Do you like Holmes, M R James, strange investigations, Victorian tales, and period drawings?  Of course you do, so today, dear listener, we offer chaotic interconnections, as we recently found something online we rather liked. No, not chicken carcasses this time, but  art by Sidney Paget, the great Holmes illustrator, gifted to the co-creator of detective Flaxman Low, writer Hesketh Prichard, by none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!

For quick context, writer Hesketh Prichard (of whom we say much more later) was a friend of Conan Doyle, and a fellow member of the Authors Cricket Club, founded in 1892. You can see both of them in the photograph below:

Authors v Artists, May 1903: Authors in back row, left to right: E. W. Hornung (1st), E. V. Lucas (2nd), P. G. Wodehouse (3rd), J. C. Snaith (4th), A. C. Doyle (6th), H. V. Hesketh-Prichard (7th), A. Kinross (furthest right). Front row: S. F. Bullock (2nd from left), J. M. Barrie (3rd from right), G. C. Ives (2nd from right), A. E. W. Mason (sitting on ground).

J M Barrie and Conan Doyle both encouraged Hesketh Prichard to write fiction, and it seems that Conan Doyle gave at least two copies of Sidney Paget’s Holmes illustrations to his friend.

One was the plate “Is there any other point which I can make clear?” from the ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’. The other is shown here, “Look at that with your magnifying glass, Mr. Holmes” from ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’. Note the inscription…

Rather neat, we thought. And searching around, it seems that more details of the nature and whereabouts of Paget’s Holmes illustrations can be found here, on a site dedicated to tracing them: http://www.bestofsherlock.com/sidney-paget-original-art.htm

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HOLMES AND THE WEIRD

Following those links, now to a tale which manages to include both Flaxman Low and Sherlock Holmes whilst at the same time following up on elements of an M R James story.

Some time back we delved into the issue of Sherlock Holmes pastiches and wilder re-imaginings of the Great Detective (see our article  shades of sherlock). And we said that we ourselves liked and wrote straight, canonical Holmes adventures, but that sometimes a really well-written excursion into the supernatural could work.

Since then, old greydog has edited two chunky volumes of such stories for Belanger Books, Sherlock Holmes & the Occult Detectives, with tales which question or reinforce Holmes’s scepticism. Both volumes are out now, some 700pp of mystery and malevolence.

Anyway, back then, we also mentioned The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (ed. John Joseph Adams, 2009), but had only dipped in and out of that anthology.

Afterwards, we came across this review, entirely by accident, on Goodreads:

The Things That Shall Come Upon Them (Barbara Roden)

“…this story should be taken as the model for Holmes-meets-Occult kind of adventures… But more importantly, in this story Sherlock Holmes does NOT do anything that goes against the canonical template of his thoughts & action, and the supernatural element is presented with its chilling moments and menace through the interpretations of the events as done by Flaxman Low… And the topping is that the story actually ties up a few loose ends in one of the greatest horror stories of all times (clue: the most-anthologised story by M.R. James).”

The tale was originally published in the Gaslight Grimoire anthology in 2008. In the introduction to it in Improbable Adventures, the author says:

“The story setting – Lufford Abbey – former home of Julian Karswell of M R James’s classic ‘Casting the Runes’ – came after I watched, with our son, the film version of ‘Casting the Runes’, Night of the Demon, and found myself wondering what happened to Karswell’s home after he died in somewhat mysterious circumstances, in France. The involvement of a ‘Dr Watson’ in James’s story was a gift from the writing gods.”

And here, for reference, is Dr Watson, from M R James’s text:

The conductor George was thoughtful, and appeared to be absorbed in calculations as to the number of passengers. On arriving at his house he found Dr Watson, his medical man, on his doorstep. ‘I’ve had to upset your household arrangements, I’m sorry to say, Dunning. Both your servants hors de combat. In fact, I’ve had to send them to the Nursing Home.’

‘Good heavens! what’s the matter?’

‘It’s something like ptomaine poisoning, I should think: you’ve not suffered yourself, I can see, or you wouldn’t be walking about. I think they’ll pull through all right.’

THE THAMES HORROR and Other Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, four of Barbara Roden’s Holmesian tales including the above, is also available from Amazon and Calabash Press:

thames horror from calabash

thames horror on amazon uk

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Finally we travel from Arthur and Monty directly to Hesketh,  and in relation to Paget’s work, consider some illustrations by B E Minns.

Benjamin Edwin Minns (1863 – 1937) was a leading Australian watercolorist, but from 1895 to 1915, he worked in England, contributing to St Paul’s Magazine, Punch, The Strand Magazine, the Bystander and other publications as well as sending drawings to The Bulletin.

(We can’t help feeling that Minns looks rather like M R James in the painting above)

As part of his work for London publishers, he produced a series of plates for Flaxman Low’s adventures in 1899…

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HESKETH, VAYDOUX AND SLOTHS

 

We think it’s fair to say that if you are called Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (1876-1922) and nicknamed ‘Hex’ at school, you ought to do something interesting with your life. The fascinating HVH-P did not let anyone down.

He hunted for (probably) extinct giant sloths in South America, helped counter German snipers on the Great War, played a mean game of cricket (as above), and explored the world. Through Trackless Labrador is one of his, for example, and he brought back some of the first reports of vodoun from the interior of Haiti. He could have been invented for the Boy’s Own Library.

In 1899, Prichard was the first white man to cross the interior of the black island republic since 1803, and he wrote a rather prejudiced book about it called Where Black Rules White. The nasty politics of the period (and basic humanity aside), it does include an interesting chapter on Vaydoux (voodoo, vodoun), where he describes practices he saw for his own eyes:

“As she danced she cleared her throat and spat with a noise like artillery coming into action. The huge black woman in the centre droned on, and to the drum-beat was added the chink of a key on metal. The Mamaloi quickened in her sinuous dancing. The heat was terrific; humanity sweltered there. And over all presided a portrait of the German Emperor, whose eye I seemed to catch at this juncture.

