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Road of Bones: Review by Ryan Tan

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Welcome to Ryan Tan’s Review of Christopher Golden’s novel Road of Bones.

In “Road of Bones”, Teig creates a documentary about the eponymous highway in Siberia. More than a thousand miles long, the Road of Bones derives its name from the forced labour used to construct it, which caused as many as six hundred thousand deaths. As a film producer, Teig has a history of failed projects and unpaid debts. He owes seven thousand dollars to his cameraman, Prentiss, who accompanies Teig to Siberia because he needs the money, and because he and Teig are close friends. They reach the town of Akhust, where wolves attack and chase them. Forced to speed along the Road of Bones, they risk crashing and becoming part of the road itself.

One of the scariest scenes occurs from the point of view of Prentiss. His guide, Kaskil, finds a stranded girl in Akhust and needs to take her to a safe place. As they move towards Prentiss’s truck, he notices something “wrong with the picture”. The vagueness of this phrase creates suspense, conjuring a “picture” of petrified humans. Like the abandoned town of Akhust, the characters are still and silent; they have become part of Akhust and may never truly escape. The word “picture” also has connotations of attractiveness, generating irony and increasing the reader’s sense of unease.

In an equally haunting scene, Prentiss embraces Teig because he thinks he is going to die. The “chill” felt by Teig shows that expressions of love have been corrupted with the implication that death is near. Love has become synonymous with surrender — the decision to let go of what life one still has. Ludmilla, an old woman who prays for the ghosts under the Road of Bones, literally experiences this coupling of love and death. As she runs out of strength and falls to the ground, she feels the ghosts “wrap around her in a beautiful embrace”. What I find more disturbing is that fear and anguish replace love because they represent a struggle for survival. Teig shivers when Prentiss hugs him, but not when Prentiss screams or curses. Even with their truck intact, the characters are not immune to the Siberian winter, which has extinguished the warmth between them.

The backstories of the characters intrigued me and I wish they had been a little more detailed. Teig feels protective of Una, the girl he finds in Akhust, because she reminds him of his dead sister, Olivia. Teig feels responsible for Olivia’s death and sees rescuing Una as a way of redeeming himself. I found it hard to understand his guilt because he only made brief statements about the circumstances of Olivia’s death, which seemed to dilute its importance. Another character, Nari, reflected on her narcissistic mother, who likewise did not make an appearance in the story. This gave me the impression that Nari’s characterisation was slightly undeveloped. Still, I loved the gulf between Nari and Teig. Despite similar histories, they distance themselves from each other, which makes me melancholic in a wistful way.

Christopher Golden’s “Road of Bones” thoroughly satisfied me with its simple prose and excellent pacing. I look forward to reading more of his works.

Road of Bones is available in The Chamber’s Bookshop. More of Ryan’s reviews can be found on The Chamber Magazine website http://www.thechambermagazine.com.

This has been a Chamber Magazine production. This review can also be found as a podcast on Spotify and on anchor.fm.

Ryan Tan Reviews “Just Like Mother” by Anne Heltzel

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Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel is available in The Chamber's bookshop.

In Anne Heltzel’s “Just Like Mother”, Maeve finds her cousin, Andrea, after two decades of being apart. Both Maeve and Andrea were orphans of the Mother Collective, an all-female cult that exclusively equated womanhood with giving birth. After the cult’s suppression, Maeve was adopted while Andrea fended for herself. This led to their separation and subsequent reunion. When Maeve loses her job as a fiction editor, she has no choice but to live with Andrea, who demands one of Maeve’s ovum as payment. Although she refuses, Andrea does not give up until she gets what she wants.

In the climax, Maeve steals the car keys of Andrea’s husband, Rob, and escapes in his car. Just before this chapter, Maeve describes a flashback in which she steals the car of the Mother Collective staff, driving against traffic and colliding with a truck. The juxtaposition of this flashback with Maeve driving in the present primes me for a similar ending, and indeed, Maeve finds herself in a hospital room in the next chapter. Considering the number of twists in the novel, the predictability of this development is a bit surprising. Even so, I find it effective because the chapter in which Maeve crashes is unusually brief, accelerating the story’s pace in a fresh and distinctive way. I also love the parallel between the shortness of the chapter and the abruptness of Maeve’s collision. This symmetry between plot and form increases my engagement with the writing.

