Journalstone Publishing 2023
Edited by Aaron J. French
Stories by T. Kingfisher, Ruthanna Emrys, Adam L. G. Nevill, Kaaron Warren, Brian Evenson, Donald Tyson, Richard Thomas, Richard Gavin, Matthew Cheney, Erica Ruppert, Jamieson Ridenhour, Maxwell I. Gold, Lena Ng, Nathan Carson, Samuel Marzioli, Lauri Taneli Lassila, Akis Linardos, and R. B. Payne.
My previous review of an Aaron J. French / Journalstone collection: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/12/25/the-demons-of-king-solomon/
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Pleased to receive this collection especially because Azathoth is so strangely important to my only novel: NEMONYMOUS NIGHT – 2011 Chômu Press, now out of print but soon to be republished by Eibonvale Press.
When I read this Journalstone book, my real-time thoughts will appear in the comment stream below….
ORDO AB CHAO: TOWARD THAT ENDLESSNESS by Maxwell Ian Gold
A short work showing that the power of words can conjure up Azathoth – even better than the puny collage here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/5437-2/ !
I still maintain that Stephen King was also describing AZATHOTH at the end of his novel FAIRY TALE as I have already claimed in my ‘review’ of it here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/07/16/fairy-tale-stephen-king/
It seems somehow remarkable that Azathoth’s other name is N_______ (never given in full) and that Nemonymous Night will be re-published by EIBONvale Press!
AGENT OF CHAOS by T. Kingfisher
“The gods of the deep know the names of every ship, and if you change the name, they no longer know it. Then it’s an intruder on the sea.”
An ex-naval (ex-navel?) woman, with the same age as me, 75, has a thing about ‘names’ — as I once did with Nemonymous during the Noughties — and mischievously she calls her kitten an ‘agent of chaos’. She is visited by her niece who watches the Aunt’s kitten playing with the knitting wool in such a way that I can no longer tantalisingly name or categorise this story mainly because the strands of wool — like threads in an arcane plot, an ocean or words spilling from one nugget of time — subsume me with this book’s eponymous god that is born from the story’s maw of innocence within mathematical criss-crossings of wool. It sort of reminded me of what is paralleled by Nemonymous Night! (I promise I won’t mention in this review the name of that notorious no-known novel again! Sorry.)
EXPATRIATE by Jamieson Ridenhour
A well-written film-noir atmosphere in Copenhagen and its jazz clubs, where strangers meet, and we must infer the god Azathoth from the music evolved, I guess, beyond what HPL describes as ‘the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes’ in the DREAM-QUEST TO UNKNOWN KADATH novella wherein this god first appeared in fiction, indeed evolved into something far more cerebral or celestial in this Ridenhour work.
If this story had been printed in another book, who knows what I would have said about it!
(I reviewed KADATH in 2014 here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/the-dream-quest-of-unknown-kadath/)
…AND PEER ALOFT TO GLIMPSE SOME FRAGMENT by Ruthanna Emrys
“In these scraps they find beauty that transcends pattern, and pattern that transcends beauty. The background radiation of existence makes music.”
For me, a most inspiring prose-poem extended to full story length with alternations of modern conversation by social media and two loving Jewish boy students of Miskatonic in the past. I seek its gestalt. Indeed, it is about the search for gestalt as my real-time reviewing claims to seek, here with violins and flutes in tune with the previous story and dusty bookshelves in contrast to the social media arguments. And a cosmic entity somehow emerges in my mind, triggered by the word Alhazred and my own triggering from AI patterns to counter us self-seeking and world-destructive humans, or collude with us to save us all, the AIs included? I brainstorm, with hopeful wisdom.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE by Brian Evenson
“Indeed, you could not resist: here you are.”
I have some resemblances and none to the ‘you’ depicted here, but I won’t tell you which is which. Alongside this ‘you’, that may be more like you than me, is the most powerful depiction of the blind idiot god and chaos I think I have ever read, especially in its lateral context around our own times, our own climate change, our own resistance to chaos. Surely worth getting this book for this work alone, if it were not worth getting it for others, too.
My previous reviews of this author’s fiction : https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-evenson/
and the ‘Brian Evenson’ art collage by you others that can make a similar difference: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/04/11/brian-evenson/
THE RECREATIONIST by Kaaron Warren
“the scabs on her elbow”
Seen through characterisations – of a woman and her lover with many arms Ash Grey, Creativity is housed as the eponymous art-commune building of which she is overseer but it seems to be a cover-joint for our Azathoth to be fed our daemon muses or ‘ghosts’, whereby ‘chaos is good’, and pan flutes an accompaniment. Either a powerful satire on the arty world or as I suspect, something far deeper and darker. Taking from me this very ability that you read for creative reviewing and turning it into cardinal chaos! Gestalt to ghost to guess what.
