Available at DriveThruHorror.com

Roleplaying game scenarist, short film maker, podcaster, and graphic designer Ross Payton adds a new laurel to his crown with Zombies of the World: A Field Guide to the Undead. At only 112 trade-paperback pages, Payton does not aim for completness, but for richness. And between his light authorial tone, his slamming graphic design chops, and his slavering hunger for the topic, he shoots his target square in the head.

Zombies of the World presents itself as a kind of all-in-one reference book, from a world in which the walking dead are, if not common, relatively well documented. If Dorling Kindersley published a zombie book, it might look something like this. Chapters cover the etiology and science of zombies, a brief history of notable outbreaks, and a simple guide to “Surviving Zombie Encounters,” all done nicely straight-faced.

The meat of the book is the largest chapter: a field guide to twenty zombie species from the Common Gray Shambler (Mortifera immortalis romeroi) to the common Asian fiend the Preta (M. immortalis gaki). It also covers two subspecies of mummy (Egyptian and Aztec) and a revenant (M. reverto vorheesi) among its examples of the walking dead. I personally think the New England Ghoul (M. immortalis pickmani) is misclassified (M. necronomicus, surely?), but that’s just nitpickery. The entries provide plenty of fodder for exactly that kind of nitpicky fun, including a description of the thing, its “habits and habitat,” and its reproduction and range (complete with handsome world map). Each entry additionally features a grand full-page illustration by Tom Rhodes and an icon indicating the thing’s “conservation status.”

Taken as a whole, the book is impressively professional. Payton published it himself through his Slang Design imprint, but it looks vastly better than the host of Lulu-Lightning books currently shambling through the post-apocalyptic world of print publishing. Paper stock, binding, and typography are of the highest quality, all important considerations in a book you buy sheerly to enjoy the existence of. Since it presents as an artifact of Payton’s specific zombie world, it doesn’t really work as a real-world compendium of zombie film and folk lore (although there’s a good amount of that in here, of course); likewise, adapting it for games will be slightly more difficult if you’ve already made basic decisions about your setting. But any book that carefully differentiates between the Italian Zombie (M. immortalis fulci) and the North American Cabin Lurker (M. necronomicus kandarian) is a book with brains enough to feast upon all night.

Review by Kenneth Hite

Related posts:

1. The Zombies that Ate the World: Book 1 Review
2. First Look at Munchkin Zombies
3. Zombies!!! Review

A beautiful young girl, alone in desolate Central Europe. Nightmares. Revenge. Mesmerism. Rationality eroding under the stress of supernatural evil, murder, and disease. Blood. Mere swords against the preternatural strength of the undead. And the world’s first lesbian vampire.

Got your attention? J. Sheridan LeFanu brought these elements together in 1872 — 25 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula — in his novella “Carmilla”, a story that subtly tilts between the nightmarish Gothic terror-tale and today’s “realistic” horrors set firmly in the waking world. Generations later, Chicago’s Wildclaw Theatre company has adapted “Carmilla” for the modern stage. [Full disclosure: I wrote a short essay, pro bono, on LeFanu for the program book for this production.] Wildclaw’s Carmilla is the latest in a series of adaptations including Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” and William Peter Blatty’s Legion that makes Wildclaw Chicago’s — and perhaps America’s — leading missionary of classic horror to contemporary theater audiences.

In similar fashion, Aly Renee Amidei has adapted LeFanu’s Victorian tale into a modern vampire story. LeFanu’s heroine Laura embodies his themes of isolation, madness, and self-doubt: she is unsure what or whom to believe. Even her own father hides secrets, and she cannot trust her eyes or her heart. Amidei’s Laura (played with just the right notes of poise and hesitancy by Brittany Burch) is less disintegrating soul than battleground: the domestic light (and restrictive prospects) of Victorian society against the forbidden (and horribly murderous) promise of the dangerous Carmilla’s love and life in vampire society. In both versions of the story, Laura is essentially passive; Amidei’s Laura realizes her own powerlessness, and gains tragic depth as a result.

The playwright stacks the deck somewhat against Victorian society, as the vampire-hunting General Spielsdorf reveals in a fearsome acting turn by Brian Amidei: his justifiable rage against Carmilla repeatedly slips into pure and terrifying hatred and misogyny. But Michaela Petro plays Carmilla as a monstrous creature in her own right, who considers her love for Laura almost a weakness. She dominates the stage with her presence, whether gently mocking the laws of Nature, seducing Laura with lies and flattery, or letting her own aristocratic hatred seep through.