“The Papaloi, a small and filthy old man, crouched at one side, as the Mamaloi caught the cock from the hands of the big woman, and, holding it by the neck, flung it over her head and shoulder. Her face was distorted with frenzy; round and round she twisted, accompanied by a swifter measure of the same dead song. She laid the cock upon the heads of the worshippers and began to whirl more and more rapidly to the hurrying, maddening drumming. Suddenly she straightened her arm, spun the cock round and round, its flapping wings beating impotently upon the air. A snowstorm of feathers floated up as she stood with rapt eyes and bared teeth, twirling; then she flung up her hand, and the headless body flew over her shoulder.

“Her excitement was horrible; she pressed the bleeding neck to her lips, and, when she slowly withdrew her hand, stood for an instant fixed and immovable, her lips and teeth stained red.”

With his mother Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard, ‘Hex’ wrote a series of occult detective stories. She also accompanied him on some of his travels, but that’s another matter…

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THE FLAXMAN LOW STORIES

Warning: Occasional spoilers do follow.

M R James, said of the stories which follow:

“K and Hesketh Prichard’s ‘Flaxman Low’ is most ingenious and successful but rather over-technically ‘occult’”

The adventures of Flaxman Low were originally attributed to E and H Heron, possibly because the printers couldn’t fit both their full names on the covers. Published in 1898-99, there were twelve stories in total, stories which brought his character onto the occult detective roll of honour. These tales are interesting, unusual and come with a twist of the new science of psychology (these are the 1890s, remember). But wait…

We re-read the Heron family, and realised that this stuff is, in fact, frequently nuts. Enjoyable, but nuts. The detective himself is “one of the leading scientists of the day”, whose real name is not disclosed. He is also an accomplished sportsman, and a record-breaking hammer-thrower, strong and lean with a high forehead, long neck and thin moustache. We learn this early on, which gets us all a-quiver and ready for the horrors.

And boy did we have trouble picking which horrors to feature. So much gold in a shallow river. We have rarely felt so dumbfounded when we put a book down. Here are two of Flaxman Low’s encounters and discoveries, to give you the idea:

• A dead black servant found mouldering in a tiny cupboard after growing poisonous fungi, derived from deadly African spores, in there. Helpfully we are told: “how or why he made use of them are questions that can never be cleared up now”.
• A ghost which eventually turns into a vampire which decides to inhabit the remains of a recently-unwrapped Egyptian mummy. As an extra, the ghost/vampire/mummy may have come originally from an ancient barrow-mound. It’s like the entire Hammer Horror catalogue in twelve pages.

Flaxman Low the Man has a number of noble characteristics, apart from his high forehead. Firstly, he attributes almost everything to his advanced knowledge of psychology and study of psychic manifestations. When he can’t really answer someone’s question, he helpfully replies:

“Everybody who…. investigates the phenomena of spiritism will, sooner or later, meet in them some perplexing element, which is not to be explained by any of the ordinary theories. For reasons into which I need not now enter, this present case appears to me to be one of these.”

A wonderful paragraph, which in greydog’s humbler stories would have been rendered thus:

Inspector Chiltern: What was that, then?

Henry: Haven’t the faintest, old chap.

Secondly, he decides for quite unknown reasons to put everyone in danger (except himself) by declaring halfway through most stories that he has pretty much solved the case but won’t give them the answer until lots more harm has been done. We felt very Miss Marple sometimes, even at the end:

“But Aunt Jane, you still haven’t explained how the one-armed werewolf which killed Colonel Smythe knew that the spectral squid would be blamed…”

Thirdly, he likes burning/shooting/knocking things down as a quick end to the matter. If he had been written with a touch more Indiana Jones, the stories would be perfect. We have to commend to you the final scene with the barrow-wight/ghost/vampire/mummy, in which it is despatched by putting the bullet-riddled and beaten remains into a boat and giving them a Viking funeral. You couldn’t make this up – except the Heron family did.

There are tales in the collection which have genuine merit, but you have to pick and choose. To finish this piece we want to ruin one particular tale in more detail. The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith is the first Low appearance. It starts with the traditional motif of Flaxman Low being called in by a chum. The chum has inherited a house, and surprisingly, the house can’t be let for long because the tenants run away or shoot out the skirting boards. Financially embarrassed, the chum asks for help, and…

This story is wonderful, especially as it veers into Lovecraft before Lovecraft in its descriptions:

“The sensation he experienced as it moved was of some ponderous, pulpy body, not crawling or creeping, but spreading… then he became conscious of a pair of glassy eyes, with livid, everted lids, looking into his own… they were watery, like the eyes of a dead fish, and gleamed with a pale, internal lustre.”

This description follows the sighting of a bladder-like object regularly going into one of the rooms, but never there when pursued. “The bladder-like object may be the key to the mystery.” Low pronounces before any real investigation has started. There’s a detective for you.

It turns out that a leprous uncle who disappeared had died in the house, and is haunting it. Flaxman Low has a novel solution – they pull the house down. In doing so they find a malformed skeleton “under the boarding at an angle of the landing”. Low reveals that the uncle’s spirit has been intermittently animating the remains, at which point we kneel before Hesketh Vernon Hesketh Pritchard (and his mum) in awe.

You see, the bladder object was a bandaged, leprous foot, apparently visible when the rest of the body was not; marks on the sand-strewn landing were caused by walking sticks – lame ghost, apparently; the spirit had somehow become huge and pulpy despite animating a wrecked skeleton, and anyway, the leprous uncle who could hardly move had for some reason hidden himself ingeniously under the landing floorboards before he died.

