McSweeney's 45

It's another anthology from McSweeney's, with dueling (ok, alternating) tales from a Bradbury anthology and a Hitchcock anthology. Some of them are classics (Bradbury's "The Pedestrian"), some are tediously long (Lucille Fletcher and Allan Ullman's "Sorry, Wrong Number"), one is out-of-place (John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio", while an excellent story, just doesn't quite feel like it belongs in here).

China Mieville's "The Design" is excellent and really impressed me, and Brian Evenson's "The Dust" certainly feels like it could be in a 50s/60s anthology. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" is both terrifying and awful (and the machine described therein is featured in Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun). Julian May's "Dune Roller" is an example of a really worthwhile story I was previously unfamiliar with (more than likely because Hitchcock, rather than Bradbury, picked it, but it certainly could have been a Bradbury pick). In contrast, Benjamin Percy's "Suicide Woods" doesn't belong in here, both because it has little in common with the other stories in the anthology, and because it has far too much in common with stories in other McSweeney's anthologies. I feel like I've read it a dozen times previously, and that's not a good thing, either for it or those other stories.

Overall, recommended. Even the stories I was less than thrilled with are page turners (and as far as page turners, the last story enclosed here is terrifying, and has a lot in common with a favorite, Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit.")

At the Mountains of Madness

The cover illustration depicted here has little or nothing to do with this book -- at no point are human characters revealed to be some sort of undead skeleton. However, the image is appropriate -- it shows the horror that can lurk behind the ordinary, the banal, how normalcy can be pulled aside for a terrible revelation.

The story is told in a typical conceit -- as the sole survivor of an Antarctic expedition, the narrator is attempting to warn future explorers against disturbing what he and his companions had.

What Lovecraft is good at is building tension -- things start slowly for the expedition, with exploration and sample taking, until an isolated group makes a discovery "that will do for biology what the work of Einstein did for physics." This, of course, puts the expedition on the path to disaster. The isolated group goes incommunicado, and when a relief expedition arrives, they find the camp in disarray, the men and the dogs wildly slaughtered, and some specimens missing. It's implied, rather than outright stated, that these specimens had lain dormant, rather than dead, and had revived and perpetrated this.

What Lovecraft isn't great at is prose. There's a lot of repetition in terms of "we withheld these details from our reports, but now I must steel myself and reveal the truth," and "ill-prepared we were for dealing with things beyond our ken". It's effective, though, as repetition is a device of madmen, and Lovecraft's protagonists are having the limits of their sanity stretched.

The setting is almost a character in itself, in that Lovecraft spends an enormous amount of time describing the awful city of the creatures, and letting our protagonist read their murals and learn their history. It's very creepy, if a little convenient that a professor of geology is intimately familiar with the Necronomicon and other tropes of Lovecraft's universe.

I would recommend this -- it's not quite what I had expected, and reading works that Lovecraft has influenced makes this lose some of it's power, but it retains enough to remain fresh.

The King in Yellow

Robert W. Chambers' collection The King in Yellow is an unusual anthology -- the first four stories ("The Repairer of Reputations", "The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon", and "The Yellow Sign") are considered classics of horror, and some of the themes and characters have even been incorporated into H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. The remaining stories in the collection are unconnected to the first four and are French-influenced romances. I took the opportunity to read the first four stories (which are in the public domain, and hence, all over the Internet. The remainder of the collection will have to wait until I either come across it in a used bookstore, or until I exhaust much more reading material.)

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

-The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2d

"The Repairer of Reputations", the first and best-known story, is a subtle tour of the mind of a madman. Hilbert Castaigne is not a stable individual, and he knows it -- as he introduces himself, he acknowledges that he hasn't been the same since has fall from a horse four years earlier. He then proceeds to mention that while convalescing from his fall, he read The King in Yellow, a fictional play that is the common thread that links these stories. Castaigne says of the play: "although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked." Prior to his accident, Castaigne had been a wealthy playboy and man-about-town; as the story unfolds, he's a recluse, keeping the company only of his cousin Louis, a soldier (in a very mid-19th century army), Hawberk, an armorer, and Mr. Wilde, an elderly eccentric who appears just as mad as Hildred.

Throughout the story, Hildred's companions often humor him -- while he is generally aware of it, and manages to turn the tables on his interlocutors at least twice, it's unclear if this actually happens, or only in his imagination. The mysterious Mr. Wilde is the eponymous repairer of reputations (he hangs out a shingle with that title at the halfway point of the story), and convinces Hildred that he has vast influence in society as a whole, with hundreds of members of the upper class in his sway. Additionally, Wilde holds a manuscript titled The Imperial Dynasty of America -- in it, Hildred is second in line to the throne, after his cousin Louis.

After poring over the manuscript again and again, Hildred confronts his cousin with two demands -- first, that he must give up his claim to the throne, with Louis does, laughing. The second demand is colder, in that Louis can't marry his fiancee, Hawberk's daughter. When Louis refuses, Hildred responds that it doesn't matter, he's hired an assassin. Louis and Hildred run to Hawberk's shop, where Hildred finds Mr. Wilde with his throat torn out by his feral cat. Without Wilde, Hildred will be unable to ascend the throne. As he mourns, he is placed in a straight-jacket by medical personnel, and led past a weeping Hawberk, his daughter, and Louis. It is unclear which of the events have occurred, and which have only occurred in Hildred's head.

Of the later stories, "The Mask" and "The Yellow Sign" feature The King in Yellow more prominently, while "In the Court of the Dragon" only mentions the play in passing (the unnamed narrator is troubled, because he's been reading it). Despite this, we never get much of a sense about what the play is about, other than a strange, otherworldly setting, and a vague sense of kinship with Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." I feel this is for the best, as often overtelling would make the play less ominous and more ridiculous. Other authors actually have written a play based on the fragments and clues left by Chambers, but since none of them shatter the human mind, what is the point?

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

-Cassilda's Song, The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2d

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_King_in_Yellow