My forthcoming novel about Lovecraft

Monday sees my new book coming out. It's a very short novel or a novella in which horror writer H. P. Lovecraft is the main character. The book, simply called Haamu ("Ghost"), with the subtitle Kertomus Hollywoodista ("A Tale of Hollywood"), is a case of alternate history: in the book, Lovecraft didn't die from cancer in 1937. After he's been miraculously cured, he decides he's had too much of horror stories in his life, sells his house and library and moves on to Hollywood where he desperately tries to break as a screenwriter. He's living in a beat-up hotel and writes pulp stories but in different genres than before (crime, romance, even mainstream stuff) and tries to keep up his letter writing, mainly with Clark Ashton Smith.

The book is fragmentary and shows us glimpses of Lovecraft trying to write and earn his living. There are also some scenes on a desolate block where Lovecraft finds a dead mole. There are also some real-life Hollywood characters, mainly other writers from B-studios, but also director Edgar G. Ulmer whom Lovecraft meets at a party. There's also Earl Peirce Jr., who's also trying to work in Hollywood and comes up with an idea he tries to sell to Lovecraft. Some of the scenes in the book are more surreal and some of them may seem like Lovecraft is hallucinating, and he's not at all times the most reliable narrator. There's no horror in the book, though, and it has no supernatural elements. It's not a genre novel.

What's the idea behind the book? The vision of Lovecraft working in Hollywood has been with me for years. I think someone suggested it almost ten years ago at the Fictionmags e-mail group where I once was an active member (still am, but not a very active one). At the time, the writer (I can't remember who it was) suggested Lovecraft might've worked in Hollywood already in the early twenties, but I decided to make this an alternate history, set in 1941. (One book that had some influence on how the novel turned out was Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, her novel on Hollywood that I read prior to starting work on Haamu.)

But there's still something I can't really explain in the book - in my own book! Doesn't art exist to make you wondrous? I'm sure many Lovecraft aficionados will tell me that my Lovecraft isn't the real Lovecraft, and I'm sure they're right. There are of course things that I decided should be according to how he was in real life, but then I also decided I don't have to act as if this was the real Lovecraft - after all, he's gone through a sickness that was supposed to kill him. His writing style has changed drastically, but that came also because I didn't want to emulate or parody Lovecraft's unique style - there are comments on this in the text. There are also subtle hints he's not really alive, as if this were a dream, but I won't give anything away.

The cover for Haamu is by Aapo Kukko, a young graphic artist. He's a very capable guy. Coming out from Turbator, Haamu has a very small print run, so be sure to grab it! Any foreign agents reading this? (Insert smiley here.)

Erica Jong: Fanny

Been working on another book on erotica and reading said stuff. I just finished Erica Jong's Fanny, a long picaresque novel on Fanny Hackabout-Jones, better known as John Cleland's Fanny Hill. This was an entertaining book, somewhat long-winded and full with anachronistic feminism, but I didn't mind. Here's a contemporaty review from the New York Times.

Age of television and reading magazines

Many years I picked up a book from the fifties called The Age of Television. I'm not sure what I was thinking I was going to do with it, but there were these somewhat fascinating diagrams of magazine reading (and reading in general) in accordance to television watching. I'm sure someone will find these of interest. The diagram that shows changes in the circulation of magazines is the most interesting one.

Help needed identifying cartoon characters

I just bought a miserable old VHS cassette with five short animated cartoons. All the five films in the bunch were without opening titles, and I could recognize only one of the cartoons (a Filmation Popeye), some others were probably Terrytoons. I'll have to check into them later, but here's a photo I took of the first one. Does anyone recognize the characters in the picture? There's also a third cat, who's a kid brother or a nephew of the two in the picture. The cats spoke English under the lousy Finnish dubbing. I'm thinking this might be something Gene Deitch cooked up with Yugoslavian animators in the mid-to-late sixties.

Wanted: railroad detectives!

Jim Doherty over at the Rara-Avis e-mail list was asking about railroad detectives in fiction. He's been able to come up with these titles, but needs more. Any suggestions?

