True Confessions: Day One

4/4/14

It’s a summer Saturday, and I’m with my dad at Tower Records & Books. I must have been 11 or 12, not quite yet too cool to hang out with my dad in public. We are in the book section, as we Wards are wont to be, and I have been promised a paperback of my choice. I had recently discovered epic fantasy; Narnia and Middle Earth, Arrakis and Earthsea, they were all digested and well-loved by then. (Excepting the dismay and betrayal I felt upon realizing the magnificent Aslan was a Christ analogue, but that’s another memory). I was looking for a new world to live in for a while.

Then my brain was ambushed by the most skin-crawlingly disgusting book cover I’d ever seen. I was almost afraid to look at it, like I thought what I saw would ooze into my brain and infect me somehow. But I also could not stop looking at it, just stood, fascinated, as my dad sauntered over to see if I had made my selection. When he saw the book, he plucked it off the shelf and said with relish, ”Well! ‘The Rats in the Walls,’ that’s a good one.” I let my dad buy me “The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre,” with gruesome cover art by Michael Whelan.

My brain would never be the same.

That guy in the window in particular freaked me out. 

The dude in the web was also pretty upsetting.

P.S.: "Pickman's Model" was my immediate favorite.

Book Review: Southern Gods, by John Horner Jacobs

    5/5 

1950s, the deep south. Hardboiled noir meets the Memphis blues and eldritch Lovecraftian horror. If any of those words ring your bell (or induce skittering waves of nauseous-yet-pleasurable horror), you must read Southern Gods right now.

Get ready to welcome the Old Ones to the bayou, when elusive blues player Ramblin' John Hastur releases a record that curdles the soul and calls to those that wait in the gulfs between the stars. Enter Bull, a damaged private dick in search of an A&R man gone missing while trying to sign Ramblin' John, and Sarah, an attractive lady with a gruesome family secret and an occult library to die for (who among us doesn't want a peek at the illustrated Necronomicon?), and you'll get an idea of what's in play in John Horner Jacobs' mind-blowing debut novel.

Needless to say, if that first paragraph is gibberish to you, or if appalling violence and obscene ancient rituals put you off your feed, please don't read this book. (There's also a smattering of sex, including a monumentally repulsive scene involving a kind of group possession, as well as lots of smoking, drinking and playing the blues, which you probably won't care for either, you prude.)

On the other hand, if you appreciate tight, literate prose seasoned with a great deal of thoroughly ooky splatter, look no further. Southern Gods made my Best of 2011 list: Horner brings a complicated era vividly to life and at the same time adds an original, dark, and swampy-foetid breath of air to the Lovecraft-inspired new weird.

You have been warned.