This is LeFanu’s Carmilla to the teeth, but in Amidei’s conversion, Carmilla is not alone: the “preternatural conspiracy” of LeFanu’s story is fleshed out into a nest of vampires whose relationships drive and mirror those of their human prey. Not only modern notions of gender/power relations, but modern notions of vampire politics, make Wildclaw’s Carmilla a surprisingly contemporary play for all its Victorian language.

This occasionally prolix Victorian dialogue, and a few subplots introduced by Amidei, slow the pacing in places, but director Scott Cummins wisely eschews any attempt at comic irony (although Laura’s governesses occasionally provide uneven comic relief), letting the story and the situation speak for itself. Overall, the mood slowly lowers, pieces of the story coming together without pressure or posturing through one final flashback establishing the horrifying history of Carmilla and her clan. The climactic horror breaks well and rapidly after that; the ending may or may not surprise close readers of the original novella.

The staging is, as Wildclaw patrons have come to expect, supremely technically competent. Paul Foster and Danielle McKenzie’s lighting design, Alan Donohue’s set, and Aly Renee Amidei’s costumes deserve special marks; the fight scenes (choreographed by director Scott Cummins and fight director David Chrzanowski) take on the heightened, almost artificial look of nightmare as they anchor the play’s central conflict. Charlie Athanas’ special effects range from Gothic fog to flickering strobes to — yes — gouts of blood.

Of all the blood splattered around, however, perhaps none is more quietly terrifying than the blood drained from a passive, nearly somnambulistic Laura to use as bait for Carmilla. Dr. Hesselius (promoted from the novella’s introduction into a Van Helsing role, played with restraint by Steve Herson) and Laura’s father (a crisp, remote figure embodying Victorian society, well embodied by Charley Sherman) make their rational decision to embrace irrationality without bothering to inform or consult the victim — or the audience, achieving genuine shock as we suddenly discover that we, also, are the battleground of the play.

Carmilla runs through February 20 at the Chicago DCA Theater.

Review by Ken Hite

Related posts:

1. 23 Hours Fiction Review
2. The Revenants Theatrical Play Review
3. Vampire Zero by David Wellington!

Available at Amazon.com

The place of the pastiche in fiction is mixed at best: August Derleth’s Solar Pons is but a pale shadow of Sherlock Holmes, and the less said about Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations” with Lovecraft, the better. But in his collection of linked novelettes, Trail of Cthulhu, Derleth had the happy inspiration to combine the Cthulhu Mythos with Fu Manchu, and the result is a propulsive series of tales considerably above his usual mark. In Doc Wilde and the Frogs of Doom, Tim Byrd goes Derleth one better; he combines Lester Dent’s Doc Savage (as clearly as the laws of copyright will allow) and the Cthulhu Mythos – in the form of a young adult adventure mystery.

This last bit is the key element that elevates Byrd’s short novel above the ruck of mashup and pastiche, and Byrd has the tone of young adult fiction down pat. It’s not only a voice that suits him better than Dent’s manic testosterone or Lovecraft’s vertiginous cosmicism, it’s a voice that brings a welcome note of originality to what might otherwise be dismissed as derivative. The real protagonists of Doc Wilde and the Frogs of Doom aren’t Doctor Spartacus Wilde and “Grampa” Wilde (a 1930s adventurer still hale and hearty at 99, although he’s let his buzz cut grow out), but Doc’s kids Brian and Wren Wilde. By using 10-year-olds — albeit 10-year-olds trained in the arts of super-science, daredevilry, and adventuring — Byrd avoids (for the most part) the traps of the modern pulp: a hero who’s never in real danger, and a hero who wastes the pulp reader’s time on internal turmoil.

Instead, he presents a Doc Savage, er, “Doc Wilde” adventure through a kid’s excited eyes, in fresh language that recalls Blue Balliett or Anthony Horowitz rather than being imprisoned by its octogenarian sources. Despite our young heroes’ impressive abilities, the threat of the Frog God Frogon builds to a genuinely scary level by the end, with a properly Lovecraftian threat to the universe (and to one of Doc’s sidekicks, a burly Irishman named Declan mac Coul) waiting in the depths of a South American cave inhabited by the titular Frogs of Doom. Byrd plays with amphibian biology, and with plenty of other sciences from nanotech to aerodynamics, with the keen eye for the plausible impossibility shared by Dent, Lovecraft, and many of the pulp greats.

