Review - The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files)
Charles Stross
Orbit, 30 October 2018
HB, 454pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book (thanks Nazia!)

Stross's Laundry Files are now, I think, his most numerous and long lasting series, running to eight or nine novels (with The Labyrinth Index) and several novellas and short stories (depending how you count the stories in The Atrocity Archives, the first book).

While always having at its centre The Laundry itself, the UK's occult service ("occult secret service" would be a tautology, no?) which is lovingly portrayed with all its bureaucratic quirks and terrors, the books really come into their own in disassembling and rebuilding the Lovecraft mythos to fit a world of coders, geeks and cubicles. Stross has lots of fun with this (and with geek culture more generally) but there's no disguising the cosmic horror that increasingly hangs over these books.

As The Labyrinth Index opens with a particularly chilling execution scene, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is active and the Laundry has fallen, with the Black Pharaoh, N'yar Lat-Hotep, assuming power as the UK's Prime Minister. The New Management is in charge, the lesser of two evils, apparently. Well, at least it's a change from the previous Government, and should liven things up? They can't really be that bad?

I mean, things can't get any worse, can they?

Can they...?

I really take my hat off to the way Stross has followed through the logic of power politics to root his Lovecraftian singularity in a firmly credible, modern day setting. The world of the Laundry Files is not all crazed cultists in the woods but well-financed televangelists, crooked bankers and, of course, venal politicians. Very much like our own. And over the series the cast of characters in these books has expanded to reflect this, Stross introducing not only new human members of the Laundry staff but elves, vampires and superheroes too, all of it plausibly done with explanations for everything rooted in the idea that computation is magic.

In The Labyrinth Index, the Prime Minister commands His servants to investigate why the US President has gone missing. A complex, if desperate plan is devised to infiltrate the United States (with the US equivalent of the Laundry referred to as the Nazgûl, the line "One does not simply walk into Mordor" can be deployed unironically...) The activity here is underpinned by the usual meticulous degree of research, and it could, you know, all perfectly well work, given the premise of computational demonology.

Central to all this is Mhairi, the PHANG who did actually appear in The Atrocity Archives but then faded from sight for a while. She has the central role in this book, as Baroness Karnstein, the new PM's fixer but is supported by, for the first time, pretty much everyone we've met so far (including an elven vampire necromancer who's on the autistic spectrum. Great to meet you, Marisol!) In fact almost the only regular characters we see little of are Bob, who has new responsibilities as avatar of the Eater of Souls, and Mo. Hopefully they'll be back again soon but in the meantime it's good to see this story told through other eyes. Mhairi is an engaging lead, concealing a fair amount of her history from us but also clearly wracked by shock and guilt that she has to consume blood to live.

Guilt is fairly widespread in fact as the very act of submitting to N'yar Lat-Hotel takes its toll, even if He is a relatively sparing Lord. In the USA the Black Chamber have taken a different tack, and for once it's hard to argue that our friends in the Laundry are on firmer moral ground, even if the entity they deal with seems less far reaching in His evil. All choices are bad, everything leads to ruin, seems to be the subtext.

But while the world merrily rattles off to Hell in its accelerating handcart, we can still have some fun - the bone violin plays a good jig - and The Labyrinth Index serves plenty of that up, whether you're into a solid, clever plot, sly humour with a point (there's a running gag about the problems in the US - when people go to sleep, they forget who the President is, allowing his enemies to write him out of reality. So there are plenty of allusions to those who know what's going as being "awake"... but not everyone wants to be awake...) or just excellent storytelling.

At the same time, the book moves us forward into Stross's Apocalypse. The tipping point in this universe was reached, I think, a couple of books ago, but so far it hasn't been clear what exact form the catastrophe might take. Now things seem to be getting clearer, and the pace picking up.

In short this series shows no sign of tailing off, rather it seems to be getting stronger and stronger. I really can't wait to see what Stross serves up next.

Review - The Ballad of Black Tom

Image from http://us.macmillan.com/

The Ballad of Black Tom
Victor Lavalle
Tor, February 2016
PB, 151pp
Source: Bought

HP Lovecraft is an author who fascinates and divides, who has had an enduring impact on popular culture yet also repels.