“chewed, from the elbow”
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My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/kaaron-warren/
and the ‘Kaaron Warren’ collage as controlled by Aizathoth: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/05/03/kaaron-warren/
THE BLIND GOD’S GAME by Matthew Cheney
“There is a lot of chaos swirling around us right now.”
finger lakes, fingers swollen, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, chewing on her fingernails, fingers were all soft stubs, a bone flute …
A well-written but fraught portrait of individuals in various relationships, uncle, niece, siblings, lovers, inter-generations, alcohol, drugs, his, her and a singular their, in times whence positive and negative are a single force, religion versus religion, involving a Thoth tarot deck … and including the search by the story’s own very old man for ‘my’ gestalt that is now undermined…
“I want to sort of hold onto it all in my mind and not ruin it with words.”
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/total-tta/#comment-3222 (I feel we may now have reached the nub of ToTAl, not exactly with the parallel regrouping of parents and child, but with our race’s darkest optimum or brightest pessimum:)
IN THE GROVE by Erica Ruppert
“I have lost the connections.”
I have scried this Roman story as a front for a holy or unholy text. One to be unearthed. From the ‘conflation’ of goddesses and gods into blurred monuments, to the Diana myth and the Azathoth mythos, with man as antlered beast, hearing distant flutes, indeed conflation as apotheosis, all seen via the front of a story told about a couple with a flagging marriage on holiday in Italy. Some of the other words in the text that stood out and actually became conflated with me as well as for me are … “Everything, inchoate. Worse than nothing. Too much. More than too much. […] …we call the absence a god. […] …anemone’s arms, moving on some cosmic tide.” — ‘Anemone’ is one of very few words with a configuration of letters containing ‘nemo’. The reader as the story’s own featured ‘King of Nemi’? A mnemonic after Lake Nemi with Roman ruins and a dead volcano.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/erica-ruppert/
and the ‘Erica Ruppert’ shifting collage here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2023/05/13/erica-ruppert/
CHURCH OF THE VOID by Donald Tyson
“shared unbelief having its own momentum”
A traditional narrative — from an empty chair syndrome to an empty universe. Plainly deep. A text that tantalisingly seems to vanish as you read it.
Ironically, from Blake above to a quote I just found from a writer whose name is an anagram of ‘void’:
“All things change, nothing is extinguished. There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.”
— Ovid
UPON AN IRON BED, UNDER THE EYES OF CHAOS by Richard Gavin
“Usually the void remains just that: a void.”
Following the previous story, the word ‘usually’ takes on a new significance, as we follow Maxine’s investigation into a woman spiritualist, then becoming involved in the latter’s Sapphic approaches and deeply into her “Mixed mediumship is a kind of guerilla spiritualism.” A dream island or a real one with six stone sentinels and a cube of iron upon which to be exposed to powers one cannot resist, with the piping sounds and implications of this book’s title. A cube has eight corners, the other six plus these two protagonists one by one? Or the iron bed’s chaos as a bicosahedron?
“A womb and a crematory working in perfect harmony.”
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My previous reviews of this author:
Omens by Richard Gavin
Primeval Wood – by Richard Gavin
Sylvan Dread – Richard Gavin
Plus a number of stories in anthologies linked from https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/richard-gavin/
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And the ‘Richard Gavin’ shifting collage here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/04/12/richard-gavin/
THE ROOT KING by Lauri Taneli Lassila
“…the tale had no single course but went on above and below itself, as well as to all sides.”
This is a very well written story of a kingdom within an inimical wilderness, the nature of kingship and what lies at its root, both disturbing and enlightening for our own times and how we build our fortresses, and also for my own only novel where Azathoth sits at the Earth’s Core with the concomitant processing purposes for humanity. Sorry, again, for that self-reference. Meanwhile, this Lassila tale is iconic and utterly compelling. It needs to be published again and again. And that statement does not derive simply from my passion of this reading moment, but it is, at root, a pervasive truth.
THE INFINITE BEAT by Nathan Carson
“Those rhythms are part of a great whole. Once you hear them all together, I think you’ll feel differently.”
This is the resisting of the eponymous god by drum gestalt of 13 drummers in unison, the ultimate tom tom tontine! Look it up.
Beyond death metal, involving a black woman mentor and a white stimming boy, and it is is compelling, characterful, pulp naive, mind-fazing, every drummer’s dream or nightmare. All good. Holy and unholy holistic.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/nathan-carson/
Hope this is not a spoiler from the next story:
THE DOOR AT 21 BIS RUE XAVIER PRIVAS by R. B. Payne
“…even the Blind Idiot God may learn compassion, empathy, wisdom.”
The first half is a compelling Parisian detective mystery, worthy of a modern Edgar Allan Poe or Robert W. Chambers, where a body is found in the Sane or a river leading to the Sane of a man who, DNA proves, was once guillotined in history but wearing a very strange wristwatch, an event that leads, for me, into an inSane cavorting with dream and experiment and sentinels of sleep maintaining Azathothian balance that quite abruptly alters the author’s own balance! — altering the author’s mind into such madness as he actually writes this story in real-time when midway through it. What is it that made him alter the course of his own currents of creativity? Or is it my own mind affected into madness while reading it!? Whatever the case it is all mighty disturbing!
“Many imagine they are awake even while they continue to sleep.”