I suspect that readers out of middle school will appreciate Byrd’s tribute first and foremost as a tribute — spotting the references and shout-outs is our own little adventure mystery — but it will surprise you by engaging you with its youthful characters as well. The typography occasionally veers into the comic-book balloon or the wildly picturesque sort of font that seems like a good idea at the time; perhaps much younger readers aren’t tired of it yet. But the words themselves reel out at pulp speed, and tickle two kinds of nostalgia at once: nostalgia for reading Doc Savage, and for reading Doc Savage for the first time, when you were eleven and hadn’t yet talked yourself into being tired of heroes.

Review by Ken Hite

Related posts:

1. The Doom from Below RPG Review
2. The Doom from Below for Call of Cthulhu

Kenneth Hite, author of Cthulhu 101 and other Mythos tomes of dark intent brings us a tale of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game from Chaosium.

Enjoy this contribution to Cthulhu Week, but don’t read too deep…we can’t be held responsible for what horrors are left behind…

“And as I said before, I haven’t any mental energy to spare on unamusing side-lines. It’s just the same with games. Meaningless spotted pasteboards, carved castles and horses’ heads … No, Grandpa ain’t made to relish sech didoes! All these things are, in their superior form, simply by-products of excess intellectuality — which I haven’t the honour to possess. In their inferior form they are of course simply avenues of escape for persons with too poorly proportioned and correlated a perspective to distinguish betwixt the frivolous and the relevant…”
– H.P. Lovecraft, letter to James F. Morton, Feb. 2, 1932 (Selected Letters IV, p. 13)

H.P. Lovecraft would think I was wasting my time. And, if you go by the vast majority of roleplaying games out there, you’d be hard pressed to prove him wrong. Almost without exception, the most popular games are the ones that encourage “avenues of escape,” usually into the purest adolescent power fantasy. In Dungeons & Dragons, for example, you are stronger, faster, and better at killing things than most people, you have magic powers (or magic items) that are sheerly impossible, and there’s nothing to prevent you from killing things and taking their belongings, by which deeds you grow ever more powerful. Especially in early versions of Vampire, the power fantasy was even more explicitly adolescent — you had all manner of cool, romantic abilities that centered around staying out all night and cruising, but the Elders kept frustrating you for their own arbitrary reasons. Throughout it, your vampire is urged to wallow in his own sense of anguish, a pain that nobody can understand, worse than anybody’s pain, ever. Occasionally, games will present adolescent power fantasies with a scrim of morality — alignments in some versions of Dungeons & Dragons, or the superheroic models of games like Champions. Sometimes the adolescent fantasy is more literally escapist, a fantasy of “getting out of here,” complete with cool “free trader” spacecraft in Traveller or at least the vicarious thrills of Luke Skywalker’s adolescent escapades in Star Wars.

But it’s all fundamentally adolescent power fantasies at bottom, or at the very most innocuous, escapism. And there’s nothing wrong with that — we’ve all got that mistreated, misunderstood ego inside us who wants nothing more than to supercharge the old id and slaughter orcs. It’s worth recalling, as well, C.S. Lewis’ observation that the usual enemies of escapism are jailers. But it’s just not that important to think about. It’s not worth any more time than it takes to fill up the dungeon or stat out the starship. And this isn’t to say that no roleplaying game can be the subject of critical thinking — if only as a product of its times, Vampire repays a good deal of critical examination, for example. And some games — the various Lord of the Rings games, for example — might borrow the weight of their source material. Certainly the whole medium of roleplaying games is grossly underexamined as an art form by narratologists and scholars of drama, and deserving of far more critical attention. Game designers can certainly learn to create better games by such examination, as well. But aside from such historicism or refraction, or investigations into the games’ nature and form, how much importance, how much moral weight, can you really attach to the specific stories told within these narrative structures? I would say — and I would expect most RPG designers to say — pretty much none whatsoever. Almost the sole exception is Sandy Petersen’s Call of Cthulhu.(1) Read Footnote

