occult “investigations.” I don’t know if the other books are similarly weighted to the mundane mysteries, but I am not planning on finding out.
The formula of the narrator “visiting my old friend, Lucius Leffing” at his quaint and eclectic Victorian digs (even though the series is set in the contemporary world) is given a supposed ‘twist’ by Brennan identifying himself as the narrator. Intended or not, the gimmick adds a thick layer of artificiality on stories already burdened with too many obstructions to engagement. Same thing with the Victorian style of the prose and the Victorian manner of the main characters. Why Brennan went to all this trouble, then decided to set the stories in the 1970s is one of those weird choices writers some times inexplicably make.
“The Case of the Hertzell Inheritance” leads off the collection. A Miss Camlee is certain her cousin, Hamilton Hertzell, has been murdered, though the attending physician of the small town of Brandelmere Falls puts Cousin Hamilton’s death down to a heart attack.She relates the details, the various townspeople involved and her suspcions in tedious detail, prodded by equally tedious questions from Leffing. Of course, given the title of the story, there is a will involved.
It’s a red herring, of course, and we find out that Hamilton was not only nearly bankrupt, but quite the scoundrel as well. Leffing and Brennan walk about town, asking questions, gathering information, little of which turns out to be pertinent. The one clue that does lead to the solution of the crime is, as Leffing admits, a leap of faith, a “long shot” which just happens to hit the mark. Unfortunately for the reader, Leffing then has to explain all the details.
A sample of the dialogue between Leffing and Brennan:
“We must not be too hard on Jenkins, in spite of his limitations,” Leffing answered. “Batarachotoxin is a highly effective cardiotoxin. It interferes with conduction in the heart, brings about extrasystoles and ventricular fibrillation. It sees scarcely surprising that an elderly village doctor certified a heart attack.”
“Good heavens, Leffing! We must be dealing with an erudite murderer of extreme resourcefulness.”
Brennan also has the extremely tiresome habit of having the speaker identify who is being spoken to by constantly tagging their name onto the end of the sentence….even when there are only two people present. Perhaps Leffing and Brennan have trouble telling each other apart.
“The Case of the Mystified Vendor” chronicles the tale of a sandwich wagon owner who has been paid to park his wagon on a particular street on a particular day, supposedly as part of an area survey. He takes the money, then feels something is wrong and seeks out Leffing. Leffing and Brennan watch from a distance on the appointed day, solves the mystery, then trots us back to his ‘digs’ to explain that the sandwich wagon was parked over a manhole cover, through which a bank robber planned to escape.
This is a far cry from “The Red-Headed League,” closer instead to serials of the 1950s like Capt. Video or Government Agents vs. Phantom Legion. The story’s main strength is that it is among the shortest in the book.
“The Apple Orchard Murder Case” is more or less a reversal of the “Hertzell Inheritance”: a brother who has blown through his inheritance has been murdered in the small town where he lived. Leffing’s reasoning, however clumsy, determines that the man had used a metal detector and found an extremely rare Liberty nickel.
By this time I am starting to notice the lack of occult, psychic or even mild fantasy elements in the stories. Did I get my facts confused? A quick check of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy reconfirmed my original notion: Leffing is listed among the psychic sleuths.
“Mem’ries” is a slight tale about a little old lady who is slowly poisoning Brennan via correspondence because he wouldn’t use her poetry in a magazine he edited.
“The Murder of Mr. Matthews” and “The Possible Suspects” are more of the same.
“The Dead of Winter Apparition” is the first of the occult tales. I can’t be sure if it’s actually better written or whether I am just responding to the fact that the subject is more to my expectations. It’s a pretty stock plot about a haunted house; Leffing’s investigation comes down to merely finding the person who can relate the terrible deed she done to cause the haunting. It’ an interesting back story, but leads only to the unearthing and Christian reburying of the revenant’s bones.
Finally, ” The Nightmare Face” presents a mysterious, horrific face at the window of a timid scholar. The source of the haunting is in the scholars bell collection (!) one of which was used by lepers in the Middle Ages to warn the town folk of their approach. (The scholar also collects hitching posts, and most of the emphasis is put on that hobby, as a red herring.) Thank goodness the scholar revealed he had the habit of occasionally ringing some of his bells before bedtime, or Leffing would never have had a clue.
Sigh. The quest continues….