We so get it. And there are many different versions of the collected tales available, new or second-hand, some of which only include six stories – look for the longer editions if you want to get all twelve.

The excellent blog site Skulls in the Stars has a nice summary of Flaxman Low, and it seems a shame not to quote that:

• Preferred tools: encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural,
• incredible observational skills
• Opponents: malevolent spirits
• Success rate: Above average
• Affectations: Always has a theory, but hardly ever shares it
• Quotation: “Yet I can assure you that if you take the trouble to glance through the pages of the psychical periodicals you will find many statements at least as wonderful.”

Assessment: Low is a moderately good psychic investigator, though a relatively passive one. He allows skeptical and unprepared bystanders to accompany him on dangerous cases far too often. Furthermore, he is often slow to act, to such an extent that people often die before the problem gets resolved. Still, he knows his supernatural phenomena, and he generally puts an end to the troubling manifestations.

We applaud Skulls in the Stars, a site which manages to combine optics and physics with a love of classic pulp and horror. Such an animal suits our own lurcher-and-weird-fiction outlook. You can find it here: skulls in the stars

And there you have him, Flaxman Low, the occult detective with a difference. You really have been warned. For more on occult detctives in general, purchase a copy of Occult Detective Magazine, and see other pages here, or call in at Tim Prasil‘s site, which includes a very helpful chronology:

https://brombonesbooks.com/for-fun/the-chronological-bibliography-of-early-occult-detectives/

(Some of the above on the Flaxman Low tales appeared on this site in 2016)

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More to come in the next few days. Subscribe for free (top left) to be alerted when we next venture out. No vampiric mummy barrow ghosts will call…

“It’s not Frankenstein – it’s Frankenstein’s monster!”

Today, dear listener, we explore recent books by those who have followed in the wake of the remarkable Mary Woollencraft Shellfish, author of Extreme Surgery for Girls: How to Construct A Real Husband (aka Frankenstein). And even better, we have spared any  expense by commissioning someone already into this stuff, our regular guest reviewer Dave Brzeski. It took us several lightning storms to get Dave going again and off the slab, but here we are…

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FRANKENSTEIN IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY

by Dave Brzeski

 

Mary Shelley created a monster! I’m not talking about Frankenstein’s creation here – I’m talking about the book itself. Rarely has a single novel given birth to so many ‘sequels’ and re-imaginings as Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus.

There are an awful lot of Frankenstein books on the market these days. For the purpose of this review, I’m limiting myself to novels – no comics, short stories, TV shows, films etc. They must be either stand alone, or part of a series first published since the beginning of the millennium. And I must consider them to be of a decent standard. Life is too short to waste time on bad books. I have no doubt missed more than a few. Please feel free to mention any egregious omissions in the comments.

This article/review has been a long time coming. I actually wrote most of the Planisek part back in 2014, for a review on the British Fantasy Society website. I’d originally intended to cover all the books that were currently available in each series, but Frank Schildiner was already working on his third when I first came up with the idea – in fact it’s now available. Then I decided that it had been so long between volumes of Pete Planisek’s trilogy that I’d need to re-read the first volume, before I could move on to the second. I also realised that Dean Koontz’s series ran to five volumes and there was simply no way… Putting this piece together was going to have to be squeezed in between other review commitments, editing various books and a magazine. If I stuck with the original plan I’d never get it done. So I decided to limit it to the first book in each series.

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1) Derrick Ferguson

 

Derrick Ferguson’s The Madness of Frankenstein (Pulpwork Press 2014) has to be considered from the perspective of what it actually is – and that is a love letter to Hammer Films!

It’s a page-turner of a novella, which follows Peter Holden, an enthusiastic doctor who considers Frankenstein to be a misunderstood genius. Holden himself is under trial at the beginning of the story, for Frankenstein-like crimes and blasphemy and about to be sentenced to death, when he is rescued by a beautiful messenger who convinces his judges that he could provide useful information if given over to the care and questioning of Doctor Edward Voss, director of the Vandicutt Institute for the Incurably Insane.

It’s a fast-paced pulp adventure story, told with tongue firmly in cheek and many a sly wink. The astute reader will recognise many of the names that characters and places are given – such as Wrightson and Moorcock. Some are clearly nods to Ferguson’s influences. Justicer Wrightson is a Solomon Kane like figure – if Kane was a total arsehole. Those of us well versed in classic television shows will know that trusting a witch named Angelique is never going to end well. The Hammer Film influence is served with a good helping of 1980s horror movie gore just for good measure. Those who prefer a clear cut good versus evil element to their fiction should be warned – there are no good characters to be found in this book, and little evidence of any with a balanced state of mind.

It is, I have to say, not a perfect book. There are a few anachronisms and too many typos. One can’t look too closely at the science involved, obviously – let’s not forget that this aspect is influenced not only by Hammer Films, but also the earlier Universal horror classics. Having said that, I was very taken with the clever, if unlikely variation on a crash cart, which was powered by a tank of giant electric eels. By sheer coincidence I recently watched the I, Frankenstein film (which came out in 2014, same year as this book) which used the same idea. Curiosity led me to ask Derrick Ferguson who actually originated the idea and he informed me that it was first seen in the Kenneth Branagh movie, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).

In conclusion, this is a fairly fast, fun read, although it would have benefited from one more editing pass. I was quite sorry to discover that Ferguson has no plans to continue this into a series.