In Call of Cthulhu, your character explicitly starts no better than any other. There is no leveling up, no percentile strength, no special class skills or feats separating your character from any other citizen of Arkham. Yes, your character may well gain magical powers and travel to exotic destinations, as in other roleplaying games. But such “improvements” come at a cost, at the cost of lowering your irreplaceable Sanity. In Call of Cthulhu, the player knows at the outset that his character, if played long enough, will go insane and die. That’s a very different proposition from hoping that your character will become the vampiric Prince of Pittsburgh or get a Helm of Command at 18th level. Of course if that was all it was, Call of Cthulhu would simply be nihilistic, an exercise in masochistic masturbation. At best, its characters would resemble the decadent aesthetes of Lovecraft’s short story “The Hound,” seeking ever more outré pleasures, or perhaps the shortsighted Tillinghast in “From Beyond,” accepting insanity as the necessary visa for interdimensional tourism. And in many of Lovecraft’s stories, this is the case — Lovecraft was, after all, a nihilist (albeit a gentlemanly nihilist) himself, who considered morality “mere Victorian fiction.” The object of terror, for Lovecraft, is terror.

But a surprising number of Lovecraft’s stories back away from that precipice. In those stories, terror provokes a response. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Dr. Willett boldly investigates Ward’s fate, and avenges him. In “The Thing on the Doorstep,” Daniel Upton does the same for his unfortunate friend Edward Derby. Walter Gilman kills the witch Keziah Mason in “Dreams in the Witch-House,” although he dies in the attempt. Although the narrator, Robert Olmstead, succumbs to “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” his warning inspires the FBI and the Navy to destroy the town. Professor Armitage exorcises “The Dunwich Horror,” the police break up “The Horror at Red Hook,” and the narrator dynamites the Martense mansion at the end of “The Lurking Fear.” And most uncharacteristically of all, the Whipples armor up with “Crookes tubes” and flame-throwers to burn out the demonic entity within “The Shunned House.” Some critics (such as S.T. Joshi) feel that these “naïve narratives” backpedal from Lovecraft’s pure “mechanistic materialism” by positing responses to cosmic horror other than fetal surrender or panicked flight. However, in this context we can recognize them not as failed models of Lovecraftian philosophy, but as the successful seeds of Call of Cthulhu adventures. (The core rulebook, in fact, apotheosizes The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as the ideal model for Call of Cthulhu scenarios.) In Call of Cthulhu, you suffer inevitable madness and danger and death for a purpose — to defend the rest of Arkham, or the world, against the Cthulhu Mythos.

That is a moral decision, to place your body and your sanity “between your loved homes, and the war’s desolation.” Call of Cthulhu is almost entirely alone among roleplaying games in that its characters are moral adults. They recognize something larger and more important than themselves or their safety. They accept self-sacrifice as the necessary price to pay to keep children safe in bed at night. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Or better yet, for complete strangers. And this is not merely the self-sacrifice of a fireman or a Marine. The Investigators in Call of Cthulhu adventures know that the true world is more terrible than fire or fascism, more horrific than anyone can imagine. They alone know the worst thing in the entire cosmos that can happen to a person — and they bring it on themselves to keep it away from others. Now that’s a game worth playing. And more to the point, one worth thinking about critically.

“Make no mistake: Oklahoma is a lot more than a mere pioneer’s and promoter’s frontier. There are old, old tribes with old, old memories there; and when the tom-toms beat ceaselessly over brooding plains in the autumn the spirits of men are brought dangerously close to primal, whispered things.”
– H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, “The Mound”

So, granting our premise that Call of Cthulhu is, in fact, worthy of critical examination, how do we go about it? Well, in any literary pursuit, it’s best to start off with Aristotle’s Poetics, because nine times out of ten, you’ll find yourself back there anyway. Even without Aristotle’s hand-holding, it’s clear that Call of Cthulhu is a framework for tales of tragedy, ending in death and madness. A full campaign played to the end arouses, in Aristotle’s words, “pity and terror.” The central agon — the conflict — of the game, however, is not that between Investigators and the gods. It is, appropriately, larger — more cosmic — than that. It is not the heroes who have hamartia, the “tragic flaw.” It is, per Lovecraft, the universe that is flawed. (Or more Real than mere humanity can stand. It all depends on one’s perspective.) The agon is centered not on the heroes but on the universe. The universe, when faced squarely, will drive you mad, as it has at its heart the Cthulhu Mythos. However, scattered accidentally through the universe are innocent beings, the byproducts of monstrous ancient warfare. The heroic Investigators’ tragic choice is to choose to face the universe squarely, to learn about its truth — the Mythos — and by so doing, go mad. Only by dooming oneself to tragedy can you preserve the illusion — again, per Lovecraft, that’s all we have — of safety and goodness for those innocent others.

