Locus, March 2014

by Locus Publications

  Gregory seeds his narrative from the outset with ominous portents. In a brief prologue, when Christopher mentions Lawrence’s name to his paralyzed father, the man struggles in a fit of apoplexy to sputter out ‘‘bad boy… bad boy.’’ Christopher’s father carved cemetery headstones for a living, and his means of transportation, a vintage hearse, becomes Christopher’s car. Christopher has just parked this car beneath a tree at Chalke House when Juliet, who has been working above in Lawrence’s treehouse, accidentally drops a hammer, destroying its windshield and nearly injuring Christopher. Shortly after Christopher meets Lawrence, the boy rescues a maimed bird from their cat – and then feeds it to a monstrous pike in a nearby pond. These moments prepare the reader for the revelation of the terrible transgression that exiled Lawrence from school: upon discovering in an art class that he was color blind, a condition that would keep him following in his father’s footsteps as a pilot, he vented his rage on two students, scalding them with hot wax and partially blinding one. Lawrence’s actions have made the Lundys pariahs in their community, virtually forced to keep entirely to themselves.

  This social isolation makes for a very unwholesome home environment. Shortly after Christopher moves in with the Lundys, he and Juliet become lovers and they spend most of their waking hours overindulging in alcohol and sex. Lawrence becomes obsessively interested in the flock of swifts that inhabit the family’s run-down greenhouse, to the extent that he begins living among them and their nests for hours at a time. Lawrence is at that transitional age when adolescence is giving way to manhood, and it is evident to Christopher that he is undergoing a physical transformation: ‘‘The smell of him was strong. Something animal, a fume of some feathery dust seemed to rise from his bare skin. Dusty… his hair was too long, the pelt of it fell across his brow and shadowed his eyes, it was shaggy on his ears and it formed a pointy tuft at the nape of his neck as though it would grow along his spine like a mane.’’ In fact, Lawrence seems to be changing into a bird boy – something of a grotesque parody of his aviator father. The ‘‘unreality’’ (as Juliet terms it) that Lawrence has created to sustain the memory of his father proves infectious: Christopher runs across the man’s uniform, presumably brought out of mothballs by Lawrence, and he begins having waking dreams in which he senses the man’s presence in the house.

  ‘‘When does a dream become a nightmare,’’ wonders Christopher. ‘‘What is the transitional moment, when the pleasant, random ridiculousness alters and shifts and is tinged with fear?’’ It’s impossible to pinpoint in Gregory’s novel, so steadily does the mood of menace build. When the nightmare finally comes fully into view, though – during Lawrence’s illfated attempts to prevent the swifts from fleeing south for the winter – it does so with the inevitability of classic tragedy. As in his novels The Cormorant and Woodwitch, Gregory foregrounds the human drama of his story against a natural world ripe with death and decay that inevitably closes in on its characters. And in his chronicle of life at Chalke House, he has painted a portrait of family dysfunction that would give the Blackwoods of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle a run for their money.

  •

  In the early 1960s, when a teenage Ramsey Campbell was writing Lovecraft pastiches, it was de rigeur for any would-be dabbler in the Cthulhu Mythos to add his own monster and book of occult lore to Lovecraft’s pantheon. Campbell managed it in a single stroke with The Revelations of Glaaki, an account of an eldritch entity that lives at the bottom of a lake in the Severn Valley and that figures prominently in the title tale of Campbell’s first short-fiction collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants. Though Campbell eventually absorbed and synthesized Lovecraft and other influences to achieve the unique style that distinguishes his work today, he has returned to the mythos periodically to take a stab at Lovecraftian tale of cosmic horror. His newest such foray, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, reads very much like a collaboration between the younger and the current Ramsey Campbell.