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2) Frank Schildiner

 

Frank Schildiner has contributed three novels to the Frankenstein mythos so far. All are actually continuations of the French pulp Frankenstein books of Jean-Claude Carrière. Carrière’s version of our favourite monster is given the name Gouroull and he’s not the sympathetic character we’ve come to know and love. Gouroull is pure evil – a nihilist who wants nothing more than to eradicate humanity. He reminded me slightly of the Marvel Comics villain, Thanos, except if Gouroull met Lady Death, he’d likely want to destroy her too! Gouroull is also insanely powerful, easily besting warriors, witches and even vampire lords in his quest to procure a suitable skeleton on which to build a mate.

The first book, The Quest of Frankenstein is entirely given over to Gouroull’s obsession with creating a new race. In this quest he is aided by H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West. The crossovers do not end there. Gouroull encounters many well-known characters from film and literature in his travels. Schildiner even gives us a helpful chapter by chapter breakdown of his character sources in the Afterword.

Do I like the basic concept of an utterly evil, insanely powerful Frankenstein’s Monster? – not particularly, if I’m honest. I’ve yet to read any of Carrière’s six Gouroull novels. English translations are finally being published, but since they were written in the late 50s, they don’t fit the brief of this article. As it is, I rather suspect I wouldn’t be a huge fan. That said, Schildiner writes a fast-paced pulp adventure that I found myself enjoying very much and I do plan on reading the follow-ups at some point.

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3) Edward M Erdelac

 

Edward M. Erdelac is the third of the modern pulp fiction authors whose take on the Frankenstein legend I’m examining. This one was a surprise! I am well familiar with Erdelac’s work and have enjoyed all that I’ve read, but I wasn’t truly prepared for the sheer scope of Monstrumführer. On the one hand, it’s another classic pulp adventure involving the infamous Dr. Mengele’s attempts to use Dr Frankenstein’s notes to turn the tide of the second world war. On the other it’s a thought-provoking and informative look at that dark period of human history through the eyes of Jotham, a young Jew, as he witnesses and experiences horrors that remain for most of us the province of books and movies. Erdelac pulls no punches whatsoever, as he not only calls to task the pure evil of the Nazis, but also the Jews for the attitudes that fuelled the rage against them in the first place. The monster himself is put to good use as a relatively objective viewpoint. I honestly can’t recommend this one highly enough.

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4) Pete Planisek

 

OK, Planisek, where’s book two? This was my initial reaction on finishing Pete Planisek’s Frankenstein: A Life Beyond. This is the first book of a trilogy, and trilogies can be very frustrating when they’re this interesting, and the following parts are not yet available.

There are a lot of direct ‘sequels’ to Frankenstein around, but this one easily puts all the others in the shade. So much so that, in my own head, I’m accepting this as cannon with the original.

Ernest Frankenstein is the brother of Victor, creator of the famous ‘monster’. He’s relocated to Ireland, after the deaths of his entire family, and is married to Ailis Iierney Frankenstein. Ernest returns to the city of his birth, Geneva, to find out the truth about the mysterious fate of his brother, Victor. He leaves his wife pregnant and gravely ill, although he isn’t aware of this. As he continues on his quest, he meets his wife’s half-sister, now a spy for the French, and a mysterious clan of gypsies, now divided into two warring factions over differing interpretations of an ancient prophecy. Victor’s creation is ever present, but solidly in the background for most of the book and Ernest is totally unaware of the details of his brother’s work.

The book is well-written and meticulously researched. It’s set for the most part in 1809, but has frequent flashbacks to events involving the Frankenstein clan – blissfully unaware of exactly what Victor is up to – which run concurrently with Mary Shelley’s novel.

If I have any criticism, it’s that the character of Ernest’s best friend, Jack Clerval – the son of Henry Clerval from the original novel – reads very American to me. I’m fairly sure the Clerval family had no American roots, so perhaps Planisek, who is American, slipped in his prose style a little here.

This is a complex, well thought out and exceptionally entertaining novel. As I mentioned, this is the first of three books, but it does end in a reasonably satisfying place. Nevertheless, I’m very much looking forward to reading the follow-ups. Book two, Frankenstein: Soul’s Echo has actually been available for a couple of years now, but given the huge wait between that and the first volume, I’ve decided to hold off until I have all three in my hands and then read the entire series.

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5) Dean Koontz

 

The first major work of the new millennium to be based upon Shelley’s creation, albeit the last to be read by me, is probably Dean Koontz‘s Frankenstein series, which began in 2005 with Prodigal Son. Initially published with a co-writer credit for Kevin J. Anderson, this is as much a re-imagining as it is a sequel to the original novel. Interestingly, Anderson’s co-writer credit was removed from later editions, as was that for Ed Gorman on the second book in the series, and from that point on they were published as solely the work of Koontz. The late Ed Gorman stated on his blog that, “I always said those books were Dean’s. As he has explained, collaboration just isn’t for him. They are his and his alone. He wrote them.”

It was originally planned as a TV series, but Koontz walked away, after a disagreement with the studio over changes. The series became a TV movie, I, Frankenstein (2004), with Koontz’s blessing, as long as they removed his name from the credits. He then decided to take the story in a different direction in a series of novels.

I admit to having not seen the TV movie when I read the book, but I can’t deny that after reading the first chapter of Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, I would love to see a faithful TV series adaptation. As with Carrière and Schildiner’s Gouroull, Koontz gives the monster a new name, that being Deucalion. Otherwise, the two versions couldn’t be more different. Here we are reintroduced to Mary Shelley’s sympathetic monster, who after a couple of centuries is living a peaceful existence in a Tibetan monastery. He recognises his capacity for violence, but like a recovering addict he’s actively and successfully taken up a better lifestyle. His peaceful existence is broken when a messenger brings him evidence that his creator also still alive – after 200 years! After his monk friend gives him some extensive tattooing to help disguise the ruined side of his face – a consequence of his having angered his creator – he sets out to investigate.