When Maeve’s boyfriend, Tyler, expresses a desire to blindfold her while they have sex, she agrees, describing her response as “Pavlovian”. She downplays her abstract, “intellectual” desire for gentle sex while validating her “primal” need for punishment. There is cruel irony in the way she recognises the pull of the blindfold but cannot resist it. The inevitability of her fate is referenced in an earlier scene, in which she places a doll on a chair in her bedroom so it can “preside over her sleep”. This image evokes Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, whose button-eyed doll watches her day and night. Just as Coraline cannot escape the Other Mother’s apartment, Maeve repeatedly finds herself back at Andrea’s house, no matter how many times she leaves. Both Maeve and Coraline are trapped by a “Mother” who is anything but.

Many of the characters die offscreen, which is unsettling because we don’t know how they die. Even when Maeve learns about the deaths of her boyfriends, their corpses remain invisible, insulating her from a shock that might have alerted her to Andrea’s schemes. The subtlety of these deaths accentuates the violence that Maeve does see. “Just Like Mother” combines unexpected twists with graphic scenes of brutality, inducing dread as well as a more explicit terror.

Ryan Tan studies English Literature at the National University of Singapore. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, Grimdark, Bone Parade, Bristol Noir, and The 13 Days of Christmas.

Just Like Mother is available in The Chamber’s bookshop.

If you like this review, you might like to read more of Ryan’s reviews in The Chamber’s Reviews Department.

Ryan Tan Reviews “Hide” by Kiersten White

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Hide by Kiersten White reviewed by Ryan Tan

In Kiersten White’s Hide, fourteen people play hide-and-seek in an unused amusement park for a prize of fifty thousand dollars. The players are given thirty minutes to find a hiding spot, where they must remain until dusk. The first two players to be found are eliminated. The rest return to a designated area in the park, where they camp overnight before resuming the next day. Although the novel rotates between different points-of-view, we experience most of the story through Mack, who is the first character introduced.

On the second night of the game, the players gather around a campfire. One of them, Jaden, recites the disturbing backstory of Mack, whom he remembers reading about in the news. Jaden’s version of the story begins in a new section, in which he addresses the others without dialogue tags, while Mack’s private thoughts are indicated by parentheses. I find it ironic that Mack, who survived the incident that killed her family, takes the role of a passive listener who responds to, rather than narrates, the story she knows firsthand. Meanwhile, Jaden’s account is presented as fact, even though it stems from a heartless need to ostracise Mack. There is a sense of unjust wrongness, which amplifies the horror of Mack’s history. The use of parentheses simultaneously weakens Mack’s comments and gives them an added visual prominence. Considering Mack and Jaden’s opposing genders, perhaps this demonstrates that marginalised voices carry more weight than those that dominate the narrative. The “optional” part of Mack’s story is, in fact, the most truthful and necessary.

The amusement park hides a monster, whose behaviour I find a little convoluted. At first, we learn that it eats no less, and no more, than two people a day. Yet, this is later disproved. We also learn that the monster refuses to eat those who are already dead, and that it cannot be seen by those who are immune to its attack. I think these details overcomplicate the plot, especially with more than twenty characters in total. One of them, Brandon, narrates a section of the novel with his distinctive voice, which strongly appeals to me. Perhaps a smaller cast of characters, each with their own style of speech, might have been less overwhelming and more compelling.

Nonetheless, I love the organic development of conflict from a large and diverse group of people. In particular, the shifting points-of-view remove the certainty that any one character makes it to the end. This creates a suspenseful atmosphere that makes “Hide” a fast-paced and engaging read.

Ryan Tan studies English Literature at the National University of Singapore. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, Grimdark, Bone Parade, Bristol Noir, and The 13 Days of Christmas. If you enjoyed this review, you might also enjoy his review of Road of Bones by Christopher Golden.

Hide is available in The Chamber’s Bookshop in both English and Spanish (as El Escondite).

