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And having a hell of a time keeping one eye on the skyline
Oh, right, and I read the trade paperback of Alan Moore's Neonomicon (2010), which did not impress me. It wasn't the rape scenes, although there is a substantial duration of them (the book opened to one when I picked it up). It was the fact that if I want Lovecraftian body horror—if I want sex with Deep Ones, unimaginable, mind-breaking violation, congress with things that are nothing so comprehensible as callous human predators and that leave their object waiting coolly for nothing more than the hastening obliteration of a world which allows these and so many other atrocities to occur—I can pick up any of a dozen issues of Sirenia Digest and get it done better. I'm not being shown anything I haven't thought of. Ditto the sex cult whose ultimate goal is the birth of the apocalypse, because I have seen horror films made in the '70's. If there was some kind of meta-commentary going on—an indictment of Lovecraft fandom, the reduction of women in horror to their sexual physiology—I missed it. Mostly I was left wanting to read some Caitlín R. Kiernan or Gemma Files. Or e-mail Paula Guran and ask her to edit, for real, that anthology of weird erotica that was batted around after the panel at Readercon 2012. The point here is not a-ha! I am too edgy for Alan Moore!; I don't have time for that kind of nail-buffing weirdo pride any more than I think I should get a British history pat on the back because I liked George VI before The King's Speech (2010). It was just the blank, slightly nonplussed feeling of picking up something acclaimed and putting it down in confirmed knowledge of the fact that there is better cosmicist fishsex in this world.
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Sigh. Moore is a writer who could and should have done that particular direction of deconstruction well and I am sad.
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It was a Rent Party Comic: "Kevin and I found that we were having some hiccups in our payments, after storming out of DC. Kevin and I found that we were having some hiccups in our payments, after storming out of DC. I had a tax bill coming up, and I needed some money quickly. So I happened to be talking to William from Avatar, and he suggested that he could provide some if I was up for doing a four-part series, so I did." Which actually feels like it explains a lot. Neonomicon is a sequel to The Courtyard, but it picks up almost nothing from the earlier comic except for the druggy Goth setting of Club Zothique and mysterious Johnny Carcosa in his mask of yellow silk, the whole literary subculture conspiracy angle of which pretty much falls by the wayside when the Dagon sex cult comes onstage. And it is doing exactly what I thought: here's violent sexuality! here's virulent racism! Lovecraft hoped you wouldn't notice! Be upset! Which just, seriously, argh.
Moore is a writer who could and should have done that particular direction of deconstruction well and I am sad.
He's working now on a full-length sequel/prequel called Providence which sounds much more promising. It reminds him of writing Swamp Thing and From Hell and the idea of using Lovecraft's preoccupations and anxieties as a lens for American society in 1919 is interesting—I would not have said that I considered Lovecraft mainstream enough for that kind of metonymy to work, but I'll read it just to see what connections Moore is making. It will just have to be a masterpiece to convince me that Neonomicon, as opposed to anything else Alan Moore could have written to pay his bills in 2010, was necessary.