  In the same spirit by which Lovecraft established the ‘‘authenticity’’ of his Necronomicon by giving it a realistic history, Campbell establishes the bona fides of his volume with an introductory excerpt from a column published in a magazine for book collectors. The only printed edition of The Revelations of Gla’aki (note the added apostrophe), the reader is informed, is a nine-volume set that was published by an obscure small press in 1865. Fewer than 200 sets were printed, and many of those were destroyed when the book was pilloried in the press as ‘‘the most evil book ever published.’’ The author of this column, Leonard Fairman, is an archivist at Brichester University, and the story begins proper with his arrival at the seaside town of Gulshaw to retrieve an extremely rare full set of The Revelations bequeathed by the town to his university’s library.

  Leonard is just the man for the job. As a student at Brichester High School, he became familiar with rumors concerning a cult who had taken up residence near local Deepfall Water and the urban legends that those rumors inspired. Leonard himself visited the lake while researching his column and came away troubled by wakeful thoughts of ‘‘a disconcertingly vivid image of a vast shape burrowing deeper into the bed of the lake, raising a cloud so thick that it blotted out the denizen.’’ Later, Leonard will be surprised to learn from his reading of The Revelations that Brichester and the surrounding Severn Valley are regarded as ‘‘the lair of creatures far older than humanity’’ – among them Gla’aki.

  But Leonard’s task is not as easy as he thought it would be. It turns out the nine volumes are not kept as a set but are held by nine individual townspeople, and he is not able to acquire more than one volume per day. Each night Leonard reads the volume retrieved that day, and the cumulative impact of those readings on him is soon noticeable: his dreams become stranger, he begins seeing jellyfish shapes populating the distant beach, and his conversations with the locals become increasingly cryptic and portentous, especially their oft-repeated observation, ‘‘There’s so much more to see.’’

  Though it’s not immediately clear to Leonard, it’s increasingly clear to the reader that the delay tactics of the townspeople and the different people and places in Gulshaw that he is directed to are all part of an elaborate ritual in which he plays a central role. Leonard has been lured to Gulshaw to serve a purpose encoded in the texts his stay compels him to read, and the ambiguities and innuendo that Campbell so expertly laces his narrative with prove keys to the deeper meanings those texts finally reveal.

  A shortcoming of many mythos tales, including some of Campbell’s early efforts, is that their horrors seem very parochial, limited only to the experiences of their characters, and of a sort that are sometimes easily thwarted. At the end of The Last Revelations of Gla’aki, Campbell conveys the sense of an all-pervasive, unvanquishable horror invading our world. This novel is a fine addition to his body of Lovecraftian tales, and fans of the mythos and Campbell’s own fiction will appreciate the connections he forges through it to Stephen King’s stories set in Castle Rock, Maine, Wil Pugmire’s tales of the Sesqua Valley, and the works of Roland Franklyn, the sinister genius who peeks out from behind several of the stories in Campbell’s ground-breaking second short-fiction collection Demons by Daylight.

  •

  It takes a while for the weird to manifest in Mark Morris’s short novel, It Sustains. So long, in fact, that you might be forgiven for thinking Morris has decided to shuck the genre altogether and write a novel about the fracture of a family following the devastating loss of their mother. And, for a while, that’s not such a bad thing.

  The novel is narrated in the first person by Adam, a 15-year-old whose mother and father own the local pub, the Maypole. They’re a close-knit family and through a few simple, warmly sketched moments Morris shows the special relationship that Adam has with his mum. That all comes apart on New Year’s Eve when a gang of roughhousing lager louts crash the festivities at the Maypole. A fight breaks out, and though the hoodlums are forcibl
y ejected, one come back after closing time, when Adam’s father has run the barmaids home, and runs down Adam’s mother with his car, killing her.

  Morris writes very believably from Adam’s point of view and he captures with great sensitivity an adolescent’s feelings about the inestimable loss of a beloved parent. ‘‘Mum is dead,’’ thinks Adam, after a disturbing dream brought on by his mother’s absence. ‘‘She will always be dead. Nothing I do or say will ever bring her back. From now on, if I see her at all, it will only be in dreams. She filled my life, but with every day that passes, she will diminish, overlaid by new memories, new days.’’ Later, when his father gives Mark a cellphone he has wanted, Adam reflects, ‘‘Three months ago, this would have made my life complete, but now I see it for what it really is: just a thing, an object, one of a billion devices we use to cushion ourselves against the darkness, to convince ourselves that we’re happy and safe and in control.’’