Dion Fortune, neé Violet Mary Firth, is still popular among occult circles. According to the tediously detailed introduction by Jack Adrian, there are at least three full length biographies out there, none of which is accurate; the group she founded, The Society of Inner Light, is still going, though they are very protective of details about her life and papers.
Most of her work was non-fiction, laying out her vision of occultism and its practice. She wrote several novels, but her best known fictional work is The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, a collection of short stories featuring the occult specialist of the same name. The first six appeared in the Royal Magazine in 1922; five more appeared in the 1926 hardcover edition, and a final one added at a later time. Though he is included in the company of occult detectives, Taverner really is a doctor, with an office in Harley Street, London, and a nursing home in Hindhead, where he deals with people troubled by various psychic afflictions. He is aided, and his adventures recorded, by Dr. Eric Rhodes, a former army surgeon with the requisite case of shattered nerves seeking employment, and who has the barest traces of undeveloped psychic powers. Rhodes plays a far more active part in the stories than the usual amanuensis, often to the point of being the hero.
Let’s be clear, these are not adventure stories. They tend to unfold fairly slowly, and largely through conversation rather than action. Fortune is a pleasing writer, bizarrely quotable, but the Taverner stories fall short of must-read status because of three unfortunate flaws: she gives away her story climaxes in her titles, at least in the earlier tales; Taverner is a paternalistic know it all on the order of John Silence, instantly recognizing the problem at hand as well as the solution, explaining it in some detail to those sad lesser mortals not steeped in the occult; and, most egregious of all, Fortune is unable to separate her evangelism from her story-telling. Fortune manages to redeem herself at the very end, casting all the stories in a new light, but still, if you’re looking for entertaining tracts on occult beliefs (with little evidential support) then this is the book for you.
The lead story, “Blood Lust,” starts with Rhodes, just out of the R.A.M.C., seeking employment. The agency has one job that it has been unable to fill for some time, and thus does Dr. Rhodes come to meet Dr. Taverner at the Halsey Street consulting room. Taverner is tall, ascetic, of indeterminate age –all mainstays of popular fiction heroes of the era– and prefers cases that have been failed by traditional psychology. Rhodes is a skeptic, thinking Freud provides the most coherent answers to such problems.
Their first patient, brought to their attention by his ex-fiance, is a war vet who has apparently lost his mind, tearing around the countryside ripping the throats out of chickens and once even biting his former love. Under questioning at the Hindhead nursing home, Taverner finds that the man has developed a blood-lust due to the horrors experienced in the trenches during the war. No, not exactly a blood lust (because he doesn’t care for underdone meat!) but a vitality hunger, which is “quite a different matter.”
“That’s exactly it. I have never been able to put it into words before, but you have hit the nail on the head.” the man tells Taverner.
Taverner quickly discerns that this vampire is actually under the influence of the spirit of a German soldier, “a corpse insufficiently dead,” which seeks to satisfy its own hunger through the young man. Taverner separates the two, and a cure is effected, though not after some rather longwinded explanations of the mechanics of such possession.
“The Return of the Ritual” deals with a secret manuscript stolen in the Middle Ages that contains a certain ritual practiced in the mysterious and secret White Lodge of which Taverner is a member. The manuscript has resurfaced, and a Black Lodge (in Chelsea, if you’re interested; they meet on Fridays) is after it. Bad news. “I would even go so far as to say the course of civilization would be affected if such a thing occurred,” Taverner tells Rhodes.
Taverner is a great one for making “certain” signs and leaving his body to go searching in the Akashic Records, the 411 of all the thoughts of all humans that have ever lived. He tracks down the reincarnated soul of the man who originally stole the manuscript, and plants a directive for the man to retrieve it. Civilization is saved, and the manuscript is returned to the White Lodge.
Arnold Black, famed aviator, seeks Dr. Taverner’s help in “The Man Who Sought,” after a plane crash leaves him obsessed with speeding recklessly around the countryside in search of…well, he doesn’t know. Taverner is quick to spot the so-obvious problem: Black was “hypnotized the spiral of the crash and he got into that particular part of his memory where the pictures of previous lives are stored.” Black is looking for a woman.
Dion Fortune
Taverner locates the woman reincarnate psychicly (dang, those Akashic Records are handy) and brings them together, but Black is killed. Fortunately, her love brings his drifting spirit back into his body. Reunited lovers is one of Fortune’s main tropes.
