Incoherent Memoirs

As writers develop their themes and characters, it can often seem to the reader that earlier books seem to pre-empt later ones, as if a germ of an idea has hatched only to await further incubation (to mix my metaphors!). One such seems to be in Fleming's Casino Royale . In a passage of otherwise 'straight' prose of Bond at the baccarat table are these sub-marine descriptions: The two cards slithered towards him across the green sea. Like an octopus under a rock, Le Chiffre watched him from the other side of the table. (p.86, Penguin, 2004) Does this not bring to mind the brilliant chapter in the next book, Live and Let Die , in which Bond walks across the sea-bed towards Mr Big's lair, and observes all the aquatic life teeming about him? Almost as if Fleming, searching for similes for his first book, was struck by the picture those words conveyed and decided to render them in a more literal (yet even more poetic, even lyrical) form for the action for his next. Felix Le...

There is of course a vast library's worth (probably several libraries' worth) of pastiche 'Lovecraftian' and 'Sherlockian' books, and my strong suspicion has always been that the larger the quantity the poorer the quality. This suspicion has not abated since the explosion of self-published books popping up on Amazon and the like. And apart from anything else, how much of it does anyone actually need? Does anyone read them all? Are there individuals out there who only read books featuring Sherlock Holmes stories? Is there an avid Cthulhu fan who gets everything - everything - that purports to be an untold tale of HPL's Elder Gods? Perhaps. In fact, probably. The only collections of non-HPL 'Lovecraftiana' I think I'll ever need is Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and its 80s sequel New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and I have been dipping into both recently.  The original Tales was edited by August Derleth and published by Arkham House (though I was f...

From At The Mountains of Madness comes "austral" :  a simple one this, meaning "from the South" (in this case, the south Antarctic) and "Nefandrous" (in context: a "monstrous, nefandrous analogy" ) This might be one of the most appropriate HPL descriptors ever, for on looking it up I read: " unmentionable, that ought not to be spoken of; hence, atrocious, appalling " And we all know how HPL loves to mention the unmentionable and speak the unspeakable!

Thinking again about 'The Thing on the Doorstep' has caused me to re-read it again since  this post . Luckily all HPL's stories are eminently repeatable and I found myself gulping the story down in a local café as greedily as I did my tea and cake. If not more so! One thing that I'd somehow not picked up on, when I was focussing more on the body-swap, were the connections to 'the Cthulhu Mythos'. There is the mention of three infamous books, including the Necronomicon - indeed, it's that eldritch tome which contained the spell making body-swap sorcery possible. But in one info-packed passage, a raving Edward Derby mentions hideous (and to HPL fans, familiar) creatures: "Dan - for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! [..] Ia! Shub-Niggurath! [..] The Hooded Thing bleated 'Kamog! Kamog!' [..] in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins [..] I saw a shoggoth - it changed shape...." This is shocking indeed...