Carson O’Connor, a maverick female homicide detective with an attitude, firmly cements the TV series feel of the book. She has a partner, Michael Maddison, with whom she shares the inevitable sexual tension. Yes, it’s slightly cliché, but it works. It almost goes without saying that they have rival cops in the police department, who are far less concerned about how they do their job, as long as it gets done and they get the credit. Koontz has a little fun by giving them names from the classic Universal horror films. Jonathan Harker (a character from Dracula) and Dwight Fry (an actor who appeared in Dracula and several Frankenstein films). I confess I found this mildly annoying, as the images I have in my head from those films don’t really fit.

From here on it gets complicated. Frankenstein, under the alias Victor Helios, is up to his old tricks, but so much more so. As one would expect, he’s progressed somewhat from the days of strange equipment, powered by lightning, reanimating patchwork creatures made from corpses. He’s well up on all the latest breakthroughs in cloning and genetic engineering. He has somehow found a way to make himself immortal and he’s far more of a monster than his original creation ever was. Several of his newer creations are now wandering around New Orleans; they look perfectly human, but they most certainly are not. It’s interesting to note that both this, and Schildiner’s novels involve a desire to replace a deeply flawed humanity with an ‘improved’ version, but one is led by Dr Frankenstein and the other by the original monster.

O’Connor and Maddison have a serial killer to catch, which turns out to be two serial killers. Things get weird very quickly. Eventually, they team up with Deucalion and the book ends with that particular case closed. But O’Connor and her partner now know who Helios is, and that he needs to be stopped. A perfect end to a story that is intended as a pilot for a series, even if it never happened. The books continue the story for four more volumes.

As a writer, Koontz is very prolific and I’ve always found his work patchy to say the least. I read several of his horror novels in the 1980s and really liked them. Since then, I’d come to the conclusion that he was simply churning books out and lost interest. This one was, for me, a return to form, despite the clichéd elements. I really enjoyed it and I fully intend to read the rest of the series.

Having previously stated that I was not going to include other media outside of novels in this feature, I found that I simply could not resist searching out a copy of the TV movie and checking to see how much of Koontz’s story and characters survived the adaptation.

In some ways I was surprised at how good a job they did, in others I was pretty disappointed. As one would expect, the story is drastically simplified. Gone is the Tibetan monastery, gone is the opening scene with Carson O’Connor, which would have worked so well as an introduction to the character. Perhaps, had it gone to series, they would have re-instated that scene in episode one. The important plot point of the serial killer murders having been committed by two separate people is ditched. But then they left out so much detail about the killings that it made little difference.

The thing that really struck me was the level at which they sacrificed logic for style. It’s a Frankenstein story, so it must be gothic. This means it has to be very dimly lit throughout and dirty, oh so dirty! Victor Helios’ laboratory, where he makes his creations is filthy. Maybe he so improved on nature with his work that they were immune to infection from the get go – they would have to be! No doubt all the modern scientific knowledge Helios had picked up removed the necessity for complex surgical procedures, so he that he could safely work in ridiculously bad lighting.

It’s not only Helios that suffers from this, though. No one has anything remotely resembling decent lighting in the whole of New Orleans. Now I admit I have never been there, but I doubt it’s quite that bad. We are expected to believe the young girl, who is the killer’s final victim has been in his apartment before. Yet, the entire building looks ready to be condemned and he has the vilest toilet basin I have ever laid eyes on (we see it when he handcuffs the girl to it) and, trust me, I’ve seen some bad ones in my time!

I did, however quite enjoy this TV movie and it would have been interesting to see it go to series. Parker Posey made a good Carson O’Connor. Deucalion (Vincent Perez) has less facial disfigurement here than in the books, so he didn’t need the tattooing to disguise it. Despite it’s many flaws, it’s worth a watch, but I’d recommend reading the books in preference.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397430/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_2

In conclusion, there is plenty here to sate the appetite of any Frankenstein fan. As I stated, this article barely scratches the surface of what’s out there. I liked some more than others, but I consider all of the books covered here well worth reading.

 

We’re always interested when we find something new and a bit different, especially if it comes from small and independent creators rather than the mega-industries – we try to be a signpost site for stuff you might otherwise miss. So today we’ll mention a bit of head-on action – Ngolo Diaspora, an African Martial arts comic book series based on the award-winning Ngolo screenplay…

“Ngolo Diaspora takes place in the near future in a world similar to ours, yet different. In this world assassinations are legal, as long as they are carried about by government sanctioned guild. Guilds are used to settle disputes between the powerful and the ordinary, with each side given a grace period to settle their differences before the assassination contract activates. Of the six sanctioned guilds, the Bloodmen are the most skilled and the most feared because of their deadly fighting style, Ngolo. Just the mention of their involvement can bring parties to the table. But some think the guilds have become too powerful and are bent on destroying them. Their target? The Bloodmen. The Bloodmen are forced to go into hiding, code name ‘Ngolo Diaspora’.”

More details about the campaign for this project near the bottom, but first we expand on the issues behind Ngolo with a piece from author and Black martial artist Balogun Ojetade, who wrote the very enjoyable A Haunting in the SWATS horror/weird novel, and Afrikan Martial Arts: Discovering the Warrior Within, as well working regularly on a wide range of other stories and comic books.