In “The Soul That Would Not Be Born” a mother explains her daughter Mona’s problem: “When they put her in my arms after she was born, she looked up at me with the most extraordinary expression in here yes; they were not a baby’s eyes at all, Doctor, they were the eyes of a woman, and an experienced woman too, She didn’t cry, she never made a sound, but she looked as if she had all the troubles of the world upon her shoulders. That baby’s face was a tragedy…In few hours, however, she looked quite like an ordinary baby, but from that time to this she has never changed, except in her body.” The girl is apparently mentally deficient.
Taverner “invariably” finds that “congenital troubles originate in a former life.” Therefore, he leaps into action by…taking a nap, once again to consult the Akashic Records. Lo and behold, as the daughter of a duke in fifteenth century Milan, she was involved in a rather nasty betrayal of a lover; at her birth in this life, her soul refused to enter the child’s body in order to avoid the payment in suffering her debt demands. Taverner gives a tidy, summation of the mental processes that precede birth with a straight face before announcing that all he can do to cure the poor girl is to “wait and watch her.”
And wouldn’t you know it, there just happens to be a shell-shocked vet receiving treatment at the home who happens to be…well, if you guessed he is the reincarnation of the betrayed lover, pass Go and collect $200. The two hook up, each gains peace before the man, cured, leaves to marry his fiance. Now Mona’s repayment truly begins.
Taverner comments to Rhodes on the young man’s marriage. “They will be in love for a year, then will come disillusionment and after they have bumped through the crisis, held together by the pressure of social opinion, they will settle down to the mutual toleration which passes for a successful marriage. But when he comes to die, he will remember this Mona Cailey and call for her, and as he crosses the threshold she will claim him, for the have made restitution and the way is clear.”
“The Scented Poppies” involves an arcane method of murder via thought transference by sending a moonstone impressed with thoughts of suicide hidden amongst a rare breed of poppy heads stuffed with potpourri. Seriously. The scents enhance the transference of the thought from the moonstone, the recipient leaps out the nearest window. This time, even the client who brings the case to Taverner is wise to the idea if not the exact method. “One cannot account for it on any of the accepted theories, but if one admits the feasibility of thought transference, and pretty nearly everybody does nowadays, then it seems to me that it wold be possible to give a mental suggestion to these men to commit suicide.” With minimal effort, Taverner turns the tables on the murderer, who leaps to his death from an embankment.
In a similar vein, a would-be suitor (and member of a Black Lodge) sends a large black dog to haunt the young woman’s intended in “The Death Hound.” Taverner is at his most tedious in this story, and nearly all of the action is revealed through conversations; the good doctor wraps the whole case up on the last page by showing the evil wizard a ring that reveals Taverner as “The Senior of Seven.” Taverner orders him to recall the black hound, and the man obliges. But as Taverner knows, the hound now haunts the man, and runs him to his death.
“A Daughter of Pan” brings another mentally deficient young lady into Taverner’s care, though Rhodes carries the burden of the story. His confusion is apparent from the start: “..The girl looked a typical low-grade defective. Now, defectives fill me with nothing but disgust, my pity I reserve for their families, but the girl before me did not inspire me with disgust, but only pity.” Well said, doctor; lack of compassion combined with contradiction.
As the title indicates, the girl is a child of nature, and her mental state the result of the restrictions her family has placed upon her. As she discovers her true nature, Rhodes falls in love with her, and begins to discover suppressed cravings of his own. Alas, once again there is another tenant in the house, a young despondent man who, upon meeting Diana, begins to play strange music on the violin. Eventually, the nature gods come for Diana, and as Taverner and Rhodes watch, Rhodes starts to follow her. Taverner restrains him, observing ” This is not for you, Rhodes. You have too much mentality to find your mating here.” (!) Diana and the violinist, both children of Pan, marry and set off for a life as gypsies.
Taverner barely makes an appearance in “The Subletting of the Mansion,” other than to get it rolling with an observation about the new tenants next door. The man remains inside, but the woman is glimpsed going to the post box. Taverner is saddened. “If a woman’s face is younger than her figure then she is happily married; if the reverse, then she is working out a tragedy.”
