The Monster In Search Of A Metaphor

Time for the second part of my episode-by-episode dissection of "The Invasion". This second part is no less chaotic and ad-hoc than the first, of course.  If anything, things have only gotten worse.

Friday 40K: 50% More Naughtiness

This week we have a third Chaos cultist from Dark Vengeance.  He has the same Red Gore/Abaddon Black colour scheme as the other two, with Enchanted Blue/Ice Blue as a spot colour, but I've inverted it here. In truth, right now the inversion makes him look a little too different to the other two cultists, but that will be sorted once a few more Imperial citizens sell their souls to the Red Corsairs.

"Should We Be Nice To Trifles?"

I was going to start this post with a criticism, but a decade and change of educational experience has taught me to venerate the praise sandwich above all else, so I'd like to kick off proceedings by noting that Mike Carey has very nice hair.

(Well, it seems nice. In photos, I mean.  I've not done the most basic of chemical analyses. I might have my obsessions, but I'm not a stalker.  The hours look terrible).

Compliment bread laid down, we may reach for the criticism pickle: Dead Men's Boots was a wee bit of a disappointment.

Not in the sense of being a bad book - it's actually a very good book, boasting the usual smart mix of grease-stains and ghouls.  We're talking in relative terms, here. Still, whilst The Devil You Know set up a tremendously interesting world and Vicious Circle filled out the dark corners in all the right ways, Dead Men's Boots seemed mainly content to danse macabre its way across the floor of the same disco. The queasy joy of unsettling discoveries was somewhat muted. The view remained lovely (for a particularly depraved and black definition of "lovely" to which I dedicate myself utterly), but there was a sense of treading water whilst we gazed at it.

Happily, with Thicker Than Water we return to our grimly determined front crawl towards murky objects in deep waters.

Going into detail here is unwise. Horror and crime are the two genres that most suffer from being too forewarned/forearmed, and for combinations of the two this becomes exponentially more true. I shall limit myself to saying both the mythos and the stakes of Felix Castor's strange and scary world are both upped here, the orbit of the last book decaying into a downward spiral.

(Why is there never an upward spiral?  Why is it when things improve Archimedes' prettiest contribution to geometry is nowhere to be found? Is it because "downwards spiral" is something we got from damaged warplanes? Because yes, if you've thrown your Spitfire into an upward spiral, you're probably not giving your all for Blighty.)

This recapturing of momentum is really all the series needed to return to the top-tier grime'n'gore'n'noir'n'grimoires of the earlier novels.  I've mentioned before how I like my horror served; thick with mystery and with enough shocks along the way to punch you out of the mindset required to solve any of them. It should be like trying to do a jigsaw on a roller-coaster you're sharing with a corpse. Thicker Than Water delivers splendidly on that score. True, the various mysteries here are maybe a little easier to tease out than they have been previously (though perhaps I'm just getting keyed into the way Carey structures his conundrums), but that actually ties in well to the atmosphere of the book.  When a story is as horribly tragic as this one, the odd sniff of dramatic irony adds to the uneasy sense of impending disaster.

And a tragedy this certainly is.  Maybe not in the commonly-used sense of the term, I suppose - with another novel in this first-person series written and another planned, it gives little away to say our hero lives to fight another day. But no-one who staged this at the theatre would want to call it anything else (well, maybe "difficult to block"); Carey here trumps his usual bittersweet ending with something that could only be considered sweet in the "any landing you can walk away from" sense.

It's a bumpy ride, in other words, with more than one gut-punch along the way. There is, ultimately, nothing more horrifying than your own family's past.  Well, actually, there's at least one thing more horrifying, but I'm not going to spoil what it is.  Just read the book, and cry in despair at the freezing misery that grips you ever more tightly, until it hurts to breathe or think or, worst of all, try predicting what might be coming.

Then start the next book immediately.

The Dogmas Of The Quiet Past

Sometimes television will tell you that all America comprises of is bars and strip-clubs and ill-maintained dance clubs.  A seedy underbelly that has swallowed the beast it was supposed to lie beneath.

There is a reason for this, of course.  All those locations share something in common.  They are - probably by design and most certainly in practice - places where people go to have something separate from the rest of their lives.  Refuges and escapes.  It would be hard to find a more obvious statement. But what matters is the impulse, not the location. There really isn't all that much that separates a strip club from an affair other than capacity and a surcharge.

