Born to the Dark by Ramsey Campbell

Born to the Dark from PS Publishing, cover by Les Edwards

The second book in Campbell’s Three Births of Daoloth trilogy is set thirty years on from the first. Dominic Sheldrake, a child in The Searching Dead, is now a lecturer on film, and married, with a child of his own. Young Toby, though, suffers from “nocturnal absences” — a sort of nighttime paralysis — and when a paediatrician recommends a new treatment offered by the Safe to Sleep clinic, Dominic and his wife are at first delighted, as it seems to work. But Dominic becomes suspicious of the sort of dreams Toby has under the influence of this new treatment, which sound as though they could have come straight out of the journal of Christian Noble, the man who, in The Searching Dead, found a new way to raise the dead.

Set in the 1980s, Born to the Dark recalls aspects of Ramsey Campbell’s 80s novels, which were often concerned with the vulnerability of children, and in particular the anxiety about a parent’s care of, and potential misuse of power over, their child. This, of course, comes about because of Dominic’s stage of life, but part of me looked for, and found, other (perhaps deliberate) echoes of Campbell’s 1980s novels. For instance, there’s the idea of dreams/sleep being studied by an institute or research project and resulting in supernatural forces leaking into our world (as in 1983’s Incarnate). I think it was in that novel, too, that Campbell used the police as an expression of the protagonist’s helplessness and humiliation by a powerful authority, and in Born to the Dark we have the sinister double act of officers Farr and Black, whose darkly cosmic double-entendres are the closest this novel gets to the sort of absurdist horror-comedy of Campbell’s most recent Lovecraftian work, the 2013 novella, The Last Revelations of Gla’aki. Campbell even allows himself an in-joke reference to Rose Tierney (the protagonist of his 1980 novel, To Wake the Dead/The Parasite), who’s mentioned here as being a former lecturer at Dominic’s university’s film studies division.

Providence issue 1, cover by Jacen Burrows

More than The Searching Dead — which mostly concerned itself with dead things lingering too long in the land of the living — Born to the Dark opens itself up to cosmic horror, thanks to the visions Safe to Sleep induces as part of its treatment. And there are hints of a coming transformation or apocalypse, after which human life as we know it will be over forever, though not necessarily extinguished. In this, Born to the Dark reminded me of Alan Moore’s Providence, another 21st century take on Lovecraftian horror which ended in our world being fully exposed to cosmic realities that make a nonsense of life at the human level.

(Born to the Dark also recalls Providence in the way its occultists, like Moore’s, are more willing than Lovecraft’s to explain their beliefs to outsiders. 1980s Britain, with its openness to New Age ideas and alternative medicine, is just the sort of place where the likes of Christian Noble and his family can be open about their cosmic beliefs, and be allowed to practise their esoteric arts as a treatment — even within the bounds of the NHS!)

A slight disappointment, for me, was that the narrator, Dominic, has grown up into a somewhat blinkered adult, who has difficulty realising just how mad his accusations against Safe to Sleep sound to anyone but himself, and can’t understand it when people don’t immediately accept his wild claims as the truth. But it does lead to a heartbreaking admission partway through the novel:

“However misunderstood and solitary I’d sometimes felt as a child, I would never have expected growing up to bring that back.”

It’s impossible to properly review the second book of a trilogy — and an as-yet uncompleted trilogy, at that. Born the Dark takes events on from The Searching Dead and, far more than that first volume (which could, I think, be enjoyed on its own), leaves me feeling we’re heading for a properly Lovecraftian conclusion. Will the ending be quite as bleak as that of Moore’s Providence? The final volume, The Way of the Worm, will presumably reveal all — or, at least, all we mere humans can grasp.

There’s a good interview with Campbell about Born to the Dark at Gary Fry’s website.

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Providence by Alan Moore

Providence issue 1, art by Jacen Burrows

Halfway through the run of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s 12-issue comic, Providence, I re-read all of Lovecraft’s stories (as well as S T Joshi’s monumental Lovecraft biography, I Am Providence), and suddenly the comic made a lot more sense. It’s not that Moore makes a lot of references to Lovecraft’s work — being pretty familiar with Lovecraft, I’m confident I’ll get most broad-brush references to his stories — it’s that the interplay between Providence and Lovecraft’s work (and life) can be quite subtle, and the deeper you can go into those subtleties, the more connections you can spot, and the more you’ll get out of the series. (The annotations at Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence helped a lot, too.)

Now I’m going to completely eat my own words about something I went into only a few Mewsings ago. Talking about Alien: Covenant, I said how prequels, particularly those that delve into a series’ background mythology, are pretty much doomed to failure, unless, like Star Wars: Rogue One, they do their best to keep their entanglements with the further reaches of the mythology as minimal as possible. Well, Providence is a prequel to Moore’s two other Lovecraftian comics — The Courtyard and Neonomicon — and it wallows in mythology (mostly Lovecraft’s, but at the end you need to know Moore’s, too). Not only that, but it attempts to make all of Lovecraft’s ramshackle mythology tie up, and — ye Eldritch Gods! — it even tries to explain it all.

art by Jacen Burrows

But, it works.