"The Second Challenge" by MacKinlay Kantor (REAL DETECTIVE TALES AND MYSTERIES, Feb 1929)
"You Pays Your Nickel" by Cornell Woolrich (ARGOSY, 22 Aug 1936), also known as "The Phantom of the Subway"
"Ride 'Em, Mokawk" by William Rohde (SHORT STORIES, Oct 1950)
"The Girl in Car 32" by Thomas Walsh (EVENING POST, 7 Nov 1953)
"Yard Bull" by (MANHUNT, Aug 1954)
"The Ghost Station" by Carolyn Wheat (A WOMAN'S EYE, edited by Sara Paretsky)
"The Right Track" by R.T. Lawton (WOMEN'S WORLD, 26 Oct 2009)

More Finnish fantasy

Review of the first English-language collection of Jyrki Vainonen's silently surrealistic fantasy stories, out now. Recommended: Jyrki is a good writer (and a personal friend, but don't let that fool you).

Steven Torres: The Concrete Maze

As some of you may remember, I had some trouble reading some new noirish e-books - they were lacking style, substance and coherence. As I had some holiday left, I decided to try another one, as I didn't yet want to start reading work-related books. I chose The Concrete Maze by Steven Torres, and it proved to be a good choice.

It's a very realistic, almost minimalistic piece, about a 13-year old Puerto Rican girl who goes missing, and his father goes searching for her. The first person narrator is a young guy over 20, the nephew of the girl's father. His narrator's voice is somewhat melancholic in all its no-nonsense curtness. And the melancholy sure fits the novel, since it's full of grief, misery and tragedy. I was hooked by the guy's voice. This could be a vigilante novel in the style of the seventies' Death Wish clones, but even though the young guy and his uncle show courage in the course of the book, they are no heroes and some of their conduct is suspicious as they torture some of the suspects.

All this said, I must say that the book drags somewhat in the middle, when nothing new seems to be happening, and the final revelation in the climax is a bit too much. There was something in there I didn't buy. But still, The Concrete Maze comes highly recommended by me.

Here's Allan Guthrie's interview with Torres.

I read also Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty to finish my holiday reading (and to give him his due), but from now it's only work books for me.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: True Confessions (1981)

True Confessions, by Ulu Grosbard, is a rare film, at least in Finland. It's never been shown in Finnish television and it's been released only in VHS in the mid-eighties. It was released in cinemas, but I'm not sure how widely it was shown. I remember my dad liking the film a great deal.

I just bought the VHS I mentioned from a thrift store and got around to watching the film the other day. I read the John Gregory Dunne novel this is based on some years ago (here are some of my reflections), but I noticed I didn't remember much of it. The film is based loosely on the Black Dahlia case, and both the novel and the film seem to offer an explanation to the case, but in the film it was shown in a very oblique fashion, as was typical in the more artful crime films of the seventies and early eighties. Really: I had to check the Wikipedia article for the film to realize what went down in the end of the film!

That said, True Confessions is not a bad film at all. It's all been done on purpose. The lead actors, Robert Duvall and Robert DeNiro are quite good (and DeNiro is not hamming it up as usual, he plays the Catholic priest in a very subdued note), and they are packed with a nice bunch of character actors. There's a gritty realism to the police work in the film, and it also shows the shady side of politics, construction, Catholic church and prostitution linked with the police force. This is a very nuanced view of being a police in the late 1940's America.

There's not much action in the film, nor much suspense, but it's still catchy and interesting to the end - even though I didn't fully realize just what happened. Who got busted and who walked? Should probably read Dunne's novel again.

The film was scripted by Dunne himself and his wife, Joan Didion, who's probably now the better known of the duo. (And only her works have been translated in Finnish.)

More Overlooked Movies here. And damn, I only now notice that Frederik Pohl died yesterday. He sure lived a full life.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Innocents (1961)

I just saw the new haunted house film The Conjuring. I thought it was pretty good, frightening even, save for the ridiculous ending with all the Catholic Christian cliches about the Satanic evil in the world thrown in. I even wrote a review of The Conjuring saying that the film might draw a comparison with some of the classic ghost films à la The Innocents by Jack Clayton. The director of the film, James "Saw" Wan, showed remarkable restraint compared to his earlier films, and some of the scenes in The Conjuring are quite chilling.