  Hoping for a new start, Adam and his dad move to a new town and a new pub, The Falcon. Soon after, Adam falls in, through no great desire of his own, with an edgy gang of juvenile delinquents who are always spoiling for a fight. That opportunity comes when Adam is assaulted, apparently by a student from a rival school, and his gang’s ringleader, Stanny, calls for a rumble between the two schools. Adam comes home with Stanny to plan the fight, and is shocked to discover that Stanny’s older brother is Danny Thorpe, the leader of the gang that the caused the New Year’s Eve ruckus in his family’s bar.

  Up to this point, Adam has had the occasional bad dream and premonition of a shadowy presence in the house – phenomena that could be attributed to the stress of his bereavement, but, suddenly, Morris takes his story in very strange direction. Running away from the police after the fight, Adam senses that he is being followed through the woods, and when he comes to a pond a muck-smeared figure emerges from it threateningly. Later, he will be seduced by Stanny’s mom, in apparent collusion with Danny Thorpe. It seems that Adam is being set up for something by his gang, and this culminates in the collapse of his world into an abyss of supernatural horrors. But though the strange incidents are handled well, they don’t really connect, nor does Morris provide a rationale for the gang’s persecution of Adam.

  At one point in It Sustains, Adam wonders about the impact his mother’s death has had on him: ‘‘Could it be that the sheer violence of her death ruptured my world, not only on an emotional level but on a structural one, too? Could her murder have changed things so fundamentally that it introduced a kind of infection that has been spreading its poison and undermining the foundations of logic and reality ever since?’’ That’s about the only way the events of the novel can be explained, and though they make for a somewhat untidy narrative, they convey with great power the horrifying sense of dislocation that can be produced by inconsolable grief.

  –Stefan Dziemianowicz

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RICHARD A. LUPOFF

  If Kennedy Lived, Jeff Greenfield. (Putnam 978-0-399-16696-9, $26.95, 249pp, hc) October 2013.

  Then Everything Changed, Jeff Greenfield. (Putnam 978-399-15706-6, $26.95, 434pp, hc) March 2011.

  Jeff Greenfield making the celebrity author circuit was something of a surprise. A political analyst and commentator, onetime political operative, here he was on the other side of the microphone flogging a book. It was If Kennedy Lived, subtitled ‘‘The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History.’’

  Alternate history? Why by Jeff Greenfield? And why now? Ah, the timing was certainly more than coincidental. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and here it was, the fiftieth anniversary of that monstrous tragedy. People old enough to remember the event are gray of hair now, and their ranks are thinning. Schoolchildren interviewed as the date approached had no idea who Kennedy was. Even those attending schools named for the 35th President of the United States had only a vague notion of who he was. Some famous assassinated leader, right? Oh, like Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln. Yes.

  So of all the books about John Fitzgerald Kennedy – there are many hundreds by now – perhaps a science fiction novel in which Lee Harvey Oswald did not succeed in killing the President was a good idea.

  Greenfield starts with a largely forgotten moment in history. It was Sunday morning, December 11, 1960. Kennedy had defeated sitting Vice President Richard Nixon in a razor-thin presidential election. One Richard Paul Pavlick, a retired postal worker, was determined that Kennedy should never take office. He waited outside Kennedy’s vacation home in Palm Beach FL, his car loaded with dynamite, prepared to die in a suicide bombing as Kennedy left the house. Kennedy’s wife and small daughter stood in the doorway to wave Kennedy on his way; Pavlick didn’t want to commit his crime in sight of Kennedy’s innocent wife and child. He drove away, was later arrested, and Kennedy became President in January, 1961.

  Greenfield proceeds to carry us through to November, 1963, and that dreadful day in Dallas. Apparently rain was forecast and Kennedy’s staff was preparing to install a bubble top on the President’s car, when the skies cleared. So Kennedy rode in an open car, along with the First Lady and the Governor of Texas and his wife.