Balogun also joined us a while back with an article about writing black female characters: http://greydogtales.com/blog/women-speculative-fiction-men-write/

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PLEASE NOTE: We often agree with our guest writers, but what they say is their own personal opinion. and they choose their own words (you should see the discussions we have when our regular guest, Paul St John Mackintosh, lays into a subject). It’s supposed to be this way, otherwise all you’ll hear is us droning on and on…

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OPINION PIECE:

The Importance of Heroic Black Imagery in These Trying Times

by Balogun Ojetade

Black heroes have become more popular since the release of the Black Panther movie. So much so, a phenomenon called “the Black Panther Effect”—the clamoring by the entertainment industry for heroes and villains of African descent—has arisen.

Heroes fill a psychological need today more than ever before in this time of Covid-19, the uprising of the oppressed, the continuous stamping out of Black lives and the cry for agency.

Heroic Black images speak to our collective desire for defiance and our need for the world to acknowledge and respect that we, too, are courageous; we, too, are powerful; we, too, are brilliant, loving, moral and willing to fight for freedom and justice.

The role of fantastic stories of battle, defiance and over-the-top heroics is to make our dopeness visible—to others, yes, but more importantly, to US. Our dopeness, immortalized in comic books, reminds us that the impossible is only impossible to those who cannot do it and we can do much.

The images of Black heroes and superheroes in comic books, movies and TV shows reminds us of the everyday Black heroes—everyday heroes on the front lines of an uprising right NOW; heroes that rise because of our suffering and heroes that rise because they suffer. George Floyd may have never been a hero otherwise, but his murder elevated him to a heroic status. His death has become bigger than him and served as the fuel for an uprising that has been long coming.

Ngolo: Diaspora—a comic book series written by Balogun Ojetade and Milton Davis and illustrated by Peter Chizoba Daniel and PEDAent—brings heroic images to the forefront, explores what heroism is and gives us agency—usually, in film, television and comic books, the African martial arts are made mockery of, defeated easily by Asian martial arts, or non-existent. Not so in Ngolo, where the African martial arts and African warriors are front and center, powerful and yes, deadly, if necessary.

Support the Kickstarter for Ngolo: Diaspora, the first book in the series. There are also card games and role playing games in the Ngolo universe and much more dopeness to come!

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So do check the link highlighted above, and have a look. Next time on greydogtales, books about Frankenstein, for some peculiar reason. We really can’t remember half the time…

 

Our big, in-depth writer interview of the month, and it’s a darned good one. As you should know, I, greydog, am an unashamed enthusiast of the work of American weird fiction writer Matthew M Bartlett, and it came to me the other day, lying back on my bed of bracken and stolen chicken bones, that it was time we interviewed him properly.

So we sent a number of photographs and only slightly redacted documents to him in the States, and suddenly he was very keen to go ahead. It was all jolly enjoyable, so do read on…

Matthew M Bartlett in the Wild

 

Interviews are curious animals. Often respectful, sometimes a touch fawning, and occasionally much like a series of press releases. Promotion-o-rama. But what prompted this one, as mentioned above, was a simple fascination with Matthew’s work – and yes, there’s a degree of envy in such thoughts. Envy is one of the five staple food groups for a writer, after all, along with economy own-brand noodles. Decent folk smile and say: “Well done you!” Avaricious jobbing writers like me hiss: “That bastard – he did it first. Back to the bloody ideas bin again.”

However, I remain absorbed by his work; a single paragraph of his, which I think I read in early 2016, told me that we would probably click:

I find Dither weeping disconsolately at the microphone. Ronstadt’s limp body hangs by the neck from a thick branch that has plunged through our modest roof, his neck impossibly folded, his tongue a black bug peeking from a pink letter slot, a coffee mug that says “I Don’t Like Mondays” gripped in his curved rigor mortis finger.

Creeping Waves

What’s not to like about that lovely little scene? Basically, Matthew M Bartlett has a unique, skewed talent which makes him stand out even amongst the many talented writers of new weird fiction today.  So now I paint a smile on palsied lips, and try to play nice…

greydog: OK, Matthew – I think it was that talented young colonial Brian O’Connell who first really alerted me to your work, four or five years ago. The key, of course, was mention of Leeds – because I’ve lived in or near there, in the UK, since the mid-seventies, and had no idea until I read your work that there was another one in the States. I even assumed it was yet another Innsmouth or Castle Rock at first. But Leeds, Massachusetts, is a real place. Were you aware that there was an urban Mothership in Yorkshire when you started?

matthew: I was aware of the Leeds in Yorkshire largely because a band I like called The Mekons started there. The Leeds in Massachusetts is actually named after your Leeds. Ours is a small, sleepy village in the city of Northampton, a village that used to be a hub for textile manufacturing, making farm implements, things like that. There’s a pretty little river spanned by quaint old bridges, a short tunnel on a winding road, an old mill building converted into apartments, a bucolic country club, a couple convenience stores, quiet neighborhoods, and a lot of wooded areas.

The Leeds in my fiction, on the other hand, is a twisted version of the whole of Northampton—a city settled in the 1600s and established as a city in the 1800s, a cultural hub and a college town, the home of some factions of early Spiritualist movements. In my stuff, it’s a place propitious for occult practices and various kinds of devilish deviance. So it is basically a Castle Rock or an Innsmouth, in that it’s a fictional city loosely based on a real city. When I say loosely, I mean that I throw in geographical features and places from all over New England, or anyplace I’ve been, really, if they seem to work for a given story. I’d love to make a map one day.

greydog: It seems more than coincidence that you should mention The Mekons, as it happens that in the same recent issue of Occult Detective Magazine where we publish an excellent story by you and Jonathan Raab, we also publish a parody by David Langford, an old friend who is also… the brother of one of The Mekons. That your own brother, I understand, interviewed Jon Langford at a Boston concert, makes this a conspiracy of massive proportions. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, so I can take that thought no further.

