The Unholy City - Charles G Finney

Sometimes you stumble on something that's completely out of the blue. This 1976 paperback with the hideous and far too literal cover proclaims The Unholy City (1937) "a masterpiece of weird adventure." Well it's certainly not an adventure, it's definitely weird, and it might well be a masterpiece.


Charles G Finney (1905-1984) was the great-grandson of an identically-named evangelist and prolific writer (so be careful if you put the name into a search engine). His first novel, The Circus of  Dr Lao (1935) was deemed the most original book of the year in the National Book Awards. It was later turned into a partly-animated movie (The 7 Faces of Dr Lao) by George Pal. Tony Randall - later famous as  Felix in The Odd Couple - apparently supplies all seven faces. I really must get a copy of book and film.


The Unholy City is partly a continuation in that our narrator, whom we eventually learn is called Captain Butch Malahide, comes from Abalone, the Arizona town visited by Dr Lao's circus. He is taking a world tour by airship but the airship crashes, leaving Malahide the only survivor. He scoops up all the money he can find from his late fellow passengers (a large amount of drachmas, though pointedly not the Greek variety) and sets out for the nearest city. On the way he encounters Vicq Ruiz, who convinces Malahide to accompany him to the city of Heilar-way where they will enjoy a bacchanal to celebrate the fact that Ruiz will die very soon. He woke this very morning with a presentiment to that effect.


Before they get to the city they encounter the Chiam Mings, who own the monster on the cover. Malahide and Ruiz are exposed to the beast, but Malahide has a pistol and shoots it. End of adventure.


The remainder of this very short (120 page) book is the bacchanal. The twosome drink prodigious amounts of szelack, travel hundreds of miles up and down the Calle Grande in supercharged taxis, watch a black citizen get railroaded in court, get interviewed by the Scavenging Scribe of the Tandstikkerzeutung newspaper, pay off Ruiz's debts with Malahide's drachmas, pick up a couple of women (Mrs Schmale and Mrs Schwackhammer), eat several meals of chops and green onions, get into fights, watch an experimental play, and are taken for members of three groups of insurgents (the elderly, the taxpayers and the unemployed) who have separately decided to rise up together against the repressive government of Heilar-way such as it is.


Throughout the day they hear and read news reports of a giant tiger terrorising the suburbs.


This is not fantasy literature, it is fantastical. In a sense it is a cock-eyed Pilgrim's Progress. The relationship between Malahide and Ruiz is the inverse of that between Don Quixote and Sancha Panza; Ruiz spouts high-flown chivalric nonsense about honour which the monosyllabic Malahide apathetically accepts. The nearest parallel I could think of was Nathanael West who was writing his slim satires at the same time as Finney. The language is deliberately archaic ("By gad, sir!"), the shenanigans bordering on slapstick. Before fighting a couple of roughs who are seeking to steal their lady-friends, Ruiz has to hand Malahide his dentures and spectacles and enlist his help to adjust his surgical support.  The roughs, meanwhile, are given a thorough beating by the slim redheaded girl cashier with the huge grin. There is also surrealism: Malahide becomes obsessed with the spectral figure of Frances Shepherd, disgraced daughter of the notorious bank president, whom he bumps into all across town, finally getting close and personal in the zoo recently vacated by the rampaging tiger.


At its heart - the Germanic names give it away - The Unholy City is a scathing satire of the rise of fascism, also lampooned by Sinclair Lewis in It Can't Happen Here (1935). You see the reports about the marauding tiger and you instantly conclude Fake News! Nobody reliable has actually seen it, although there are pawprints and savaged corpses. It is a perfect gem of its period. I would add 'and its genre' but what is its genre? Is it, perhaps, unique? Whichever, I loved it.

The Lurking Fear - H P Lovecraft

This Wordsworth collection concentrates on the non-Cthulhu. non-Arkham stories. The main preoccupation here is the Gothic, specifically inbreeding and ancient bloodlines tainted. The introduction by Matthew J Elliott is useful and the last entry is Lovecraft's own insights into his craft .Notes on Writing Weird Fiction'.


As for the stories themselves, some are unfinished or abandoned drafts, included for the completists. But there are also classics like 'The Music of Erich Zann', 'Beyond the Walls of Sleep', 'The Beast in the Cave' and, my favourite, 'The Rats in the Walls'. Overall, though, you wouldn't want this collection to be your first acquaintance with Lovecraft. There are many better and more typical collections, of which I have quite a few.

The Wolves of London - Mark Morris

I had not come across Mark Morris before spotting this, the first part of his Obsidian Heart trilogy, in my local library.  I am already on the lookout for more.

Wolves is a horror/fantasy adventure with the added bonus (so often missed) of an engaging protagonist, Alex Locke, goalbird turned psychology lecturer, with something worthwhile at risk - he wanders from the straight and narrow because his eldest daughter's boyfriend is in bother, and gets stuck there when his younger daughter is kidnapped.  The writing style is lively but nowhere near so lively as Morris's imagination.  The surprises and twists keep on coming and kept me entertained to the very end.

Being a trilogy, the end is not conclusive and I admit I would have preferred some loose ends to be resolved.  I expect I shall just have to pick up Book Two, The Society of Blood, to satisfy my curiosity,

By the way, the artwork on the cover, by Amazing15.com, is just superb.

The House on the Borderland - William Hope Hodgson

Mr Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality.  Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connexion with regions or buildings

Thus said H P Lovecraft in his rolling survey of the form, "Supernatural Horror in Literature", written between 1925 and 1934.

Well the object here is very much the building, and what happens there is abnormal to the ultimate degree.  Those who know Hodgson only for the Carnacki stories or his innumerable tales of the Sargasso, are missing out.  Borderland prefigures his final novel, The Night Land, which even Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith felt 'went a bit too far'.  It might have been written in 1907 (see 'the editor's' introduction) but in many ways it could easily have come from the acid-ridden 1960s.

It starts traditionally enough.  Two Victorian chaps take a holiday in the far West of Ireland.  There they stumble upon the ruined, abandoned house, perched precariously on an unstable rock platform over a huge bottomless abyss.  In the rubble inside the house they find a damaged manuscript written by the last owner, a nameless recluse.  We do not know when the manuscript was written or when the house was abandoned, and very soon the issue of time becomes irrelevant.

The recluse describes how he was sitting in his study late one night when he felt himself being borne up and away by invisible forces, into space and out of the solar system.  In another part of the galaxy he visits a planet where he finds a massive replica of his house hewn out of green stone, standing on the border of the Silence.  He wakes back in his study and finds that nothing has changed.  Or has it?

Part of his garden is carried away in a landslip.  The pit begins to form.  Creatures emerge and attack the house, which the recluse now realises stands on the border between dimensions.

A good third of the book is taken up with a second out-of-body experience in which he seems to live forever, so long that he sees and survives the death of the sun itself.  He seems to wake, but---

Unique for its day and very much a precursor of modern visionary sci fi, this book essentially defines the term 'fantastic fiction'.  A must-read for any student of the genre.

And what, for the record, did Lovecraft think of The House on the Borderland?  Why, this---

The House on the Borderland (1908) - perhaps the greatest of all Mr Hodgson's works - tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms the focus for hideous other-world forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below.  The wanderings of the narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature.  And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery.  But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.

I'd quibble with the last sentence - Lovecraft, understandably, had no knowledge of Hodgson's love life, which I see mirrored in the recluse's reunion with his lost love in the second vision - but otherwise, I think he pretty much covers all the bases.  And I'd forgive him almost anything in return for the word kalpas, albeit Lovecraft borrows it from Hodgson's book.