I shouldn't've said that, since I hadn't seen The Innocents! I just watched it for the first time last night, and I must say that The Conjuring is pretty far from away from Clayton's film in restraint. In The Innocents, we are merely being shown two figures from a distance. There are no tricks James Wan is fond of, it's all in the mind. And we are never really told whether the ghosts of the film are true or whether they are imagination of the protagonist, the tutor (played by Deborah Kerr). The film might be even more scarier of that.

Beware of a slow pace! This is not your typical fast ride through nightmares all the horror films are now bound to be.

Based on a Henry James novella "Turn of the Screw". Now that I mentioned that, I might add that I finally finished the translation of H. P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" and sent the final edits to the publisher yesterday. Another one goes down!

Here's what Lovecraft writes of James's story: "In The Turn of the Screw Henry James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil servants, Peter Quint and the governess Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realise fully all the wild and devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare and mounting tide of fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which gives the novelette a permanent place in its special class." (Hey, no one said Lovecraft is easy to translate!)

More Overlooked Movies here.

Finnish fantasy free for Kindle

Jeff VanderMeer supports Finnish new weird writing giving away free e-book copies of famous Finnish fantasy writer Leena Krohn's short novel Tainaron. Check it out, it's a great book, full of wisdom, beauty and marvel. epub format also available.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Livia Reasoner: The Vampire Affair

I won this book from Livia Reasoner, James Reasoner's wife, some years ago in a blog or a Facebook contest. I got around to reading it only now, but luckily it still seems to be available as an e-book, though I believe these Silhouette books have a short shelf life.

This is the only paranormal Silhouette book Livia has written, but I don't know why this is, since The Vampire Affair is a solid book, fast-paced thriller with enough vampires, romance and erotic love. It's a clearly work of a professional. The main characters are a young and eager female journalist and a mysterious millionaire who turns out to be a vampire hunter and a bit of a vampire himself. This may sound cliched (and indeed many parts of the book are), but Reasoner writes deftly and keeps the story running. The book is quite short, so the cliches don't get in the way. In the end Livia throws some American Indian mystique in the mix, and it works, too!

The Vampire Affair could've also easily started a series, since both major characters could well play leading parts in coming books as well. Here's hoping it will happen!

More Forgotten Books here on Patti Abbott's blog.

Kevin Wignall's Dark Flag finally out

Remember Kevin Wignall's Dark Flag? I had a hand in publishing the book in Finnish translation some years back as Lipun varjo ("The Shadow of the Flag"). The book wasn't actually a success in Finland, even though it's a very good novel, and it vanished quickly. To this day, it hasn't been published in English language, but finally it's available as an e-book from Amazon. I really advise you to pick it up. This isn't one of those sloppily written and edited e-books I was talking about earlier.

(And thanks for comments on that post, I'll reconsider my stance.)

Negative reviews on e-books?

I've been reading some stuff on my Kindle, mainly stuff I've picked free from Amazon, new gritty and noirish crime fiction from both side of Atlantic. I've liked a lot some of the stuff I've acquired, for instance Juaréz Dance by Sam Hawken and Tony Black's bleak novella The Storm Without (of which I didn't do a blog post). I also liked Lawrence Block's short story "Keller on the Spot" quite a bit.

But I've recently dropped two novels by new noir writers I was reading on Kindle. The other one was sloppily written and edited, and the other one had ridiculous characters and the police work depicted in the book wasn't believable. I was going to post a review of the books, but then I got to thinking I wouldn't be doing much of a service to the writers and their publishers (the other one of the two writers has just a book out from a small publisher working actively in the neo-noir business). Then I got to thinking that as a critic that's just what I should be doing: pointing out what these writers and their publishers are not doing very well and keeping readers out of the bad or mediocre stuff, but then I got to thinking again and then I decided not to post.

What do you think? I'm really an outsider in these circles, since I'm essentially a foreigner to all American, British and Scottish writers mining this area, but then again, someone might benefit from my point of view.

The Counselor

Here's the trailer for Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy's film The Counselor, coming next October. I'm not really that keen on Scott, but this looks kinda promising.

Pulp writer Earl Peirce Jr.