Anyway, thinking about the aforementioned Castle Rock from Stephen King, your own Leeds, Lovecraft’s Arkham, S P Miskowski’s Skillute and others, what is the attraction of fictional locations like these? Do you feel that such discrete, frequently revisited psychogeographies are basically comfort zones for the writer? Or do they represent something else, such as authors’ own experiences of, and issues with, small town life?

matthew: Leeds grounds me in a locale with established geographical features and institutions. In that sense it can be a comfort zone, I guess, although the term “comfort zone” seems to suggest that there’s no room for growth and experimentation there, and I don’t believe that—the borders both physical and metaphysical are not exactly constricting. They’re very malleable. For some authors, these fictional locales definitely serve as commentaries on small towns; for me, if there’s any of that, it’s not deliberate, or at least not overtly so. Northampton/Leeds works for me because it’s so old, the new is just a very thin skin placed over the ancient. Also, a relative recently traced my family to the area, in Colonial times, which I didn’t know when I moved here.

greydog: Cool. Now, the substantial block of Gateways to Abomination, Creeping Waves and If It Bleeds (or Iib Leeds as I prefer to call it) is augmented by both subtle and direct references in a number of other stories, as in the collections Of Doomful Portent and The Stay-Awake Men. Is there a whole garment there in the making, a final hideous pullover being knitted to a pre-existing pattern? Or do you add to it on fairly random, when-the-mood-takes-me sort of way?

matthew: The latter. Or both. I don’t know. Which probably means the latter. I do know I have a basic idea of an overarching plot like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and each story is a patch of pieces, and it’s so big that there are more than enough places to fill in more.

greydog: You rarely tell a ‘straight’ story. Characters, events and symbols intertwine, disappear and then are back – the Government Man in If It Bleeds, for example – sometimes as focal points, sometimes as throwaway references. Or maybe they don’t come back at all, and we’re left to wonder where they went. It’s a striking – and very effective – approach which raises the content of your stories to almost psychopathic dreams. Deliberate stylistic choice, or something which flows from how you think about the world?

matthew: I’m not particularly good at analysing myself and my fiction. I can say that I like writers and songwriters who revisit locales and characters, and who use call-backs. As a reader I find it thrilling to say, Oh, that’s the person from that other book, as if it’s my own private discovery. It’s fun to write that way, too. I may be working on a current piece and think of something or someone barely referenced in Gateways, and work them into the new story. I gave myself plenty of elliptical stuff in the early work that I can come back to and mine for more material.

In the flickering lights, Greyson had a terrible hallucination: for a moment it seemed as though Spettrini’s head was sending tendrils of flesh back to the chair. Where the tendrils hit the surface, the leather took on the magician’s pallor, splotches of flesh spreading like spilled water, and then hair, white and wild, began sprouting from the flesh of the chair. Spettrini reddened, as did the chair, then, as the spinning tables slowed and the stroboscopic effect faded, so did the hallucination.

‘Spettrini’, The Stay-Awake Men and Other Unstable Entities

greydog: Your world is full of facades. Ice-cream vans burn and break open to reveal warped children; skulls split and twisted horns erupt, bodies burst to release the new and terrible things within. Skin is something which is worn like an old suit, not integral to whatever lives inside it. Camouflage and deception; transformation and the incubation of horrors. Should we distrust what we see?

matthew: Again, I’m bad at analysing myself, but it sounds like you’re onto something there! I’m a fairly naïve person, so I’m surprised again and again when I take something or someone at face value, and then the ice cream truck shrugs off its suit and becomes a mobile slaughterhouse. Say I start a new job, and I gamely think everyone gets along, likes one another, despite small disagreements…then I find out there are massive battles going on, people who loathe one another almost homicidally. This reveals itself only after many months, and I’m left to wonder if it was obvious all along. Maybe I’m dealing with something like that when I write. But I worry that if I can pick out particular metaphors or overarching themes in my stuff, I’ll start overthinking it.

You’re listening to WXXT. You are not sure how long you have been listening. Your stomach drowns out the sounds of your radio. A wind howls. The batteries die. Infants mewl at your feet. Up next, the swinging sounds of Dino Paul Crocetti. You know him as Dean Martin.

Gateways to Abomination

greydog: I’m with you on the overthinking bit, which makes some of these questions a bit ironic, but we must screw our courage to the sticking post, as Lady Macbeth said when her soufflé collapsed yet again. Beyond visual cues, there’s a huge aural component to your fiction, from background static to explicit WXXT broadcasts; Fat Andy and the Peepers, fragments heard in the background, old records and spoken words which make no obvious sense. There’s Music of the Moldering, of course, and you’ve worked with Cadabra Records. All these suggest that aural stimuli play a large part in your own life, yes?

matthew: Yes. I like listening to music, which isn’t exactly unique, but as a teenager the mix of music—mostly what we now call Classic Rock and then punk and new wave and goth stuff—and the hour-long spoken word/comedy shows our local stations played really opened up pathways in my head, and made me think about what we hear vs. what we see. Which brings us back around to the last question.

I remember there was a deejay on WCCC, our local rock station. He had one of those cool-guy rock voices, a little raspy but well-modulated, professional but gritty. I pictured him as a tall, sandy-haired guy with a sharp nose and arched eyebrows and a motorcycle jacket, face like a younger version of the character actor Jere Burns from Breaking Bad and Justified. One night I went to a show where that deejay introduced the band, and he was just a tiny, sort of hunched guy, balding, with a scraggly beard. On the radio he was The Lich; in real life, he was just Hal Lichtenbaum. It may be somewhat significant that I got heavily into music, and at the height of that interest, MTV came out and I began to see the people who made the music. Or it may not. Who knows?

greydog: I always find the problem with music videos is that I can never quite disengage the song from the images (including what the singer looks like) afterwards. And for years I thought that Frankie Laine really looked like his photo on the cover of Hell Bent for Leather, one of my favourite teenage albums. He didn’t.