Perhaps this is why Hart, having been dumped by his young lover, finds himself wandering from one display of flesh to the next. Yes, it's in the course of his investigation, but there is always more than one route to a destination.  You don't have to trawl through so much filth if you think a little harder about where you're stepping. You certainly don't have to follow your undercover partner into the compound of a violent and sadistic biker gang for no damn reason.

Not unless you're fleeing so fast from something you no longer give a damn about where you're headed.

Which is Hart down to his bones, of course. Attacking Lisa's new choice of partner, coming within an inch of kicking off a brawl in a hospital, walking slowly and begrudgingly through a hail of bottles.  It takes dedication for your alcoholic partner to get drunk and high and agree to a raid on heavily armed drug dealers in the projects so as to back up face-carving proto-Nazis and for you to be the guy who looks in trouble.

Because when we use these places to escape our lives, sooner or later they become our lives.  Cohle learned this lesson once before, though the fact he kept his neat box of guns and grenades and hard liquor suggests he didn't learn it as well as perhaps he needed to.  When we say we're getting away from it all, what we really mean is that we're trying to escape the mistakes we've made.  The past we've ruined. And in the process, perhaps because we're so busy trying not look back we won't look forward, or perhaps because we're just people and as such fucking everything up is our default approach, we just make new mistakes in new settings, and the whole horrible process just spools up once again.

Except for children.  The innocents.  Not because they never sin, but because there is almost no sin a child can commit that can't be quickly forgiven, brushed aside as being something one simply has to expect.  A child can fuck up in any number of ways and the next day everything resets.  And then there comes a time in their life when they've become too old for that to operate any more, and all of a sudden when they screw something up, it stays screwed.  Then, worse, the screw-ups start to compound themselves, building on each other until you've surrounded yourself with tightly packed walls of shit.

No wonder we have so fractious a relationship with the past.  We're not only trying to ignore the mistakes we've piled up, we're trying to forget there was a time when nothing we could do would really matter all that much. We tell ourselves children are the future because it hurts to much to remember that children are our past.

Of course, not everyone chooses to blot this out and continue shuffling through the day.  Out in the Louisiana woods, a different approach has been birthed.  Satan worship, Lang called it, but we know better. Sacred rocks predate anything the Christians have made famous.  Deer antlers and spirals go back far, far further than a young Jew's temptation in the desert. Whatever they are, though, they're trading on the past-free lives of children in order to get into contact with something that is all past, so ancient it can only be sketched in the faintest form on our consciousnesses. The Yellow King. Carcosa.  Not names, but desperate indications for something a name cannot stick to.

The monster at the end of the dream.  The horror at the start of the world.  Lying dreaming in the Lousiana woods, as men poke at it with antlers and dream of how their pasts will finally be left behind when it awakens to claim us all.

A Tale Of Cocktails #46

Banana Cow

Ingredients

.

1 oz rum
1 oz crème de bananes
1 1/2 oz creme
Dash grenadine
Nutmeg and banana to garnish

.

Taste: 7
Look: 8  

Cost: 8
Name: 7
Prep: 6

Alcohol: 4
Overall: 7.0

Preparation: Shake liquid ingredients with ice.  Pour into a cocktail glass.  Grate nutmeg over the cocktail and garnish with a banana slice.

General Comments: So Fliss found us a random cocktail generator the other day.  Which is awesome, obviously.  I have a huge yen for randomness.  It's how I pick comics to buy, my preferred way to listen to albums, how I choose which episode of Supernatural to put on whilst Fliss and I are playing Ghost Stories or Elder Sign... It throws up interesting combinations that spark new ideas.

Or, in this case, gets you drunk in ways you might never have thought about.

The banana cow - named, one presumes, for combination of banana liquor and cream - is sweet and thick. The combination works well; it's sweet enough to be moreish, and thick enough to stop you swigging it down in seconds - the nutmeg detracts just enough from the sweetness in this regard.  This rather limits the refreshment the drink can offer, but that's fine.  It just means this is something to try second or third during a cocktail evening.

I also assume you can't drink too many of them, lest you fall prey to diarrhoea, insanity, hallucinations and ultimately death. Again, this counts against the drink somewhat in terms of how often you'll want to reach for it, and the slightly fiddly nature of putting it together causes problems here as well.