And that, as it happens, is also the central agon of the other great American narrative art form (besides fantastic fiction), the Western film. The agon, the central conflict, of every classic Western from The Toll Road in 1920 to Unforgiven in 1992 is as follows:

This central tension is most visible in the Westerns of John Ford, such as The Searchers, in which John Wayne’s violent Indian-killer Ethan Edwards is needed to rescue Debbie from the Comanche, but his violence and hatred have no part in the civilization he returns her to. Another, even clearer, example is Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This 1962 film tells the story of three men: Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valance, an outlaw who terrorizes the town of Shinbone, John Wayne’s Tom Doniphan, a rancher and deadly shot who keeps Valance at a distance, and Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard, an Eastern lawyer who rejects the gun and tries to use the law and social pressure to defeat Valance. In a tense showdown, Valance is shot and killed. The town hails Stoddard as “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” and thanks to this reputation, he is able to secure statehood — and therefore peace and civilization — for Shinbone’s territory. However, this is a lie. The man who actually shot Liberty Valance is Tom Doniphan, firing from the shadows across the street. From that moment, Doniphan’s life falls apart. He is rejected by his ideal woman in favor of the newly confident and lionized Stoddard, and dies a failure, drunken and unmourned. To secure the blessings of peace for Shinbone, Stoddard must allow the world to “print the legend.”

This is the fate of the Call of Cthulhu Investigator, then. He is the Tom Doniphan of Arkham. He must defeat the Mythos in secret, from the shadows. To do so, he must understand, and perhaps even utilize, the Mythos — spells from the Necronomicon, or greenish star-stones from the Elder Things’ necropolis. Even telling the world of his actions endangers it, and should a Ransom Stoddard learn the truth, he must erase it, “print the legends” of decency and morality and conventional Euclidean geometry. And by those legends, those rules, the Investigator cannot be allowed. The Investigator becomes that which he destroys, a being tainted by the Mythos, eventually driven mad by it. Recasting the tension:

The “gun” of the Western becomes the Mythos tome, or star-stone, or Gate spell, or simple understanding of the threat in Call of Cthulhu. Game-mechanically, it’s the Cthulhu Mythos skill, ever creeping upward and always eroding Sanity as it does. Lovecraft’s stories bear this out less mechanically — some of his heroes, such as Professor Armitage and Doctor Willett, presumably remain useful members of society. Others, such as Robert Olmstead or Walter Gilman, give way to the horrors. Some few have their veracity, or their very sanity, questioned. In general, Lovecraft’s less sane narrators are the ones who failed — Thurston in “The Call of Cthulhu,” Dyer in At the Mountains of Madness, etc. But you can see the skeleton (perhaps in pieces) of the Call of Cthulhu agon present in Lovecraft’s overarching narrative structure none the less.

There is a way out, and it’s one that Robert E. Howard, for example, would have jumped at. The Western is almost always about the moment in time in which the frontier moves on and civilization arrives, the “frontier moment.” But presumably in the past, before that moment, the “necessary barbarian” could stay on, if only on the outskirts. The gunfighter Tom Doniphan begins the movie, after all, as Shinbone’s favorite son. Another example: in the “past” of High Noon, Marshal Kane once rallied the townsfolk to drive out the villain Frank Miller. But in the filmic “present,” the town is too civilized to help him. At the end Kane takes on Miller alone — and leaves civilization behind.