I first read Lovecraft in the mid 80s. I think that his books may have been on a reading list my English teacher handed round when I was about 14, although I'm not sure. I do remember that the three volume paperback version of his complete works I have had to be specially ordered, so I didn't just come across them in a bookshop. It seems curiously appropriate that it's (now) a yellowing, cheap edition which probably wouldn't bear rereading: the pages would most likely crumble away if exposed to sunlight... I far prefer this to any of the handsome, acid free versions now available with erudite introductions and extensive footnotes.

When I first read these stories I had a thrill of recognition. I realised that I'd seen some of them before, in horror/ ghost anthologies. And the atmosphere of others was familiar from TV: the crazed cultists in the woods summoning up a nameless of horror from outside time were the staples of series like Doctor Who or Sapphire and Steel. So it was clear that they were part of the DNA of popular horror, acknowledged or not.

There are though problems with the stories and with their writer which I didn't see at the time. I couldn't read them now without seeing the racism which lies beneath the surface of many: Lovecraft's figure, until recently used for the World Fantasy Award, has now been retired

But the stories remain, and they influence, and they prompt reactions. Some of those reactions come in the form of reworkings, new readings and challenges, which seem especially thick on the ground right now. I reviewed one of these a couple of days ago and The Ballad of Black Tom is another. It's a short book, at 150 pages (but that's something it has in common with many of the originals).

Set in the 1920s, Ballad follows Charles Thomas Tester, a young Black man living in New York who hustles for a living to support himself and his elderly father. Times are hard but Thomas gets by: outside the story he's clearly found a means to occult knowledge - we first see him taking a trip to deliver a book to a mysterious woman who is clearly a devotee of those arts. Where he got it, and how, we never learn - but he knows how to handle such things.

But supernatural horror isn't the only kind here. Tester's life is plagued by casual and not-so-casual racism: to be seen heading the wrong way on the subway train is enough to prompt questions from the whites, and a cop searching his pockets feels empowered to pinch any money he finds as "evidence". Later in the story we see just how cheap Black lives are, in an echo of recent murders (and Lavalle uses the term: murder, as that's what it is).

These experiences build and build through the book alongside Tester's experience of the weird, largely through encounters with Robert Suydam, an elderly white man whose family want him declared insane (they're worried he'll spend their inheritance). Cavorting with the likes of Tester must be a sign of such insanity, surely?

But when we learn what Suydam really wants, we might begin to agree that no, his grip on reality actually is rather precarious. Tester agrees, and might have turned his back on Sutdam, if it wasn't for one terrible event...

This book impresses on so many levels. It delivers all that (neo) Lovecraft should: the cultist, the meddling, the awful reality behind the appearance of the world, pulpy goings on in the backstreets (rather than the backwoods, here) and hints at forbidden, blasphemous knowledge. Yet it manages to be very modern too, despite its setting: the racism here is exposed as a thing done to the characters by their setting rather than being a key to the author's own mind. That frees the story to take a leap of imagination and explore what the oppressed might make of such a hidden reality, how they might choose to turn it against their tormentors. (And there's a cameo of Lovecraft himself that handily feeds back as almost a sort of origin narrative for his whole mythos - which is appropriate given that this whole story riffs off one of Lovecraft's own).

That's a lot to get into 150 pages but Lavelle manages it adroitly, in a story that flies along and demands to be read in a single sitting - and which has greater depth and resonance than any of the originals.

(For a more detailed analysis of both this book and Cassandra Khaw's Hammers on Bone, another take on neo-Lovecraftiana, see this fascinating essay on The Middle Shelf. (As an essay, it needs to reveal a bit more of the plot(s) than a review so you should read the books first).

Review - Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Image from www.harpercollins.com

Lovecraft Country
Matt Ruff
US: Harper, 2016
UK: Picador, 25 January 2018
HB, 372pp
Source: Bought

This book could be regarded as a series of interlinked short stories/ novellas, or as a longer narrative in chapters. The difference isn't perhaps very important but the choice of form does explicitly emulate the way the Lovecraft mythos was constructed - as does the content: As Atticus, George, Montrose and their family go live their lives and go about their business they encounter the same looming theme of ancient evil from beyond time as Lovecraft's protagonists.

