Lovecraft — BLOG — ANTHONY R. CARDNO

TITLE: A Scout is Brave

AUTHOR: Will Ludwigsen

155 pages, Lethe Press, ISBN 9781590216606 (softcover, e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Will Ludwigsen’s new novella A Scout is Brave is almost too many things at once: young adult coming of age story (the narrator and main character is thirteen-year-old Bud Castillo), nostalgic historical (the time is 1963), a paean to the glory days of Scouting … and Lovecraftian eldritch horror. It almost shouldn’t work. In Ludwigsen’s deft hands, all the elements mesh for a story I couldn’t put down. I wasn’t surprised, of course. Ludwigsen’s Acres of Perhaps: Stories and Episodes is one of my favorite genre short story collections, and I will take any chance to tout it, including at the top of a review about a completely different book by the same author.

But let’s speak of A Scout Is Brave.

In the summer of 1963, Bud Castillo’s father loses his construction job in Queens NY. Just as the family is starting to worry about whether he’ll find work again, Bud’s father is offered an incredibly lucrative job: to help install and make operational an oil rig … off the coast of Massachusetts, near the small town of Innsmouth. Of course, weirdness is going to ensue. Bud finds he is the only kid in a town full of mostly elderly folks descended from the town’s original inhabitants … except for one other boy, Aubrey Marsh.

Readers of cosmic horror are well familiar with the history of Innsmouth, and with the Marsh family, as detailed in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” There have been countless pastiches, prequels, and sequels over the years, and yes, this is a sequel. One of the better ones, since Ludwigsen doesn’t try to imitate Lovecraft’s style, as so many of the writers who have visited Innsmouth in Lovecraft’s wake have. He tells the story in the simpler, less purple-prose, style of a man reminiscing about a year that changed his life. There’s no doubt, from the very first pages, that Bud and his family are walking into something they can’t imagine. The reader knows it, and the narrator, from his decades-later vantage point, knows it. Ludwigsen expertly portrays the language of someone whose fondest memories (of a friendship he’ll never experience again, of the time he came to understand his parents, and himself, better) are tinged with unimaginable horror.

The cosmic horror builds slowly: the little hints at the start, with descriptions of the odd behavior of the few returning residents of Innsmouth, slowly grow into scenes that are both rife with jump-scares (a visit to an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of town) and eerie cultish religious ceremony (when Bud’s family finally agrees to attend a service led by Reverand Pritchett at the Evangelical Progress Temple, the only church in town), which eventually lead to the story’s action-packed, frightening dénouement on ice-packed seas. The slow ratcheting up of the eeriness and the tension is perfectly paced. And what I find particularly brilliant is that the story feels Lovecraftian without ever actually teetering over into full on cosmic/eldritch horror.

These moments that teeter on, but never full embrace, the cosmic horror are interspersed with what I can only call a “skewed Rockwellian normalcy.” Bud meets Aubrey, introduces him to the concept of the Boy Scouts, they form a troop. They roam the town looking for good works to do, and through Bud’s eyes we get to meet the town’s denizens, most of whom have endearing, if odd, personalities, and who become the boys’ de facto teachers in whatever subjects they are expert it, since Innsmouth doesn’t have a school. I was a Cub Scout, a Webelo, and made it through a couple of years of Boy Scouts before the unexpected passing of a favorite Scoutmaster. I recognize Bud’s idealized attitude of “what Scouts should be,” and his joy at finding someone who embraced it in the same way. I also recognized the tint of nostalgia in older Bud’s narration – a tint that doesn’t quite cover up the things he’s learned since leaving Innsmouth, the scars that belie some of the nostalgia.

There’s also some insightful commentary about the negative aspects of nostalgia (through the citizens of Innsmouth who cannot move on even though they were left behind) and charismatic leaders who will say anything and do to get their way.

A Scout Is Brave is a perfect mix of nostalgia, horror, coming-of-age, and social commentary. It is going to be on my list of favorite reads of 2024.

TITLE: Aftermath of an Industrial Accident: Stories

AUTHOR: Mike Allen

235 pages, Mythic Delirium Books, ISBN 9781732644021 (paperback)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): A Korean War veteran must rely on wits, improvised weapons, and words from the dread Necronomicon to escape the lair of a deranged cult. A ghost cannot communicate how she died, no matter how desperately she tries, while an unconventional ghost hunter incurs the venomous wrath of the Queen of Night. Murderous conspiracies reveal themselves in online video clips, a saint blasphemes as a serial killer prays for mercy, and corrupt families in ancient kingdoms trade blood and souls for leverage over foes. Enduring nightmares for a living can lead to a fate worse than burnout. A gruesome invasion from outside space and time tests courage – and corporate loyalty – past all rational limits. In these twenty-three stories and poems, two-time World Fantasy Award nominee Mike Allen spins twisted narratives, some wound through the fabric of our world, some set in imagined pasts or futures, all plumbing the depths of human darkness.