House of Footsteps: Review by Ryan Tan

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House of Footsteps by Matthew West

In Mathew West’s House of Footsteps, Simon Christie visits Thistlecrook House, the home of a recluse named Victor. As an employee of an auction house, Simon performs a professional assessment of Victor’s art collection, which he wants to sell. Due to its sheer size, as well as the remote location of Thistlecrook House, Simon remains as a guest, occupying an unused bedroom. He visits the library to do further research and finds Amy, a secretive woman who evades his questions about her identity. As their friendship grows, Amy drops hints that Victor is her enemy. Despite knowing nothing about their history, Simon promises to help her escape Victor.

I admire the novel’s ambitious choice to keep its explanations vague. As Simon reminds himself more than once, he only has a limited understanding of Thistlecrook House’s troubled history. His acceptance of this cluelessness as his best chance of happiness echoes the Lovecraftian theme of blissful ignorance. In fact, the archaic writing style, which uses formal language and intricate sentences, brings Lovecraft to mind. While the lack of a “big reveal” risks disappointing readers, I think it respects the third person limited point of view, from which the story is told. I also love the prevalence of suggestive details, especially the painting in Simon’s bedroom from the perspective of someone standing in the centre of a lake. The vividness of these details complements the obscure backstories of Amy and Victor, accentuating their mystery.

The romantic scene between Simon and Victor encapsulates the strength of the characterisation. Neither Simon nor Victor acts in a clichéd or oversimplified way. Rather, their interaction gives their personalities a new dimension. Victor tells Simon that “we both knew it was going to happen”, referring to their physical contact as though it already occurred. The pronoun “it” reinforces the bold assurance of Victor’s manner, who takes for granted that Simon perceives his intentions. Meanwhile, Simon’s post-alcohol narration is interrupted by em-dashes and sentence fragments, emphasising the brokenness of his mental state and his struggle to form a coherent thought. Victor’s merciless exploitation of Simon’s vulnerability conveys his power and cunning. In contrast, Simon’s innocence inspires not just pity, but dread of what he has in store.

Although “The House of Footsteps” is slightly slow-paced, its compelling characterisation makes it hard to put down. In particular, Mathew West’s eloquent writing style will appeal to fans of Lovecraft.

Ryan Tan studies English Literature at the National University of Singapore. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, Grimdark, Bone Parade, Bristol Noir, and The 13 Days of Christmas.

Be sure to visit The Chamber’s bookshop for books similar to House of Footsteps, and visit The Chamber’s Interviews department to find exciting new authors.

“H.R. Giger: His Dreams, Our Nightmares” Article by John A. DeLaughter

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“You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman’s…only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with…hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness…Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or- I hope to Heaven- ever will again” (1).

When H. P. Lovecraft penned those words in 1926, little did he know that out of the earth’s primal ooze, another man would arise, one who captured the ancestral memories of fright.

The man was Hans Rudolf Giger. That Pickman-incarnate was born February 5, 1940, in Chur, Switzerland. Giger’s morbid artwork work inspired the Xenomorph extraterrestrial in the movie Alien. The influential director Oliver Stone is not known for delving into existential darkness. Yet, his opinion about Giger’s place in the world of art and culture is noteworthy:

“’I do not know anybody else,’ he said, ‘who has so accurately portrayed the soul of modern humanity. A few decades from now when they will talk about the twentieth century, they will think of Giger’” (2).

And H.R. Giger departed from the earthly spheres on May 12, 2014.

Giger dredged the hereditary memories of immemorial fear. Like the Grecian god Charon, he poled the haggard ferryboat to the dark underworld. Upon Giger’s return, he captured hints of the demons and dreamscapes that vibrate with life beyond the prosaic world.

In this essay, we will try to gain a sense of the cosmic grandeur in Giger’s art that excites in us.

Seven Ways H.R. Giger touched Our Instinctual Fears:

1) Giger’s art stirs up desires for the forbidden and taboo. Once, Giger’s paintings would have been declared blasphemous. Zealots would have burned him at the stake as Warlock. As one whom interviewed Giger, surrounding the making of Alien wrote:

“…The hint of witchcraft was surely confirmed when the chief warlock – Giger – ordered crates of freshly boiled animal bones directly from the slaughterhouse. They were used to create molds for the derelict’s cadaverous walls: horizontal ribs crossed with vertical spines cords. If you want an egg to appear fleshy, use real flesh. If you want an alien spaceship to feature a carapace of bones, use real bones…” (3).