Winnington, a tubercular patient at Hindhead and a lower member of the same secret order to which Taverner belongs, becomes obsessed with the woman. Rhodes discovers the husband is a drug addict, and does not connect it with Winnington’s sudden trance-like states. Though the end is entirely predictable, as Winnington exchanges souls with the drug addict, Though the couple is now happy, Taverner turns back up to admonish Rhodes for making such a bad job of the affair (though what he could have done about it isn’t entirely clear, not being able to make “certain signs”) and to give another mini-lecture on Fortune’s own concerns. “Adultery of the soul” is an odd concept, and one seemingly frowned upon, even when the woman is unaware of the exchange, thinking her husband merely cured of his addiction. And immorality is defined concisely as ” that which retards the evolution of the group soul of the society to which one belongs.” This predates the notion that one can’t define pornography, but “I know it when I see it,” and provides further evidence that the new World Order conspiracy is succeeding in undermining everything we hold dear. Or not.
“Recalled” finds Taverner and Rhodes as mere observers to an army colonel who must pay a price for an affair with an Indian woman some years before his marriage. He doesn’t believe it at first. “If a man enters into,er..relationswith a native woman, they have an uncanny knack of laying hold of your soul by their heathen jiggery-spookery.” Ultimately he accepts his fate, which is for his beautiful white wife to bear a coal black son, disgracing them both in front of their peers. It’s an interesting comment on race and gender, but a polemic nonetheless.
“The Sea Lure” also finds Taverner absent, as Rhodes considers a young woman in a city infirmary who is suffering from what they call “stigmata”, though the wounds appear in her shoulders rather than the traditional Christian places. In a coincidence so huge that Rhodes actually has to comment on it in the story, he is dispatched to see what he can do for an old friend of Taverner’s, another occultist who lives near the sea. He has been seeing water-elementals, one in particular calling him forward. He has shot her twice…in the shoulders! Needless to say, the soul lovers are reunited and sent on their happy way.
In some ways the most entertaining of the stories is “The Power House,” which has an actual antagonist in the person of an old foe, an ugly, hunchbacked occultist named Dr. Josephus. His actual knowledge seems to fluctuate, one minute being a terrible threat, the next being a pretender. He has been luring young women away from their husbands and homes and somehow using their vitality to refresh his own withered spirit. On a pretext, Rhodes worms his way into the cult, and is invited to participate in a ritual. Taverner tags along, they waylay Josephus, and Taverner takes his place on the dais wearing an elaborate Egyptian costume; Rhodes follows up in a cowled scarlet robe,and sits quietly by as Taverner reveals himself as the Senior member of the Council of Seven and sets the captive participants free. The description of the ritual room, the costumes, the language, all are enjoyably familiar. But that’s the end of the story. Josephus is left bound in the coal bin, and whether or not he will work further misdeeds is not considered.
The final story in this collection, “A Son of the Night,” was not included in the original hardcover edition. As many other posthumous works by fortune have been issued since her death, some supposedly narrated from the beyond, there is some speculation that this story was written by someone else. it does read differently, but that could be to maturation of style as much as anything. But it is by far the best story in the book, and not so much an adventure or mystery as a revelation. Called in by a pompous, almost cartoonish Countess and family to certify their eldest son as insane so they might gain control of his inheritance, Taverner and Rhodes instead establish a kinship with him. He is another child of Pan, and Taverner gives Lord Cullan his freedom, but also gives him a patient to treat: Rhodes! The inheritance plot is not resolved, is forgotten about in fact, as the repressed soul of Rhodes is finally broken loose, and he enters the Unseen world as a companion to the other two men. Upon rereading the whole of the collection, the stories become less about Taverner’s ‘cases” and more about Rhodes education and journey to occult enlightenment. t draws together the diverse elements into a whole that makes the book ultimately worth the reading.
Although this review is based on the Ash Tree Press limited edition, there are numerous other paperback editions available.
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, 1988, Harcourt Brace Jovanovish
With all the brouhaha swirling around Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code these last several years, I’m really surprised that no one has been touting Foucault’s Pendulum as their next film project. Eco’s book is more the Anti-Da Vinci Code, with secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, coded manuscripts, Rosicrucians, Kaballah, ancient secrets, dark conspiracies, etc., still driving the mystery, but with more irony and satire, and a decidedly different conclusion. Eco even tosses in a Lovecraftian reference to a Cthulhu Cult, a show of respect that Brown avoids. (And let’s not forget, Foucault’s Pendulum was written almost 20 years before Brown cobbled together his mega-bestseller.)