  That is, in ‘‘our’’ world. In Greenfield’s there was a light drizzle, the bubble top was installed, the bullet was slightly deflected by the Plexiglas bubble, and Kennedy was wounded but not killed. Greenfield’s ideas might have seemed novel to some talk show hosts and audiences, but to science fiction aficionados the trope is as familiar as sunrise. It’s been a staple in the field for the better part of a century, dating back to James Thurber’s ‘‘If Grant had been Drinking at Appomattox’’ (New Yorker, 1930, reprinted F&SF, 1952).

  Greenfield was a participant in some of the events of the 1960s, so he knows whereof he writes. He is also an exhaustive researcher, down to details of street patterns and the personal backgrounds of the players. What is odd, to this reviewer, is the dry, impersonal tone of much of the writing. There is an almost pedantic feel to the book, rather like a high school civics or history text. Much of the text is given over to political strategy sessions taking place in Greenfield’s universe.

  Greenfield deserves credit, somewhat tempered but nonetheless real, for mentioning the Keating Incident. This involved one Kenneth Keating, a Republican Senator from the State of New York who served in the early 1960s. His role in those years is a dirty little secret that has been swept under the carpet by both Democrats and Republicans ever since.

  Keating sounded the warning that the Soviet Union was placing missiles – possibly armed with nuclear warheads – in Cuba. The Kennedy Administration either ignored Keating’s warnings or dismissed them as groundless alarmism. This went on for months, until the President announced with a straight face that – the Soviet Union was placing missiles – possibly armed with nuclear warheads – in Cuba.

  We all know the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of Armageddon. And when the fiftieth anniversary of that series of events was observed with television specials and endless talking-heads discussions, there was not one mention of Senator Keating’s attempts to sound the alarm. Maybe he was mentioned somewhere, but if so this reviewer is unaware of it.

  Greenfield carries John F. Kennedy through a full eight years in office. He refers repeatedly to Kennedy’s obsessive, serial infidelities, but other than that there is very little in the book about the President’s private life. Greenfield’s main focus is Kennedy’s relationship with Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev and the possibility of defusing the Cold War in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Greenfield also describes Kennedy’s declining health, the President leaving the White House at last as a crippled shell of his onetime athletic self.

  If Kennedy Lived is certainly not a good science fiction novel. Any number of writers active in the field today – the talented and prolific Harry Turtledove for one, the equally talented Barry Malzberg
for another – could have written a far better novel on the same theme. (And in fact, Harry Turtledove did write just such a book, in collaboration with Bryan Zabel and Richard Dolan. It’s called Surrounded by Enemies: What if Kennedy Survived Dallas?)

  But in fairness to Greenfield, his book is not labeled a novel, but ‘‘an alternate history.’’ With an injection of juice, with some human passion, it might have been a very good novel. Unfortunately, it reads like a high school text book, the kind that teenagers shy away from in favor of X-Men comics or roleplaying games.

  •

  Which brings us to Then Everything Changed. A far longer book than If Kennedy Lived, this was published two years earlier, and if one is looking for the passion, the humanity, the energy that the Kennedy alternate history lacks, look no farther. It’s in this book.

  Then Everything Changed in fact contains three novels, each illuminating a different alternate history of the 1960s. In the first of these, the Pavlick assassination attempt succeeded. Kennedy had won the popular election by a narrow margin and would, of course, have eventually won the vote in the Electoral College. But since the electors had not yet cast their ballots, the nation faced a Constitutional crisis.

  Greenfield creates real drama, with President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, Senator Lyndon Johnson, and others conferring. Once the crisis is resolved and Lyndon Johnson becomes President, the plot comes to center largely on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.

  In Greenfield’s second alternate history, a Kennedy aide ruins Sirhan Sirhan’s aim and the attempted assassination of Robert Kennedy is foiled. The scene moves on to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Greenfield introduces a covert plan by Lyndon Johnson to travel to Moscow for a surprise summit conference, followed by a triumphal return to the United States and re-entry into the Presidential contest.