Perhaps it works because this twelve-issue series isn’t also trying to be a cinema-audience-pleasing ninety minute thrill-ride at the same time, but can take its time to tell the story as it needs to be told. Considering this is a horror comic, very little happens in the first few issues — unless, that is, you’re busy making Lovecraftian connections, in which case the implications will be building. But also, of course, this is Alan Moore, and Moore is particularly good at not only sorting out other people’s narrative tangles, but at adding his own — often awe-inspiring — sense for them to make.

In fact, I’d say Moore is energised by a creative challenge, and the bigger and more impossible-seeming, the better. He stated his aim for Providence in a 2015 article on Previews World:

“…Providence is an attempt to marry Lovecraft’s history with a mosaic of his fictions, setting the man and his monsters in a persuasively real America during the pivotal year of 1919: before Prohibition and Weird Tales, before Votes for Women or the marriage to Sonia, before the Boston Police Strike and Cthulhu. This is a story of the birth of modern America, and the birth of modern American terror.”

The comic follows Robert Black, a reporter from New York who, upon the suicide of his lover (in a suicide booth — this is a slightly different world to ours, in this case owing a little to Chambers’ King in Yellow), leaves his job to pursue his dream (“some day, if Providence allows”) of writing a novel. Scholarly, nervous, and by no means an action hero, Black is the typical Lovecraft protagonist — in all but being both Jewish and gay. Intrigued by the mention of a translated Arab alchemical text that made its way to the US, Black begins tracking down the various individuals and occult groups who have made use of it in their beliefs.

Providence 7, art by Jacen Burrows

These individuals and groups are Moore’s renamed versions of Lovecraft characters, and the main fun of the first half of Providence is in tying up Moore’s characters with Lovecraft’s, and seeing what twist Moore has put on them. Usually, the effect is to emphasise the historical and social context in which their stories are being told, and to — at first at least — make us feel that perhaps Lovecraft’s presentation of them as figures of horror is a misunderstanding because of their status as social, racial, religious, or sexual outsiders. Because of this, Black doesn’t even start to glimpse the implications of what they’re saying (Moore’s dialogue has a wonderful way of playing with double meanings), and I, as a reader, started to feel that perhaps the whole point of Providence was to redeem Lovecraft’s secretive, evil-intentioned cultists from any horrific interpretation at all.

The first character Black meets, for instance, is a Doctor Alvarez, Moore’s version of Lovecraft’s Dr. Muñoz, from “Cool Air”. Like Lovecraft’s Muñoz, Alvarez is seeking to preserve his life beyond the natural point of death, which requires him to live in a controlled, artificially cold environment. He doesn’t hide that he’s doing this, but neither does he state it outright:

“For myself, I must not complain. Here, for a time, I can be comfortable… Life does not trouble me.”

It’s as though Alvarez might be quite willing to admit the truth about what he’s doing, if only Black were to ask the right question. But Black never does, because — who would? Who would suspect that the quiet-voiced, well-mannered Alvarez is actually a walking corpse, preserved by ammonia and low temperatures? Also unlike Lovecraft’s character, Alvarez is fully human, even compassionate, as revealed in a very un-Lovecraftian line:

“…to not love is to waste the existence. Even life is a small matter beside it.”

But there is a real horror, and Black’s journey takes him right to the heart of it. The Arab alchemical text, the Kitab Al Hikmah Al Najmiyya, includes a prophecy of two figures, a Herald and a Redeemer, who are to bring about the end of our world — or its transformation. Moore’s refusal to provide a Lovecraftian moral judgement of his characters extends to a refusal to judge the coming transformation.

So, you start by thinking this Dr Alvarez is, in fact, a pretty nice chap; then that those Innsmouth folk are maybe odd-looking but they’re just folk from a different culture; then that Garland Wheatley (Moore’s version of Wizard Whateley from “The Dunwich Horror”) is, well, dangerously backward, perhaps best left alone, but not a world-shattering evil… Then you find yourself at issue 6, the halfway point, where it is, finally, made clear to Black that he is in the midst of something really bad, and in deep, and it’s way too late to do anything about it.

art by Jacen Burrows

Randall Carver, art by Jacen Burrows

The ideas Moore presents undergo a similar shift. At first, it seems as though he’s presenting Lovecraft’s horrors and his dream-world stories as evidence of a real but separate dream-reality, which brushes up against our world and which can even be accessed by dreamers such as Randall Carver (Moore’s version of Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter, which confusingly is also Lovecraft’s fictional version of Lovecraft himself, which makes it triply strange when Moore presents us with his versions of Carver and Lovecraft living in the same town). Black has a few such brushes, but initially dismisses them as hallucinations. His issue 6 experience, though, is too deeply traumatic to be dismissed even if it can be thought of as a hallucination, and it sets the tone for an increasing bleakness throughout the second half of the series, which on a first read left me with as much a feeling of nihilism as Ridley Scott’s Prometheus did on a first viewing. There’s a real sense, in the closing issues of Providence, just how little human life and our illusions of free will matter in the face of the coming transformation:

“We are words on papyrus, a thousand years ago.”

