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