I’ve said before that I would probably never have written any Lovecraftian or Mythosian stories had I not come across Scott R Jones’ Martian Migraine Press in 2015, and read his own book When the Stars Are Right. After that, I was intrigued – and tempted. In 2016 Scott accepted the first such tale I ever wrote, without any idea of who I was, and the whole thing sort of ambled on from there.

So it seems fitting that we have another first today, the only time we’ve covered the same book twice on the website in any detail – the absolutely excellent Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat by Jones, reviewed this time by guest author Justin Burnett of Silent Motorist Media…

(Our own perspective on Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat was posted in July: http://greydogtales.com/blog/shout-kill-revel-repeat-what-would-scott-r-jones-do/ )

Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat: a Review

by Justin A. Burnett

“He’s good, this Huxley of the Old Ones, this Prophet of Diabolical Singularity. Reading Jones is like slipping into a dream…”

Lovecraftian fiction has me bent two ways. On the one hand, it implies a wearied narrative structure: Protag stumbles across an esoteric mystery purloined craftily amidst the mundane and generally indicated only by the presence of quirky characters with fishy auras. Protag teases the edges of said mystery until either her mind or existence (often both) unravels. That’s my uncharitable bent.

But then, if the rows of Lovecraftian anthologies and collections on my bookshelf indicate a Hyde to my over-critical Jekyll, it’s because Lovecraftian fiction is simultaneously rich with variety within its formal structures and prone to opening chasms of the heart resembling its concurrent space and time variety.

But let’s not mention Lovecraft more than necessary, or you’ll get the wrong idea. For Lovecraftian, Scott R. Jones is not. He prefers the term R’lyehian. If he means operating within the Lovecraftian Mythos (at its widest) sans the absurdity of treating it with Roman dogmatism, then call the distinction apt.

It’s also a worthy starting point in considering Jones’ 2020 collection, Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat. I’m far from a Lovecraft expert (much less so than Jones himself), so trying to trace each iteration of the Mythos winding through this collection is useless. It’s also beside the point. It’s nice to recognize bits of Ramsey Campbell and Frank Belknap Long along the way, but what’s nicer is watching Jones “abuse” the tradition.

I’ve always wanted to read a Lovecraftian collection set after the end. What’s it like, writhing in the tentacles of the novus ordo seclorum? When the sun sets forever and the fungus fills the horizon with impossible colors, what then? SKRP is the sharp edge designed for this very itch.

Many of Jones’ strongest stories reside in this rough, gore-drenched landscape of the weirder-than-weird apocalypse. There are plenty orifical portals to close, crippled sanities to maintain, and all the mind-bending tech you could possibly want to get the doing done. It’s a playground, really. A happy place for deranged imaginations prone to stretching the extremes inherent in weird fiction to snapping.

And Jones wields a prose to match, an angular, jarring thing that doesn’t coddle the reader with downy description. It’s overloaded with a universe that only Jones knows fully, bursting at the seams in places where you can glimpse the hallucinogenic machines of world-building beyond. It’s sharp. Hostile. But this is a fiction collection, not a pillow.

I can barely pick favorites. ‘The Abraxas Protocol’ is as crazy as a werewolf tale can get. In fact, forget werewolves. Remember how I keep bringing up (however reluctantly and loaded with disclaimers) Lovecraft? Well…

And what about ‘The Amnesiac’s Lament’, smacking of VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts in the best of ways, blending mind and matter in a way that injures the very notion of Point of View?

There’s even a story about coffee.

Yes, Jones wields quite the sense of humor between the permeable boundaries of his multiple dimensions. Nevertheless, you won’t escape his darkness, the sense of a universe bent ever to violence against its involuntary inhabitants. If there’s a challenge to reading this collection, it’s the sting of his worldview.

But let me avoid another possible mischaracterization: Jones is not without tenderness. ‘Book of Hours’ is a heartbreaker about a couple who would do anything to bring back their dead boy. And they do it… every bloody thing. What they find, as you’d expect, isn’t what they sought. In this one, like others in the collection, transcendence looms in the burning horizon, a dark one filled with agonies and joys, but transcendence nonetheless.

Joel Lane, in This Spectacular Darkness, makes a useful distinction between “ontological horror” and “existential horror.” The former is anti-humanistic, Lovecraftian, centered around the erasure of humanity. The latter, associated with popular writers like Stephen King, is interested in utilizing horror to examine the human dimension: loss, desire, those truly squishy terrors that terrified Lovecraft. Jones writes himself into the borderlands of this divide. The human is never far, particularly insofar as she seeks the perennial need lying buried beneath the mask of the given: escape, atonement, whatever-you-call-it.