It's in the "daily lives" though that the differences start to arrive. There is a counterpoint theme, also of ancient evil but a much less alien, more recognisable and, yes, more frightening evil: racism. Specifically, racism in the United States in the mid twentieth century. Atticus, George, Montrose, Ruby, Hippolyta, Horace and the other central characters in this book are black. The story(ies) are told from their point of view: when a character appears who's white, we're told that: the issue of whether or not they're a particularly hostile, dangerous white is never far away, whether implicitly or explicitly; daily life is an endless matter of calculating safety and danger; the family history is full of the fruits of slavery, and everyone is living with its consequences.

The very chapter (or story) headings, for the most part, reflect this, giving accounts of pogroms or escapes, murders, legally sanctioned discrimination (for example, restrictive covenants preventing property sales to black people) and other horrors.

And these are true horrors. Towards the end of the book, we read this account:

'We were on the grass in front of someone's house. The people inside heard me yelling and the porch lights came on. I saw my father had been shot in the side and there was blood coming out of his mouth. He has this look on his face. Horror. Horror at the universe. I was too young to understand it. I thought he was afraid because he was dying, but that wasn't it at all. It wasn't until I had a son of my own - a son who wouldn't listen - that I understood what he felt. 

He wasn't afraid for himself. He was afraid for me. He wanted to protect me. He had: he saved my life, getting me away from that gunfight. But the night wasn't over and he knew he wasn't going to be there to see me through it. That's the horror, the most awful thing: to have a child the world wants to destroy and know that you're helpless to help him.'

If you want a real description of awful, cosmic horror, isn't that it? The burbling, sanity blasting Lovecraftian things-from-beyond-time really come down to this: powers that will come and destroy those you love. Powers that would brush you aside like a gnat. But we don't have to wait till for an alignment in the heavens for these to manifest - they are here and around us already.

In this book, we see relatively little of the classic horror tropes - and those we do see have generally been summoned or conjured by white cultists in their white robes. We see far more casual prejudice, malice, hatred - the sort of hatred that will shoot a father, burn his son, rob and lie. The Turners, the Dandridges, the Berrys aren't surprised when these powerful white men (they are mostly men) grasp magical power too, just as they hold sway in day to day life. It's only to be expected, and all part of the real horror.

The reader soon learns to beware of every random encounter with a figure of (white) authority. These can easily end up with the protagonist dead, arrested, fired, or driven away. Hence those endless calculations of risk and options: hence the book which George publishes, The Safe Negro Travel Guide, which gives advice on where to go and where to avoid, which restaurants will serve his readers, where one can stop to use the toilet even. It's a book that has to be constantly updated.

In a world where this is the mundane reality, is there really much additional horror from a thing with many tentacles that lives beyond the stars?

I feel that Ruff has brought off a brilliant conjunction here - the stars must be right! - between reality and fantasy horror and moreover to do so he's repurposed writings from an author who is - as Montrose points out early on - deeply problematic in his racial views, views that also seeped into his works. I would say it turns Lovecraft's writing on its head, but it's more a drawing out of what is already there to make them, in effect, challenge themselves.

I realise all the foregoing may make this book sound like the driest of  polemics, but it's really not. The stories explore and in some cases parody or reconstruct a variety of genres from outright horror to fantasy and even Golden Age SF. They are peopled by a gallery of characters - the whites who mess up the lives of Ruff's protagonists aren't, for the most part, cardboard racists (a few are). We have a shrewd magician who sees the advantage of treating well those who are, in an ironic twist, his distant relatives, descended from a fleeing slave of his family. There is an irate ghost who comes to an accommodation with the new occupants of his house, to everyone's advantage - while the (living) neighbours are still (literally) throwing shit at the house. It's a complex world where there are opportunities as well as risks, but, unsurprisingly, the dice are loaded against you (if you're black).

The book also has moments of great humour, particularly in the stories that involve Ruby who has some truly strange experiences that give her, perhaps, a perspective not available to the other characters, alongside the terror. But it ends on an ironic and - in light of recent events - rather sad note, quoting from the 1955 edition of George's Guide which looks forward to '...the time, not far off now, when all travellers are treated as equals'.

We still wait for that time. May it be with us soon.

For more information on the book see here.