Normally, when one wishes to summons a demon, they inscribe the pentagram, sit in the resulting symbol and protective circle, and recite the necessary invocation. Giger’s art bypassed the Ouija board or the Scything Crystal, to contact the darkness in each of us.

2) Giger’s art titillates us with Necromantic Puzzles. When one lovingly fondles the bones of another, strange thing happen. Occult visions are invoked.

Giger was an artist of the ossuary, mimicking the bone chapels of the world in his cosmic pyramids and cyclopean temples. He took old dead bones from our primeval past, and like a modern Joseph Curwen, revived them into living, breathing, slavering nightmares.

As Giger aficionados tattooed themselves with the artist’s otherworldly images, they mystically enter one of those off-world temples, and join the pageant of weird adherents in worshiping the Old Ones:

“…The…tattooing process, which involved complex ritual and taboos…was associated with beliefs which were secrets known only to members of the priestly caste…historically tattooing had originated in connection with ancient rites of scarification and bloodletting which were associated with religious practices intended to put the human soul in harmony with supernatural forces and ensure continuity between this life and the next.” (4).

3) Giger’s art captivates the morbid curiosity that causes us to gaze on car wrecks.

Giger’s work imitates descriptions of Pickman’s art:

“God, how that man could paint! There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform” (5).

Giger’s work was the art of the train wreck, where twisted bodies, fused with metal and glass, recombine in all matter of surrealistic forms – art as mutation, art as mutilation. Giger captured in art, the prose of Clive Barker’s, Midnight Meat Train – with subways cars filled with butchered human bodies, suspended as if in a slaughterhouse, awaiting their consumption by Manhattan’s Old Ones.

Was it any reason why Clive Barker said of Giger:

“…Like all great visionaries, Giger…plunges his hands into the raw stuff of our subconscious, and using methodologies that are unique to him creates a state that is rigorous, hierarchical and, for all its abysmal depths, inviting. ‘ In mapping the tribal lands of our psyches, Giger gives us fresh access to them. He frees us, in essence, to wander there, encouraged by the fact that others have gone before. He makes us brave, and I can think of few higher ambitions for any art. Following where he’s gone, we discover that this new country, which we came into fearful of our sanity, about our lives in countless places. We are not, after all, strangers here. It’s the world we must return into the world of the mortgage payment and the tax return; of the domestic tiff and the public slight that seems chilling, repulsive, alien…” (6).

4) Giger’s art illuminates the primal worlds of the Witchdoctor. Giger traffics in the unwashed, undefined realms of the Shaman.

Where others fled, Giger made his home. What others dread, he made his habitat. What others fight to suppress, he drug back to the surface. Giger brought to a canvas near you the hidden world that ancient shamans saw beyond our own, as they sat in mescaline-induced stupors, with shining streams of drool, driveling down their chins, and onto their heaving chests.

The sum of other worlds remained largely unexplored in either man’s lifetimes. Life beyond the electron microscope, beneath the ocean depths, behind the three dimensions, and beyond the twinkling stars remains unknown and untouched.

Entire libraries of DNA remain unread and untapped.

Giger’s images bore inside you, like the insidious Brown Jerkins, or Giger’s own immature alien chest-buster. The fear it happens upon eats away at your insides. The raw things of the world that cultivated and civilized Homo sapiens avoid are, with little warning, thrust upon our screaming senses. His Xenomorph mimics the dark that slithers out of our collective darkness.

Will they enrich or eviscerate us, as we begin to explore their domains?

5) Giger’s art dissects Lovecraft’s living cosmos. He performed an autopsy on the universe, while it still vibrated with life, aware of its violation.

The maniacal chaos of the demon-sultan Azathoth who inspired lines like:

“…Outside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes…” (7).

That same Azathoth lies butchered by Giger’s palette knife like a common lab frog.

The archaeology of the cosmos is a study in anatomy versus a study in architecture: veins and sinews appear instead of electrical conduits. Ligaments and ribs show up where you expect potable water lines and sewers. Bridges and scaffolds have mouths and faces.