Lovecraft will occasionally set his “frontier moment” in the past. Take, for example, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The evil sorcerer Joseph Curwen (the “Frank Miller” or “Liberty Valance” of the tale) meets a fiery doom in 1771 at the hands of a posse of heroic Investigators. They were able to go on with their lives, and Lovecraft notes that “every man of those leaders had a stirring part to play in later years.” (HPL populates the posse with a number of Revolutionary War heroes from Rhode Island history.) But even then, they had to print the legend, to keep silence. “There is something frightful,” Lovecraft writes, “in the care with which these actual raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least allusion to the matter.” Even in the wide-open heroic past, too much heroism was dangerous: “Hardest to explain was the nameless odour clinging to all the raiders…”

Although it may be less immediately apparent, one other parallel between the Lovecraftian story or Call of Cthulhu scenario and the Western obtrudes itself. That is the role of space, physical extent, and of the hostile and forbidding landscape. John Ford was fond of filming his heroes small and insignificant against the vast vistas of Monument Valley, emphasizing the mighty challenge of civilizing such a desert. Almost every Western worth the name is an interaction with the setting, with the land itself, if only in the cinematography. (Liberty Valance, filmed mostly on a backlot, is a rare exception — although Tom Doniphan’s abandoned ranch has a very Dunwichian aspect to it.) Sometimes, as in Shane, the landscape almost becomes a character, and its character becomes an issue. Is it destined for (barbarian) ranching or (civilized) farming? Which will the land choose? Lovecraft, of course, used the wild hills and woods of western New England — and then the vast frozen plateau of Antarctica — just as surely as Ford used the Arizona desert, and in almost exactly the same way.

HPL himself ascribes the American horror impulse to the landscape, in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” where he describes the Puritan reaction to “the strange and forbidding nature of the scene … the vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk.” Lovecraft even notes “hordes of coppery Indians [with] strange, saturnine visages and violent customs” that might come right out of the John Ford playbook. (Although Ford was far fairer to the Indians than was the racist Lovecraft.) And as Philip Shreffler notes in The H.P. Lovecraft Companion:

The scope of Lovecraft’s horror stories becomes cosmic in nature; vast sweeps of space and time are the rule rather than the exception. And this is what gives Lovecraft such a peculiarly American character. From the days when English Anglicans hacked Jamestown out of the Virginia swamps and the Puritan Separatists braved the hostile environment of eastern Massachusetts on through to the present time, American writers have responded one way or another to the sheer immensity of their national landscape. What Daniel Boone used to refer to as “elbow room” has been transmuted in the hands of our artists into a kind of huge blank canvas on which grandiose philosophical ideas can be painted on a cosmic scale.

Thus the Western and Lovecraftian cosmicism spring, at least in part, from precisely the same stimuli. Is it any wonder that their responses to the demands of drama are so similar? Once you begin to look for it, you see the frontier everywhere in Lovecraft — the pure exploration of At the Mountains of Madness, the terrors of native captivity in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (where the Mi-Go are the real First Americans), the frontiers of time itself in “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Call of Cthulhu.” But the frontier means danger, and the danger to Arkham and the world cannot be plowed under by sodbusters or talked away by Ransom Stoddards. It requires constant vigilance, and constant sacrifice. Every moment of mankind’s history is the “frontier moment,” because the Mythos transcends time. We must all of us — from 1890s Golden Dawn members to 21st century Delta Green ops — become the man who shot Joseph Curwen.

Footnote 1: One can make the argument, and I have, for a handful of other RPGs as bearers of moral weight, and thus worthy of serious critical examination. The world of Ray Winninger’s Underground is explicitly designed as a critical examination of the superhero genre. Further, the direct connection in Underground between the characters’ advancement and the increase in social justice in their neighborhood is almost nonexistent in other games, though Greg Stafford and Robin Laws’ HeroQuest presents community service and improvement as one goal of heroquesting. John Tynes and Greg Stolze’s Unknown Armies, although replete with cool powers and secret destinies, strongly foregrounds the question of consequences in a way most RPGs do not. And Vince Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard is the first Western RPG to genuinely confront the moral core of the genre, and it mechanically enforces that confrontation to produce a masterful examination of the twinned concepts of justice and responsibility.Return to Article

This essay appears, in slightly earlier form, in the collection Dubious Shards, available from Atomic Overmind Press and Ronin Arts.

