Book #18: The Wise Friend by Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell has settled into a nice groove of late. Sure, there's a formula at work here, but I'll take Campbell doing variations on a theme any time.

Patrick was a fan of his aunt's slightly surreal and peculiarly spiritual art, despite the protestations of his own parents who found her worldview and paintings more than a bit off. Years after his aunt's death in a tragic fall, Patrick's son becomes obsessed with her work, largely through the influence of his new girlfriend.

Over time, Patrick comes to believe there's an old power waking in the woods. It can take human form but can't assume its full magical potential until certain rituals involving the earth from burial sites of various occultists are brought together. Unfortunately, he comes to believe his son's girlfriend is assisting an ancient evil trying to re-emerge. Questioning his own sanity, he desperately tries to stop what is imminent but at the potential cost of alienating his son forever.

Typically well-written with Campbell's hallucinogenic prose and paranoid descriptive style. A breezy summer read for quarantine.

Book 19 of 2018

The Night Ocean: A Novel

When we were living in Baltimore and going to karaoke with a group of regulars a new guy joined us often. He was one of these young 30-ish guys who sport a carefully manicured beard, and who have a beard maintenance kit always to hand with a comb and some lotion to comb into the beard when too much beer or gin and tonic has frothed it up. He also had an aggressively maintained mustachio which curved elvishly up into spirals at each end of his upper lip. He couldn’t sing a lick, but was an enthusiastic singer nonetheless. In between singing, we drank and talked about shit. It’s what one does with karaoke buddies.

One night he pronounced Cthulhu incorrectly while discussing a meme, and I pointed it out and corrected his pronunciation, and he responded “I play Dungeons and Dragons, I think I know how to correctly say Cthulhu.” After I got over my initial shock that D & D had become a thing again (hipsters—is there nothing they won’t mine from the past and resuscitate with gusto?), I took up the challenge.

“Have you read Lovecraft?” I responded. He replied in the negative. “Well it’s interesting that you would know how to pronounce Cthulhu when you’ve never read Lovecraft. I have read EVERYTHING, and own the Arkham House four-volume Collected Works in hardback. My Honors English high school literature paper was a Jungian analysis of Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and I was turned on to L. Sprague de Camp’s bio of HPL by my English teacher that year. I have perused many of his letters and have even endured his Vogon-quality poetry about mushrooms from Yuggoth. I read S.T. Joshi’s biography, Stephen King’s musings on HPL in Danse Macabre, and even read Michel Houellebecq’s acid little philosophical tome about Lovecraft’s worldview in the original French. I have a blog whose title is a Lovecraft pun. In many texts both scholarly and otherwise I have read how Lovecraft pronounced Cthulhu, so I’m pretty sure I know how to pronounce it, and I’m positive you do not.”

It’s a truism in life that know-it-alls are assholes. This guy was a know-it-all without any backup for his know-it-all-ism. I’m a know-it-all who brings out the heavy (and nerdy) artillery when needed.

When I was a teenager reading Lovecraft nobody in my circles knew who the fuck he was. Until Mrs. Hardin, my 12^th grade English teacher, I don’t think I met anyone who had even heard of him, let alone read him. And now Lovecraft permeates our culture. Every time I see the latest Hollywood schlock there are HPL references, subtle or not. TV shows like Stranger Things are Lovecraft light. All the comic book films owe substantial debts to HPL. Political memes with Cthulu, T-shirts, mugs, plush toys—he’s everywhere. People who have never read Lovecraft and who would need a dictionary to get through the first two pages of “The Outsider” or “The Music of Eric Zahn” know about Cthulhu.

Many writers have been obsessions in my lifetime. Some of those obsessions re-wired my brain and came to permeate my day-to-day life. Lovecraft was the first to really do that for me, even though I only read him for a few years and stopped reading him by the time I was no longer a teen. His stories are for the most part awful—even the best ones are at best dis-satisfying. Trying to go back and re-read them is pointless; I can never slog through more than a few pages. But there was something about that alternate reality, and that cold archaic worldview…and those entities beyond time and space! For a formative time of my life, he set a standard, and though he was quickly replaced by Dostoevski and then Henry James and then others...he was a key figure in my youth and remains vitally important to me.