Doing my first book, Pulpografia (2000), I encountered one or two Finnish translations of short stories by one Earl Peirce Jr. His name may have been written "Pierce" in the Finnish magazines. I didn't find any info on him, except that he wrote for Weird Tales and later on crime pulps, such as Detective Tales. I googled him earlier today (for a purpose I'll reveal later) and found out this post on a genealogy site. Someone has really done good work on Peirce, a really little known writer!

I put up Peirce's tentative bibliography here in my bibliography blog.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Godzilla (1998)

Roland Emmerich's reworking of the famous Japanese monster wasn't a critical success (I think it wasn't a success even commercially), but my kids just saw it and they liked it. I believe my son (who's soon to be 9 years old) loved it. He also loves the Jap movies of which he's seen five, including the original one. 

There are some moments I also happen to like ("love" might be too strong a word here): Godzilla's leap into Hudson River, the drive into Godzilla's mouth, when Godzilla fools the submarines, the sequence at Madison Square Garden with the Godzilla babies. I also like Jean Reno's hardboiled character. My son says: "The best moment is the ending." He always feels sympathy for the baddies in the film when they fall. 

More Overlooked Movies here. 

Interview with Ed Gorman

Check out this good interview with Ed Gorman at The Rap Sheet.

Steve Brewer: Bank Job

I just finished this hardboiled thriller reminiscent of Elmore Leonard's work the other day. It was the first book I read by Steve Brewer, but I liked it well enough to read more of his books later on.

Bank Job (2005) is one of those books that start rapidly, race along with a good speed and develop into a satisfying climax. Three low-life criminals are on a crime spree doing stupid things. One of them gets hit by a whiskey bottle during an attempt to rob a liquor store. The guys end up in a lonely house with an old couple living in it. The old guy of the house has a secret up his sleeve, and much action and mayhem ensue. There's plenty of violence that really hurts, and there are also some sudden twists and turns.

Brewer creates memorable characters with just few touches, a bit of dialogue, descriptions of how people move, act, keep a book in their hands. It's quite nice that the lead character is someone over 60. The young hoodlums are also depicted very nicely, they are fully human though they are quite worthless and almost evil. The plot moves on with a nice pace and slows down only in the last 20 or 30 pages. Comes highly recommended, even with the very stale front cover.

Edit: Oops! I meant to publish this on Saturday, but I accidentally pushed the Publish button and can't take it out anymore. So it's two book posts on the same day, but I don't really think anyone minds. 

Friday's Forgotten Book: Sébastien Japrisot: The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun

Still suffering from a bad back, I finished lying on a sofa the French writer Sébastien Japrisot's thriller La Dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil (1966). I had a beat-up copy I'd found somewhere cheap, and upon noticing I already have a better copy I decided to throw this away - most certainly something I wouldn't normally do.

This is a very good crime novel. I once read somewhere that if you're a male writer, don't try a woman's point of view (unless you're Cornell Woolrich). Japrisot does it and does it very well. Of course some of the stuff in the book depicting a young woman's sexual and social disorientation is dated, but they didn't overrun the reading experience. The book reminded me a bit of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, which I liked to a certain point, but I also got weary of its longevity. Not so with Japrisot's novel, as it clocks at about 250 pages. The book starts in the middle of the woman's noir nightmare of which the characters and the reader can't possibly fathom what's going on. Japrisot likes to toy with the reader's expectations and this is far more exciting and surprising than Gone Girl. Japrisot also writes in a very French style that's both hypnotic and diffuse at the same time. This is a very engaging book and although the prose isn't the most straight-forward one, you can't help but read the book in one sitting.

The book was made into a British movie in 1970 with Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed. Haven't seen it, though. Seems like there's no decent DVD on it. Here's a good blog post on the film.

More Forgotten Books coming up here.

Edit: I forgot to mention it, but I read the Finnish translation from 1967. The title means "The Woman in the Car". Guess this was clear to anyone. Crime Club (with the nice logo) was a quality paperback series from the large Finnish publishing house Otava back in the late sixties. 

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Hooked Bear (1956)

Suffering from a bad back I watched some VHS tapes with old animations in them and spotted this Disney cartoon previously unknown to me. I don't know how this has happened - the explanation is perhaps that I've seen some of the Humphrey the Bear cartoons, but forgotten all about them. Nonetheless, this was a pretty entertaining little film, directed by Jack Hannah.

 More Overlooked Films here.