About Kenneth Hite
Kenneth Hite is an author of the best introductory primer (Cthulhu 101), the second-best roleplaying game (Trail of Cthulhu), the fourth-best book of criticism (Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales), the best alternate comics history (Adventures Into Darkness), the fourth-best Tarot treatment (Tarot of Cthulhu: Major Arcana), the seventh-best RPG supplement (Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity), and the two best children’s books (Where the Deep Ones Are and The Antarctic Express) about the Cthulhu Mythos. He has also written 70 or so books and games that barely touch on Cthulhu at all. He blogs, if you can call it that, at PrinceofCairo.livejournal.com.

He lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and one non-Lovecraftian wife.

Related posts:

1. Cthulhu Week: Deconstructing Realms of Cthulhu
2. Cthulhu Week: The Lovecraft Movie Dilemma
3. Cthulhu Week: The Tentacles That Bind

Available at Amazon.com

The high concept of James Morrow’s novel Shambling Towards Hiroshima is, quite frankly, almost worth the price of admission by itself. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Navy had a backup plan in case the Army’s A-Bomb didn’t work out in WWII — genetically engineer giant, fire-breathing lizards to devastate Japan. (But we were building the A-Bomb to devastate Germany, I hear you cry. Never you mind about that.) But unlike our secretive A-Bomb policy, we decided to demonstrate our monsters to the Japanese to give them a chance to surrender first. But (and here’s where it gets really good) we couldn’t devastate anywhere real for a mere demonstration, so the Navy hired the world’s greatest monster-actor, Syms Thorley, to get into a rubber monster suit and stomp around on a model of “Shirazuka” for the cameras. The plan was to show the film to the Japanese and horrify them into surrender.

This novel is Syms Thorley’s memoir, written forty years after his starring role as Gorgantis, the flame-breathing giant iguana, in the top-secret Knickerbocker Project. Which of course spawned a whole series of popular “Gorgantis” movies in the book’s universe. (As your top-secret government embarrassments so often do.) It’s alternately too clever by half and not quite clever enough. The entire concept is ludicrous, of course, satirizing the ludicrousness of atomic warfare. But Morrow’s use of “Gorgantis” to represent the Bomb in an ironic satire doesn’t work nearly well enough to warrant cheapening Ishiro Honda’s original use of Gojira to represent the Bomb in a horrific cri de coeur. Those who most appreciate the daikaiju myth will find the least to appreciate about this “white liberal guilt” redress of it, even if they are otherwise sympathetic to Thorley’s anti-nuclear politics. Goodwin attempts to hang a lantern on the problem when he has Thorley complain that the audiences at his SF convention appearances never seem to want to listen to anti-nuclear propaganda at a monster-fest. Consider that lantern well and truly hung.

Where the book does shine, however, is in the recreation of Thorley’s monster rally Hollywood of the 1940s. The interplay of somewhat fictionalized characters (Thorley is a riff on Boris Karloff; “Siegfried Dagover” a villainous Bela Lugosi) with real ones (the Navy gets Willis O’Brien of King Kong fame for the special effects and James Whale to direct the secret Gorgantis shoot) is almost seamless. The film storyline — both the secret Navy film and the horror film backdrop — far outpaces the rest of the book in human interest, believability (even during the more ludicrous set pieces), and invention. It’s a shame that the monster-fest keeps getting interrupted by attempted irony, or what’s worse, attempted significance.

Review by Ken Hite

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Every so often, you will see Catherine “C.L.” Moore’s hero Northwest Smith referred to as the model for Han Solo. This would only be strictly true in a world in which Josef von Sternberg directed Star Wars.

Yes, Northwest Smith is a wanted criminal and occasional smuggler; yes, Northwest Smith wears space leathers on his lean frame and a ray-gun on his hip; yes, Northwest Smith has a dangerous killing alien as a sidekick. But in the thirteen recorded Northwest Smith stories by C.L. Moore (all collected for the first time in this excellent Planet Stories omnibus), we only see the inside of one spaceship — and Smith is a passenger, not the pilot.

No, Smith may inhabit a solar system of Martian canals and Venusian swamps, but his adventures are less SF than a kind of lush, operatically colored noir. (Dario Argento instead of Sternberg?) As in noir, Smith can depend on nothing but his instincts to guide him: “a bed-rock of savage strength” is his real gift, an unbreakable will to survive as an individual that saves him time and again. He’s more Man With No Name than he is Han Solo. The world is strange, the city unfriendly (Smith spends a lot of time in various wretched hives of scum and villainy on Mars and Venus), and the girl … well, the girl is always the heart of the problem.

