I decided to pick a novel I've never read by an author I've never heard of because I love mysterious journeys that can end horribly. Or something like that. I give you the horror novel Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs. The cover: The plot: Recent World War II veteran Bull Ingram is working as muscle when a Memphis DJ hires him to find Ramblin' John Hastur. The mysterious blues man's dark, driving music—broadcast at ever-shifting frequencies by a phantom radio station—is said to make living men insane and dead men rise. Disturbed and enraged by the bootleg recording the DJ plays for him, Ingram follows Hastur's trail into the strange, uncivilized backwoods of Arkansas, where he hears rumors the musician has sold his soul to the Devil. But as Ingram closes in on Hastur and those who have crossed his path, he'll learn there are forces much more malevolent than the Devil and reckonings more painful than Hell…The pitch: Combines Lovecraftian horror with a Southern gothic sensibility. Cajun Cthulhu, if you will. The links: Amazon Kindle edition $9.96 Kobo $7.69
I'm at least saving this thread from the indignity of sliding to the second page. :P Maybe I should have found a book that really was called Cajun Cthulhu.
Well, I bought it and do intend to read it before the end of Feb, but after recently reading Krampus and watching seasons 3 to 5 of Supernatural (awesome stuff btw - that finale with "Rock of Ages" was just beyond excellent) I am feeling somewhat burnt out on the modern/urban/jaded/noire fantasy sub-type. I will read Southern Gods, though, really.
I liked it, but only to a certain extent. It starts out really great -- very atmospheric, very Southern Gothic, very creepy -- creepy enough that it spooked me a little bit when I was reading it at night. Then, about halfway through, it shifts gears and switches over to Lovecraftian style horror. With that, came a sudden rushed feeling to the book, like the author was in a hurry and realized they only had so many pages left to wrap the story up. So it felt a little disappointing. I would have loved the book this started out as, but the book it ended up being wasn't quite as good. But it's not a bad book! Just flawed.
I'm disappointed that the book was a, well, disappointment but now I'm interested to see if I see the same tone shift that you did. Given my 'reading is fundamental' reading pace I probably won't have this finished for another week or so. I kind of wish I'd just chosen something more deliberately lurid and out there.
I finished this last night, and overall don't have anything good to say about it. Spoilers commence. I wouldn't call the tonal shift as going to Lovecraftian horror at all; there really wasn't much of any Lovecraft in there except a few book and god names. I'm no purist about such matters and am all for updated riffing on the Cthulhu mythos, mind you. I think A Colder War is the best thing Charlie Stross ever wrote, for instance, and there's a just fantastic section of the Trail of Cthulhu roleplaying game rulebook where it presents completely alternate different takes on a whole raft of mythos entities. It's just that I do prefer such variations to demonstrate a basic grasp of the theme they're varying on. This didn't do that. Examples abound, but the treatment of the Necronomicon stands out. It's one of those tomes that the mere act of looking through can undermine one's sanity, partially undoing the great mercy of the human mind being unable to correlate the world's contents. Pretty wisely, Lovecraft himself never really tried to attempt to describe what was actually in it. Can't eff the ineffable, after all. (You can sort of assume it was primarily because it was a textual Total Perspective Vortex which was not at all based on angel food cake but instead on a few notes of the mad piping horror at the center of all.) Here, it's instead mostly a picture book of juvenile gore sketches. Nope, doesn't work. To be fair, not much of anything works after Ingram's thread and Sarah's threads meet up. Prior to that it had some potential that I can see a more talented writer turning out a cracking good horror story with. A Parker-esque smarter-than-he-looks competent brute on the trail of a wandering soul-sold bluesman whose music can literally raise hell? Getting deeper and deeper into a shadowy cultish network of pirate broadcasters who are sheltering and protecting and worshipping Ramblin' John? Yes, please! I'll go see the movie! Instead, that entire setup was just thrown away for an embarrassingly godawful forced love interest, clumsy coughs of exposition (including the characters telling each other things that had happened that the reader had just read pages before), more exposition rammed into unnecessary flashbacks (my "favorite" was Sarah suddenly remembering the one time her uncle told her exactly what had happened in the book's prologue sequence), and blah.
Well, I suck for taking so long to finally read this but not as much as the book itself. Hey-o! More seriously, I agree with much of the criticism leveled against Southern Gods. The title alone holds great promise on what turns out to be a strangely small scale story considering the subject matter of gods trying to destroy our world. The early chapters are promising. Ingram is a rough but likable kind of lug and the mystery behind the pirate radio station and the ominous tales of Hastur are set up nicely. I felt things started to come apart at the Ruby when the literal orgy of violence unfolds. Drastic gets an essential point right here -- when you're openly invoking the Cthulhu mythos as Jacobs does here, sure you can bring your own take to the material but if you stray too far it's no longer really Cthulhu anymore but its own thing. That in itself isn't bad but I agree again that the 'pictures of gross imagery makes you go crazy' stuff came off flat, even unconvincing. The angle with the music and singing is largely forgotten once the bad books are uncovered, to the story's detriment. The 'love' interest may as well have come with lug nuts, it was so blatantly bolted onto the plot. And Sarah seemed to switch between being weird and emotional to focused and strong more on the requirements of the story than through any natural character arc. I felt nothing in regards to Franny's fate because for most of the book the character is tucked away in the background. So yeah, what started out as an intriguing take on the Cthulhu mythos ends up a disappointment that focuses (IMO) on the wrong things. I also noticed a strangely high number of typos and grammatical errors in the book. I promise not to be a month late with the next BOTM Club selection I decide to read. :P