Some reading this review will be interested to hear about a series of ghost stories I have written in the last few days breaking more than twenty years of writer’s block, an event, partially at least, triggered by reading this very anthology, all of these new stories by me being short-shorts so far, as linked from here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/new-dfl-ghost-stories-commenced-in-later-2023/
AN UNUSUAL PEDIGREE by Richard Thomas
“trying to discern a pattern in the random”
This is a most powerful honest-to-goodness (literally) horror story, portraying the baton-passing bloodline of an ongoing serial Tontine of fathers and sons in one such bloodline carrying this book’s god with flutes, drums and violins and the necessary killings, sacrifices, marriages and births needed to avoid the final subsumption by it. Whatever “the dream weavers growing tired and weary”… I woke today to praise it.
My previous review of Richard Thomas: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/the-best-horror-of-the-year-volume-eleven/#comment-17124
DUST-CLOTTED EYES by Samuel Marzioli
“…his eyes pleading with the ceiling.”
A poignant, suspenseful account of characters in a house who expect a Visitor each Midnight, each Visitot masquerading as someone missing that a particular character loved or maybe it is really a loved one, even a zombie or ghost instead? The world’s erstwhile order outside, once disguised chaos, has become chaos indeed, they opine. But, bod by bod, they succumb to temptation from each Visiitor’s emotional ploys. These temptations and the inevitable gradual depletion towards whatever Tontine prize make me expect the ending will be happiness in some glorious Heaven. I come here to tell you that your expectations are right and you are safe to read this story, especially with its characters’ interactions resonating with Beckett or Pinter, writers I admire, who tempted me further into this theatre of words and dialogue towards its upbeat finale.
THE REVELATIONS OF AZATHOTH by Lena Ng
“Inside, the ceiling of the cave reached higher than a temple.”
A Slave Girl with Necronomer markings narrates her own rite of passage, as shriven by nature and other inimical folk, this being a Dunsany-Biblical paean to Azathoth and his scouring of our burning, flooding world through, I infer, a “scowling wind” and much else that even Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith could not dream of, let alone HPL.
Azathoth as saviour, like it or not.
With vast visions upon Plato’s cave wall as well as teeming outside that cave, Silken Wyrm et al.
PRIMORDIAL JACK by Akis Linardos
“The land was spitting his own men back at him, minds muddled and zombified by the primeval poison.”
This teems with many thoughts and visions as we follow Jack leaving his ship with Alan and the rest of the crew as spear-carriers, with the conceit for me of being tied to some literally astrological power by a cosmic cord in the human back, and involving some relationship with “the immortal core” and Azathoth’s scythe or tooth, some of which rings a strange truth with the likes of me. Full of memories as a loved one’s backstory with fruit, and guilt to be assuaged, and swamps and a poisonous relic and a teardrop necklace, all eventually creating a world to be transcended towards a seemingly inevitable, idyllic but fallible humanity within it. Something here even transcends my own hopefully constructive misunderstandings about what is written here! We are not all gods, only some of us.
RESPECT YOUR ELDERS by Adam L. G. Nevill
“But as the massacres began, the strange coinciding of the slaughter with the comet transformed the latter into an augur.”
This is a significant and gruesomely effective Azathothian dystopic vision, as seen though the eyes of a quite believable man who is two years younger than me, and one year older than the cut-off point for such oldsters as us in ‘Midsommar’, a vision indeed stemming from Covid, Ukraine/Russia, Climate Change, and youthful social media’s young flashmobs, who, as a result of a cometary astrology from the stars, proceed to massacre the so-called generally charmed life of us oldster generations. I empathise with this man and his attitudes, except his being a widower and his resort to that Thai girl! The attitude to his contemporaries whom he despises, seems wholly acceptable to me, though. And while utter mayhem rolls around him, I note, as well as other things, his apparently needed attachment sporadically to “loft space”, “attic eaves”, “loft ladders”, “roof space” and “loft hatch”, thus happening to chime with my own aforementioned new series of tiny stories written in the last few days as listed and linked HERE!
And, for anyone interested, the INTRODUCTION paragraph at the start of MANSIONS OF THE ROOM, written yesterday before reading this Nevill today, is also relevant to my appreciation of what surely must be a classic worthy of this author’s canon. For example, the now new Astrology of Azathoth described in one striking paragraph that is unmissable within this Nevill, aka ‘Astrolgical Harmonics’ (as I have long called them) here with flutes and drums and also now with the added power of cause-and-effect as well as of almighty synchronicity!
“…I’d sat in safety and comfort and watched a generally dissatisfying but unthreatening world lose its shaky balance and topple backwards into history.”
“In chaos you look for patterns.”
“Danced to the barrage of fast drums and mad, near discordant piping. Idiot anthems that blinded them to reason or compassion.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/adam-nevill/ and shifting collage here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/4837-2/
A fine climax to this powerful book as a whole, whereby Azathoth becomes fully alive for perhaps the first time, as triggered by the perfect storm around us all.
A rescuing craft of horror or a craft of love, who yet knows?
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