But it looks nice and tastes nice. Nothing at all wrong with a cocktail best enjoyed in small doses.

The Peace Of The Gun

 
Following on from the SFX Forun's consideration of The Space Museum, we're trawling through The Invasion this month. What with that story being eight parts, I'll divide my thoughts on the story into two posts.  Below the fold is, unsurprisingly, my thoughts on the first four episodes.

Suffer Little Children

"I've seen the future, brother, it is murder." - Leonard Cohen, "The Future".

Since we're stuck on the subject of madness, it's no surprise we're going to need to dig around the insanity brought upon society by the existence of children.

Adults tend to hate children.  They're just so young, with so much life left in them, and they don't even have the decency to realise that.  Youth is not wasted on the young, it's actively maliciously misused.  You can love your own children - thank Mother Nature for the chemical processes put in place to promote that - but everyone else's are screaming beacons of everything you've left behind. Try spending three days without water and watching a man piss into a fire, and you'll perhaps be a tenth of the way to understanding what children do to all but the most stable adults (and stable adult is a fiction as unlikely and cruel as any fiction we can assemble about our progeny).

So we do the only thing we can do; we consider things only in the abstract. Think of the children.  Not the actual children, but the ridiculous spectre of our own past we lie into being and plaster onto the faces of every child we see.  Nothing makes thinking of the children harder than thinking of an actual child, which is why we almost never do it.

This profound and necessary chasm between us and our children causes all sorts of problems.  Our obsession with a child's "innocence" is one.  There are two relevant definitions of the word - not guilty, and not aware - and the problem falls in the gap in between the two. It's a natural enough thing to do, I suppose, to start viewing the innocence of children as being dependent on them being kept safe from experiencing crimes.  As if this were possible.  99.99% of children will never know any crime so damaging as those their parents accidentally perform against them. Cohle, our textbook lunatic for these eight entries, knew this all too well, hence his relief that his daughter died before he had the chance to sin the way every parent sins. But of course his child is gone; he has that luxury.  What option do the rest of us have but to keep going, and to lie about the direction we're going in?

The fact that adults lie about this, and about everything, can lead one to view childhood as a time of simplistic honesty.  This is obvious nonsense.  The greatest spinners of propaganda, the very epitome of Orwell's cold nightmares, could never lie so much as a child - there simply isn't the time.  The difference between adults and children is not that children lie less often, it's that they lie because they enjoy it.  We lie because we would immediately grind to a halt if we didn't, like a pocket-watch flooded with sand.  A child can pretend she has an invisible friend who must have her own seat at the table because having an invisible friend is cool and makes you special.  We pretend our spouse hasn't started working late every night because they're sleeping with a younger more fully-proportioned legal clerk.  We pretend we can love two women when we're driving one to misery and breaking into the other's house when they decide they don't want to fuck a married man anymore.

The greatest advantage children have is this: when you lie purely for the fun of it, you get good at detecting when someone is lying for more desperate reasons.  We find this much harder, of course, because if we can too easily recognise each other's forays into excuse-making and track-covering, we might start to pick apart our own, and we would be lost.  Lie detection is a game for the children, the miserable, and the mad.

Every madman was a child at some point.  The killer of Dora Kelly Lange was once a child.  The copycat killer seventeen years later was once a child.  But when?  Did they paint that mural in the church that burned down?  Did they see a horrible monster of green spaghetti that turned and chased them through the woods?  Did they begin to draw pictures in their notebook of couples copulating? At what point do the lies of enjoyment give way to something else? What is madness but a series of lies told about the world that don't correspond well enough with the lies everyone else tells about the world?

It is by no means clear that Marty's daughter has been in any meaningful sense hurt by what she has learned, and what she has felt compelled to draw (when did so many of us give up drawing? Did our imaginations just become too swamped by generating the fictions we need to stumble out of our beds?).  But the terror remains for her parents.  Perhaps the greatest fear for any parent - other than death, injury or disease - is that as their child grows up they will choose for themselves the wrong lies.  That they will choose a woman, dead and in antlers, resting as if praying in a burned field.

But it's too late, of course.  Someone has already chosen the field, and someone else is about to.  The critical question is merely whether Martin Hart can break out of his own lies for long enough to pin down somebody else's.  Whether he can actively shape the future, rather than just throwing it together mistake by mistake.

To give himself, and all of us, the chance to tell ourselves one less lie.