Moore delights in entrapping Smith with a luscious femme fatale — often, as in the vampire tale “Shambleau,” or the Circe story “Yvala,” or the perhaps self-explanatory “Werewoman,” literally so — and describing the ensuing temptations in hues of rich, iridescent Technicolor all the more vivid for being entirely verbal. This opalescent fog of language is the best thing about the stories; Moore reads like Clark Ashton Smith on Cialis. As in noir, Smith ends the tale bereft of girl, and usually bereft of answers as well.

What answers we do get are of the unnatural variety; Moore sold these stories to Weird Tales, not to Astounding Stories, after all. Smith’s solar system holds pre-human temples and the tombs of dead gods, energy beings from other dimensions and a lost race of Moon-men in the wastelands of Tibet. (Though Smith meets the Moon-man in New York City.) The dangers Smith faces are supernatural, not scientifictional, dangers; a ghost in a Venusian ruin, not a radiation leak or a meteor puncture. The reason to follow Northwest Smith is not to explore, but to experience. And only that infinitely seductive mistress of words, C.L. Moore, can offer those experiences to us.

Review by Kenneth Hite

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Chicago’s Wildclaw Theatre company takes, as its mission, the restoration of horror to its rightful place on the stage. Its previous productions include theatrical adaptations of Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” showing a solid grounding in the classics. Their newest show is the Midwest premiere of Scott T. Barsotti’s The Revenants, a drama of love and zombies.

Without spoilering anything, I can say that the play is a thoroughly successful melding of the relationship drama and the zombie apocalypse; neither component was bolted on after the fact, and each provides vital momentum and plot turns for the other. WildClaw’sWitch House also concerned apocalypse, though interestingly a less personal — and more cataclysmic — one than Lovecraft’s story. It, also, featured a relationship drama, although one cast as a parallel investigation; a despairing Thin Man story wherein Nick and Nora meet only for the catastrophe.

The Revenants, by contrast, is all about contact — enforced contact. Gary and Karen, two survivors of a zombie apocalypse, are hiding out in a basement with Gary’s wife Molly and Karen’s husband Joe — both of whom are zombies. (They’re essentially chained up, like the experimental subject in Day of the Dead. And while I’m inside these parentheses — isn’t it strange that we now have an essentially universal understanding of a zombie apocalypse? You still can’t make a vampire movie without setting it up, but “zombie apocalypse” is apparently like “country house murder” or “Thanksgiving dinner.” It’s a stock event you set drama against, not drama itself any more.) Joe and Gary are long-time best friends, and Karen believes that Joe is “alive somewhere in there.” Karen’s feelings toward Molly are far more ambivalent, which introduces only the first unbalanced moment in the steadily collapsing “bottle drama” gyre that has marked almost all worthwhile zombie drama since Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The zombified (but how fully?) Molly and Joe provide chorus and counterpoint to Gary and Karen’s increasing stress and tension, as we uncover more of their past and witness their eroding present. This isn’t etiolated Harold Pinter, though; Revenants is horror all the way — especially if the notion of missing, broken, or mutilated love is horrific. Or the notion of love, like zombification, destroying your personality, your history, your free will …

The WildClaw team has two great advantages over other similar off-off-Loop companies. The first is their willingness to take risks — presenting horror on stage among them. The second is their technical nous; WildClaw reliably punches well above its weight in lighting, set design, sound, makeup, blood work, and (in this play) fight choreography. Revenants displays both those advantages to, er, great advantage. They don’t stint the acting, either.

The cast is also good, with the standout being Jenny Strubin’s Karen. Brian Amidei is probably the best actor on stage (based on his Witch House chops) but the role of Joe calls for little more than presence, alternately menacing and brutalized. Oh well, nobody takes a part as a zombie for the dialogue. That said, the zombie “dialogue” is always good — menacing gutturals, contrapuntal groans and growls, and just the tiniest torturous hints of humanity. The director, Anne Adams, balances the zombies (mostly in the background) and the survivors (mostly in the foreground) deftly — there’s always something going on, and nothing is ever blocked or walked over. There’s even a gun, which gets used. Chekhov would approve, as would George Romero.

In other words — go see it; it’s playing through May 24. See it with someone you’d shoot through the brain, or chain up in the garage, should it come to that.

Review by Kenneth Hite

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