He’s good, this Huxley of the Old Ones, this Prophet of Diabolical Singularity. Reading Jones is like slipping into a dream: It’s strange, horrifying, and you awake with a fresh new vocabulary of ideas and images you wouldn’t have found in the dreary daytime. Not many writers can do that. It’s no surprise that Ramsey Campbell calls him “a genuine master of horror.”

I heartily recommend Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat. Indeed, I’m looking forward to a re-read.

Justin’s Silent Motorist Media small press can be found here:

https://silentmotorist.media

And SMM’s latest book is The Nightside Codex, which we hope to finish and review here soon:

the nightside codex – amazon

A selection of John Linwood Grant’s Lovecraftian fiction will be included in his second collection, Where All is Night, and Starless, due out mid-2021 from Trepidatio/JournalStone.

Given that Thanksgiving is now being celebrated across the colonies (except by those who don’t celebrate it), and in view of the fact that we’ve been very quiet here recently, today we are proud to present another classic European folktale concerning the Christmas Wasp.

Like many other such tales, this one was collected by Professor Ernst Stellmacher, author of Insekten-Archäologie für Frauen (1873), some time in the 1860s, and probably carries a heartwarming message for children everywhere…

THE TAILOR OF BREMEN

There once was a poor tailor who lived in the town of Bremen, along with his wife and seven children. Originally he had intended to live in Düsseldorf, but he was so poor that he couldn’t afford the extra letters, especially with the severe tax on umlauts at the time. There – in Bremen, not in Düsseldorf, you can forget about the geography stuff now – this simple, honest tailor made marvellous suits for the rich merchants of the town, and beautiful gowns for their wives, who all sported inexplicable duelling scars (the reason for that won’t come up, either – you do understand what ‘inexplicable’ means, right?)

It was often said around town that the tailor’s clothes were some of the finest in the land – and it was also said that being simple and honest was how you stayed poor in those days, especially if rich merchants kept ‘forgetting’ to pay their bills. This being so, the family augmented what little the tailor made through his wife’s spinning, which occasionally attracted the interest of passing travellers.

“Ach! Why is that old woman round and round going? Wunderbar!” they would cry, and throw a few pfennigs into the children’s open mouths.

Despite this, one December day the tailor found that they had no money left to buy even a loaf of bread. So he left his house and walked down to the church to pray that God might ease his poverty, but he was unable to get in for the crowds of Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists and other dissenters busy nailing proclamations to the church doors. What was he to do? Just then, a finely-scarred merchant’s wife saw the little tailor crouching by the church entrance, and took pity on him.

“This very morning,” she said, “I had a vision of the Blessed Emma of Stiepel, who is, as you know, the patron saint of Bremen – and not of that stupid Düsseldorf place. She came to me while I was ironing the children, and said that I would be granted a fine meadow, which I should give to the poorest people of the town.”

“A vision!” said the tailor. “But…”

The merchant’s wife nodded. “Ja, I thought that was a dumb idea as well. What should they do with a meadow? Eat it? So instead, I made a pact with the Devil, and he gave me hundreds of golden thalers, on each of which can be seen the image of the sacred Weihnachtswespe (or ‘Christmas Wasp’, for any foreigners reading this). These coins I give to you, that you and your family might prosper!”

At which she opened her silk gown, and out flew not coins, but a large swarm of irascible insects, mad as hell at being confined in the dress by a delusional merchant’s wife who had just spent three solid days and nights in her husband’s wine cellar, knocking back the hock and Glühwein.

And darting and stinging, the wasps drove both the poor tailor and the drunken merchant’s wife down the street, never to be seen again…

As for the tailor’s wife and children, they too were visited by the Blessed Emma of Stiepel, but – being neither drunk nor simple – they took up the offer of a meadow, applied for planning permission, and went into real estate, eventually owning half of Bremen. And some of the nicer parts of  Düsseldorf.

Thus even today, those who have been fooled by a suspiciously generous gift, or who have done badly in a transaction with a merchant, refer to themselves as having been ‘stung’… or something like that.

N.B. For those who like to know real stuff, Emma of Stiepel was born somewhere between 975-980 and died 3 December 1038, being known for her good works. More details tracing the myth of the Christmas Wasp can be found here: http://greydogtales.com/blog/folklore-origins-christmas-wasp/