The two books also share the idea that people really want and perhaps need to believe in something beyond this world, though the authors take diametrically opposed views to the benefits thus provided. Whereas both protagonists unravel mysteries and discover secrets, Eco’s hero uncovers something far more terrible (or possibly, more beautiful, depending on 
your own beliefs) than Robert Langdon could ever imagine
I admit, it’s only by a stretch that I can classify the book as an Occult Detective entry; it is indeed about the occult and occultism, and there is a good deal of detective work involved, but the heroes are are not dedicated to either pursuit. There are no Carnackis or John Constantine’s here, just ordinary guys with the ordinary fault of being too clever for their own good.
The story is simple enough: three friends, two of which work for a vanity publisher, have read so many ridiculous, badly written, poorly thought out manuscripts relating various occult histories and theories, that they decide, as a game, to do the job right. All have knowledge of various aspects of esoteric lore. Using a word-processor (remember, this was written in the 1980s) with a program that will create new text from randomly inserted key words, they create “The Plan,” an elaborate mash-up of occult tropes that supposedly leads to the key to world domination. They also create their own ancient secret society, Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici, or Tres. This fiction becomes a game for the trio, the details of which are worked out over a period of years. Like all good occult conspiracy theories, this involves the descendants of the Templars, a secret map and an object of great occult power, in this case, Foucault’s pendulum, which is on exhibit in Paris. (Lost fans will recognize the pendulum from its appearance in Elizabeth Hawkings’ lab.)
Unfortunately for them, as an extension of the joke, they step over the line when they leak the plan to Aglié, a man who hints that he is the immortal Comte de St. Germain. He and his occult wingnuts fall for the gag (ha-ha) but the plan backfires when it becomes clear ‘they’ are willing to kill (uh-oh) for information handed down by more ancient masters than you can shake a stick at. Now in fear for their lives, the three men find themselves wondering if they perhaps they have indeed stumbled on to some Secret Knowledge. That the existence of “the Plan” is accepted so readily, with no evidence, is one of the key points of the novel, the frightening truth that there are people in the world who believe what they read in the Weekly World News. One of the best scenes in the book comeswhen the narrator, Casubon, shares the mysterious coded document which he and the others used to kick-start their game with is girl friend, and she can just as credibly decode it as a laundry list.
By turns enthralling, tedious, fabulous and frustrating, it is an almost impossible book to describe in any greater detail without getting involved in the wealth of detail which forms the background of the book. It’s an accurate summation in the same way as boiling Moby Dick down to a story about a whale and an obsessed captain. Foucault’s Pendulum is almost more valuable as a compendium of occult history and thought than a story, even as interesting as it is. Every chapter opens with a lengthy quote from one ancient occult text or another. Either Eco did an enormous amount of research on this subject, or he is even better at making up fictional arcane books than the entire Lovecraft Circle put together. I lean towards the former.
If you’re used to Dan Brown’s meat-and-potatoes style, Eco will likely be a slog, though I think a worthwhile one. He doesn’t wire neon lights on his themes, and the themes themselves are not steel-planked as they are in pulp fiction. The world is a complex place, and Eco seems to have little patience with his mental inferiors. I’ve never read The Name of the Rose, but I’ve heard that the first 100 or so pages are intentionally tedious, both to convey the experience of being a monk in Medieval times and to discourage readers who aren’t willing to work at reading. No beach reads here.
On the downside, I accept the fact the Eco is much smarter than I will ever be, but I wish he wouldn’t rub my nose in it so much. His philosophical points -and he is a philosopher first, a writer second- assume a great deal of familiarity with some very fine points of thought that I just don’t have, and he likes to insert dialogue and quotes from books in their original languages, without benefit of a translation. Italian, Latin, 14th century French — let’s face it, he runs in different circles than I do. You can find the translations online now, but in 1988 you were on your own. It’s hard to love a book that requires a separate post-doctorate degree just to understand it.
But if you’re a fan of this sort of stuff, as I most assuredly am, it is a wonderful change of pace to read a challenging, dense, original, thought provoking piece of fiction, one that refuses to talk down to its readers, one that treats the material seriously rather than an excuse for parading the old cliches out in modern dress. Eco is in many ways what Lovecraft dreamed of being, an artist, who writes for himself rather than money, and who, though he would like your company, isn’t bothered if you choose not to follow along.