The Night Ocean is about HPL specifically, but more generally about stories and writers permeating one’s existence, saturating one’s being. It is an extended nerdgasm, not just for weird fiction fans, but for sci-fi geeks, political wonks, fans of archaeology, for beats and hippies. It’s also a reminder about how far we’ve come as a society in terms of acceptance of alternate lifestyles and tendencies.

Let me just run through some of the characters: Isaac Asimov, William S. Burroughs, Robert Barlow, Frederick Pohl, Hart Crane, Roy Cohn, Whitaker Chambers, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo. Houellebecq is included but is thinly disguised.

This novel is a well-imagined forgery about well-imagined forgeries about a weird Luddite racist throwback whose peculiar imaginings have tentacled their way down through the last century and a half, and whose distasteful personal beliefs and philosophy can teach Americans a lot about ourselves to this day. The Night Ocean was not what I expected, but it was a hoot. I learned some things about Lovecraft i did not know!

And, gleefully, the correct pronunciation of Cthulhu is explained herein.

Recent Books

After a half-decade of precipitous decline in book learning, I'm back on track for a fifty-plus volume year. Of course fifty-plus volumes is about half what I used to read, but it beats the abominable and inexcusable past five years. But being a teacher is hard. The last thing I want to do after work is read!

SPQR is a tidy and engaging exploration of current scholarship about Roman history from its beginnings to its fall. Of course doing all this in one volume means one gets a SKETCHY history, but Beard knows what she's about, and her focus on a few key themes (such as the foundational myths of the Roman state and their resonance and recurrence and use by the powerful) keeps the volume from bogging down or seeming too light. I enjoyed it immensely.



A passionate, heavily documented, and well-argued case for the re-establishment of John Brown as more than just a fanatical curiosity in US History. At times there's a bit TOO MUCH hagiography, as in the chapter about poetry and music which seems to claim that John Brown was the topic of every poem ever written...but I agree that his impact on the fabric of America cannot be understated, and that he was purposefully diminished by a century of haters in order to make him appear a crazed terrorist and no more for a reason.

Brown's raid terrified the South and inflamed their passionate fear-mongering of Northern aggressors, and his martyrdom was latched onto by propagandists in the North who created a myth and a series of patriotic and religious songs about Brown's scaffold equating to the Crucifix. It was his speeches and correspondence between capture and hanging which made him a substantial man of letters, words that inflamed the Transcendentalists to memorialize him, and which laid the groundwork for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Brown believed more ardently than 95% of his fellow Abolitionists in the humanity of black folk, and their equality, and that God hated slavery. He also knew it would require tons of blood to cleanse it from America. It has yet to be cleansed.





H,P. Lovecraft imagined bizarre and bleak alternate realities which have captured the imaginations of introvert nerds for decades. I include myself in that category, though I must admit that since adolescence has passed I find much of his stuff completely unendurable. But the impact he had on my imagination lingers, despite the fact that I learned later he was an irascible racist and would likely have found Hitler's Final Solution quite satisfying had he lived to know about it.

So this "novel" (actually a series of interconnected novellas) sets a family of African Americans in a Lovecraft Mythos tale, replete with a wizard family, subterranean chambers in New England, inbred small town communities harboring ancient lore, etc, etc. Of course the complications of racism and racial intolerance and violence against persons of color are the TRUE horrors in this story, as the heroes and heroines of the tale are more than a match for their white wizard opponents and the many eldritch terrors they encounter. Lovecraft Country is not on a par with Junot Diaz's stuff, but is in the same vein--kind of Chabon-ish in tone and humor and delight in mining a vein of pop culture and fleshing it out with social commentary.



Stories without exception of a very high quality. Bobbie Ann Mason, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor---Gaitskill belongs right up there. Includes the source story for that kind of crappy "Secretary" movie, which isn't nearly as funny and sad as it should have been,