MY RATING: Five out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: Mike Allen’s fiction is in your face, no holds barred. Allen will do whatever it takes – linguistic gymnastics, horrific physical details, telling a story from the point of view of a parasite or a micorganism – to get under your skin, to make you squirm, and quite possibly to make you throw the book across the room as you fight back nausea. If I may steal a term from my own review of Allen’s most recent novella (in the anthology A Sinister Quartet): Mike Allen’s work is one masterful mind-fuck after another.

If you’re the kind of person who wonders whether a spider might lay eggs in their ears while you sleep and then gleefully describes what it would be like when those eggs hatch, does Mike Allen have some stories for you. Not that that there’s a spider-lays-eggs-in-main-character’s-ear-canal story in this volume – but it’s the kind of thing that would be right at home here, and if anyone could make it scary instead of trope-y, it’s Allen. The stories that are cutting-edge body horror are not for the squeamish. The protagonist of “The Sun Saw” stumbles upon a creature fused together from the living bodies of multiple humans; “Puppet Show” reveals the back-stage workings that turn humans into blood-soaked automatons for a massive rock stage show by the band Bloodbath Jubilee. In these stories, Allen spares no details. He refuses to let us look away from the damage people will do to each other in the name of religion (the cult in “The Sun Saw”) or entertainment (“Puppet Show”) or science (“Aftermath of an Industrial Accident,” which features some graphic death scenes and another forced melding of disparate bodies into one).

Not every story is a full gross-out, of course. The body horror of “With Shining Gifts That Took All Eyes” and “Tardigrade” is subtler stuff, in the former case more inferred than seen. Even the comical-but-disturbing “Tick Flick” is not quite as in-your-face – but all three stories leave an afterimage burned on the mind’s eye that returns days after you’ve last consciously thought of the story at all. And sometimes, that’s worse than the more concrete images Allen gives us.

Body horror is not the only sub-genre represented. There’s a linked pair of fantasy horror tales, “Longsleeves” and “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade,” that take place in the land of Calcharra and explicate the lengths men will go to to gain and retain power (usually over or through the women they’re supposed to care for). There are Lovecraftian themes and overtones in a number of stories: the unseen Owner of the creature in “The Sun Saw” and the unseen Mother in the disturbing monologue “Drift from the Windrows” being the most obvious. There are cursed books (“Binding,” which is also an excellent example of the “club story” genre) and cursed phrases (“Nolens Volens”).

The Calcharra stories aren’t the only linked stories in the collection. Fans of Allen’s Korean War veteran turned hunter-of-the-weird John Hairston will be happy to see him in two of the tales herein, “The Sun Saw” and “Nolens Volens” (and isn’t it about time Cemetery Dance or Subterranean Press issued a nice hardcover collection of all of Allen’s extant Hairston adventures?). The stories “The Cruelest Team Will Win” and “Follow The Wounded One” don’t share characters or a setting but they seem to take place in the same world, one in which certain people are born with animal spirits that allow them to co-exist in the dreamworld/spiritual realm connected to our own. The female narrator of “The Cruelest Team” turns into a bird to chase away, or sometimes eat, the ghosts haunting friends’ houses, while the male narrator of “Wounded One” turns into a giant cat in the other world and meets a young woman who also turns into a bird. (I didn’t see anything that implies Leeanne in “Team” and Kori in “Wounded” are the same character or even turn into the same type of bird – but perhaps I wasn’t reading closely enough.) Both protagonists take on apex predators in the spirit realm who are equally dangerous in the mundane world.

There are a couple of more standard ghost stories as well: the protagonists of “A Deaf Policeman Heard the Noise” and “Burn the Kool Kidz at the Stake” each deal with ghosts haunting their psyches and their homes. “Kool Kidz” also has a lot to say about toxic fan culture and is perhaps even more topical now than it was when it originally saw print in 2017 (which seems so much longer ago than it really is).

Three of the stories in the collection have never been published before: “A Deaf Policeman Heard the Noise,” “Puppet Show,” and “Blue Evolution.” “Blue Evolution” is a neat bit of classic pulp-fantasy-adventure, in which the crew of a dimension-hopping aircraft/submersible encounter both spider-pirates and giant evolving native organisms. It’s also a great example of the author hitting the main characters with two equally bad problems and forcing them to use one to solve the other (although not necessarily in the way one might expect).

The collection also includes a number of Allen’s poems, of which I would be remiss not to mention “Toujours Il Coûte Trop Cher,” co-written with C.S.E. Cooney and imagining a spiritual/ghostly encounter between Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais. If this one hasn’t been recorded as a two-person audio play yet, it should be.

There really is something for every type of horror fan in Aftermath of an Industrial Accident: Stories. Well worth seeking out in print or e-book.

NOTE: I received an ARC of this title from the publisher but didn’t get the review written in time for it’s July release.