In its final issues, Providence is at times quite moving — issue 11, for instance with its rapid skim through the history of Lovecraft, his circle, and his growing impact on culture — but, at the end, it’s also terribly bleak. Robert Black turns out to be yet another Moore version of a Lovecraft character, so you know he can’t come to a good end, but in its final issue, Providence brings in characters from The Courtyard and Neonomicon (which I also found horrendously bleak, after its protagonist underwent a similarly horrific and traumatic experience as Robert Black does) and resolves the whole three-title series.

Robert Black, art by Jacen Burrows

Most of the issues of Providence included a lengthy text extract from Black’s diary, and I have to admit that, on my re-read of the series, I skipped these. In part because, although they provided Black’s innocent interpretation of the events in the comic part of the story, they didn’t really add much, as it was pretty easy to guess what Black thought was going on anyway. But also I skipped them because they were pages and pages of single-column, long-paragraph, small-size handwritten text and were just plain difficult to read. Aside from the wonderfully punnish extracts from an Innsmouth parish newsletter in issue 3, I really don’t think I missed much by skipping them.

It’s an excellent series, if bleak, though one I think you really need to know your Lovecraft to get the most out of. As such, it might not have wide appeal, but I’d certainly rank it with the best of Moore’s work, and Jacen Burrows is to be applauded for the amount of work he’s put into realising so many historically accurate locations and Lovecraftian characters, as well as providing some neat visualisations of sometimes transdimensional concepts.

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What books do best

I love films. I love music. I love games, comics, paintings, the lot. But most of all I love books, stories told in words. I’m not going to argue that my chosen favourite form of art/entertainment (if only there was one word that meant both and didn’t sound either pretentious or disparaging) is better than the others, because it’s not. They’re all means of telling stories, or saying interesting things, and they all work in different ways. The ones that work best are the ones that use the strengths of their form to the best advantage. In Watchmen, for instance, Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore deliberately used one of the advantages of comics to do something which can’t be translated into film — the fact that you can pack a lot of detail into each panel, and the reader can linger, and flip back and forth, to really absorb that detail. That’s why, when watching the recent film of Watchmen, I kept thinking, “But they’ve missed out… And what about… And where’s..?” All the way through.

But what do books do best? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

The weaknesses are obvious. Unlike all the other art-forms I listed above, they can only say one thing at a time — worse, they can only build up what they want to say one word at a time, which means you have to put a lot of work in just to get to the first thing they want to say. Music can be instantly impressive; the first shot of a film can just grab you; a splash page opening a comic takes you right into its story; but even “Call me Ishmael” has to be read one word at a time.

What are books’ strengths? I’ll take my answer not from a book, but a song:

Book after book
I get hooked
Every time the writer
Talks to me like a friend

— “Spaceball Ricochet“, Marc Bolan

Books talk to you, just like people do. Alright, you don’t see them waving their hands and pulling faces while they’re talking (books are more like telephone conversations, in that way), and they don’t allow you to talk back (or they don’t listen if you do), but although books are the least like our sensory experience of the world (mostly pictures and sounds), they are, I think, the most like our experience of people.

Some books (like some people) talk at you, and expect you to believe what they say because it’s they who say it. Such books are written by Authors, and their Authorship comes from them regarding themselves as Authorities — and that’s a little too close to regarding themselves as what Philip Pullman called The Authority in His Dark Materials, i.e., God. (Books written by Adults for children all too easily fall into this trap. Don’t they, my dearie wittle ones?)

The best books, though, are written by human beings, not Authors. They talk to you as an equal, as another human being, and don’t try to be clever or sophisticated or loud, or to put on airs:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson.

Idle reader: without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like.

Don Quixote, Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

Ever since people started reading books silently (Saint Ambrose is recorded as the first to engage in this peculiar practice), when books speak, they do so inside your head. In this way, they can seem not so much to be speaking to you, as to be the result of your eavesdropping on someone else’s thoughts, their own interior monologue raised to the clarity of complete and artistically ordered sentences.

What goes on in other people’s heads is, of course, one of the great mysteries of life. We can be reasonably sure that if I see a red penguin and you see a red penguin then the sensory impression received by our eyes is roughly the same thing, but the thoughts that go through our separate heads (“A red penguin? Am I insane?!” and “Ah, the Red Penguin returns…”) can be as different as, well, two books on a shelf.

But it’s in books that we have the solution to this mystery. Books allow the most intimate contact with the inside of another person’s head, because the writer doesn’t have to talk to us like a friend, they can go one better, and talk to us as they would to themselves, either about themselves, or (if they’re pure narrator) about the story, situation or picture they see:

The Piano Teacher, Erika Kohut, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. Mama likes calling Erika her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon. She is trying to escape her mother. Erika is in her late thirties. Her mother is old enough to be her grandmother.

The Piano Teacher, Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Joachim Neugroschel

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake

A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I’s feet and wetting they.

Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore.

A good book opens up a world and surrounds you in it. Because it starts inside your head, if read right, it replaces your senses and becomes your world, while you read it. One word at a time you go into all the strangeness, wonder, fear and peculiarity of being another human being. Which, you of course find, is just like being yourself. Only, with the furniture moved about a bit.

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