And still on the aural stuff, you frequently reference a real organisation, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – but as I read more of your stories I’m no longer sure of their role. At first I saw them as the Radio Police, maybe even the ‘good’ guys, but now… are they the investigators of deviant transmissions, the instigators of them, or both?

matthew: I use a fictionalized version of the FCC, which I plan to flesh out and use as antagonists in the third ‘canon’ WXXT book. Listen to this: Calvin Coolidge was once the mayor of Northampton. He also signed into law The Radio Act of 1927, which spawned the Federal Radio Commission, which was later replaced by the FCC. The connection to Leeds is irresistible. My FCC will be composed of mystics, former occultists, and religious fanatics and cops who decide to wage war on my little radio concern. They’re technically “good guys,” I guess, but not for me. They’re on the side of law and order; they’re corrupt, twisted Christians who want “decency” on the airwaves—like, nothing but wholesome content, while they themselves roil in the muck of corruption and vice. So they’re the bad guys, and my band of demons oppose them. There are no real “good guys.”

greydog: Leeds, Massachusetts is modern in one sense, the ‘skin’ you mentioned above, but your fiction in general does draw on history, from the witch-elders, New England historical disquiet, through to wireless and number station references which seem to belong more to the post-war era than today. How do you feel about weird fiction which is explicitly set in the deeper past – ‘period’ fiction? Can it achieve the impact of contemporary-set work, or it safer because of its chronological distance?

matthew: I like weird fiction set in the past, though I frequently start to wonder whether this or that is historically accurate. It’s certainly a worry when writing any kind of historical fiction. I do think it can achieve the impact of fiction set in contemporary times, because people as a whole don’t change much, and the past is always bubbling up. Look at the brilliant work of Daniel Mills and Scott Tomas for terrific fiction set in New England’s past.

greydog: I’m getting into Mills’s  The Lord Came at Twilight at the moment. Historical accuracy research for this sort of thing is a strange fish, because you know that most readers won’t care, yet there will always be someone who knows when the left-handed sprocket wrench was really invented – and call you out on it. I live in fear of those people.

Staying historical, as a Britlander I often say that my own nonsense draws more on writers such as Saki, William Hope Hodgson, Blackwood and Dunsany than it does on the 1920s to 1940s ‘Weird Tales’ tradition. And I love subverting classic British approaches. But when I started writing weird fiction, there was always an elephant from Providence in the room – and sometimes the beast annoys me. Do you ever get tired of people trying to talk about ‘Lovecraftian’ elements in the contemporary field?

matthew: I don’t think I would have tried writing weird fiction if not for having read Lovecraft, so I do have a bias. However, I’m not overly fond of pastiche, or of explicitly using Lovecraft’s various genius creations, unless I’m working satirically or in parody, which I do from time to time. Eventually I want to self-publish a smallish collection of my Lovecraft parodies, but one of them is in an anthology that hasn’t been published yet, and it’ll be quite some time before I get the rights to it back.

greydog: I look forward to that. So, at the end of it all, when your work is out there – it’s great to get good reviews, which you do (a lot) and yet also fascinating to get bad ones. I’ve had books I was in marked as 5 Star Must-Reads, only to have one Amazon reader say rate it as One Star – ‘Total garbage’. And I rather liked a One Star given to your Gateways (as opposed to the one hundred plus 4 and 5 Star reviews), where the reader missed the entire point, said they could write that sort of thing easily, and then totally proved that they couldn’t, by trying it. Do reviews influence you in general? Do they ever steer what you do next?

matthew: I’m not one of those writers who boasts about never reading reviews; I read every review I can get my hands on. I can’t really say that they influence me. The negative ones rarely have much to teach me; the work either didn’t resonate with them, which is fine, or they just think it was outright bad-which is also fine! It’s certainly not for everyone, not even every horror fiction reader. It’s true that here and there someone misses the point entirely, like one reviewer who complained that I wasn’t honest when I used the phrase “Collected Short Fiction” on the cover of Gateways, not realizing that that was a calculated ruse meant to trick the reader into thinking that he or she wasn’t reading a short novel I have to admit that some bad reviews sting.

Some are hilarious. Maybe I’d find them less funny if I didn’t have so many positive ones to offset them. Sure, occasionally, though, there is insight. One reader said something like “too many worms devalue the currency” – and I get that. Gateways was what I called “distilled” horror. There aren’t sympathetic characters (there are hardly any “characters” at all), and there’s precious little in the way of normalcy to offset the weirdness. It’s a barrage. That wasn’t necessarily calculated. Some people loved it, and others who had different expectations were disappointed.

greydog: I absolutely loved it. And finally, a brutal, incisive question. Why goats?

matthew: They’re very cute, but they have horns and weird eyes and creepy teeth, and when they bleat it sounds eerily like a human yelling. They’re wonderfully devilish. I’m just annoyed I didn’t invent Black Philip before Eggers got there.

greydog: Thank you so much, Matthew for joining us. We imagine we were a pleasure; you certainly were.

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IMPORTANT INTERVIEW NOTE

We failed to ask Matthew about which up and coming authors he likes, who stands out in weird fiction at the moment, and who were the great classic writers. This was because we thought it was a bit boring, and we were more interested in him. But he probably has a favourite colour, or something. We don’t know. Oh, and he loves cats.

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Have a look at Matthew M Bartlett’s Author Page on Amazon UK or US… and buy a book!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Matthew-M.-Bartlett/e/B00M5HEX5Y

https://www.amazon.com/Matthew-M.-Bartlett/e/B00M5HEX5Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share