Giger, as Lovecraft before him, turned the cosmos is some kind of an enormous, incomprehensible entity:

“…Lovecraft’s…focus on the cosmic horrific theme of existence-as-nightmare was balanced and complemented by a deep craving for liberation into transcendent realms of beauty and bliss…The stories of H.P. Lovecraft are…about incursions from the cosmic beyond that open up vistas of wonder and awe. They’re…about dislocations in time and space that offer a paradoxically fearsome and exhilarating experience of liberation from natural law. They’re…about the longing for a transcendent experience of absolute beauty. This duality…is a part of the age-old tradition of fantastic storytelling…Should incursions from beyond the cosmic order, breakdowns in natural law, and the destruction of the physical body be viewed as joyful or terrifying, exhilarating or horrifying, dreadful or liberating? The answer has long emerged from the collective unconscious, often in the form of fantastic stories…as an unqualified, ‘Yes…’” (8).

Each of Giger’s paintings represents a sensuous invitation to join oneself with Azathoth, to lose oneself in the immense, corporeal conflagration.

6) Giger art embraces the aesthetics of death rather than life. Giger fell madly in love with death, long before his brief infatuation with life. His tryst with the Grim Reaper became a driving passion that formed the core of his life.

Giger’s biomechanical orgies capture the necrophiliac thrills of the tomb given breath in The Loved Dead:

“…I haunted the death-chamber where the body of my mother lay, my soul a thirst for the devilish nectar that seemed to saturate the air of the darkened room. Every breath strengthened me, lifted me to towering heights of seraphic satisfaction…” (9).

Giger brought his homicidal photo-realism to everything he touched. And his disturbing photographic memory emptied the undigested contents of the bowels of the heavens and the earth onto his canvases; the things we could not stomach were the curtain of normalcy to be pulled aside, and we saw the darkness that lay just beyond our five senses.

7) Giger’s biomechanoid visions of humanity bother us. Our lives are now governed by machines, from the smartphones we constantly pore over to the computers many of us serve before each day.

The fine line between being served by our machines to having to serve them blurs with each new jump in technology. The borging of humanity will not come at the hands of an all-powerful race that invades out space in enormous technological Rubik’s cubes.

Since most of the enslavement will be done invisibly, by future enhancements of Wi-Fi connections, the horror of assimilation portrayed in Star Trek will become an accepted rite-of-passage.

Giger’s art X-rays the reality of man/machine interface. That art reveals how far we are separated and alienated from nature, the environment for which we were bred.

Ultimately, Giger’s art threatens to release the dark jinn that resides in each of us, one who is willing to do our darkest bidding – yet we fear the unintended consequences if those primal urges are fulfilled.

Conclusion:

Hans Rudolph Giger touched on the existential tensions that confront and confound current generations.

Giger employed the tools of today’s alienated youth. His use of the airbrush allowed HRG to crystallize in paints, the personal estrangement and loss of a sense of self that Graffiti and Tattoo artists strive to express.

In a cosmos, where we have become machines, where we have become functions, in a world where the marks of individuality become fewer and stereotypical – Giger has captured the ultimate mechanization of man. He depicted on canvas a future when we become cogs in the machines. The day many modern philosophers once warned us about – one where man serves machines when man becomes machine – has arrived.

——-

End Notes:

(1) Pickman’s Model, by H.P. Lovecraft, 1926.

(2) “H. R. Giger and the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century,” by Stanislav Grof, The Primal Psychotherapy Page, 2005.

(3) “How H.R. Giger’s Brilliant Madness Helped Make Alien ‘Erotic’,” by Charlie Jane Anders, IO9, October 20, 2011.

(4) Tattoo History: A Source Book, by Steve Gilbert, December 1, 2000, p. 158.

(5) Pickman’s Model, by H.P. Lovecraft, 1926.

(6) “Introduction,” by Clive Barker, Giger’s Necronomicon 2, English Edition, 1992.

(7) The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft, 1927.

(8) “Lovecraft’s Longing,” by Matt Cardin, http://www.teemingbrain.com, November 1, 2009.

(9) The Loved Dead, by H.P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr., 1919.

***

John A. DeLaughter M.Div., M.S., is a Data Security Analyst and Lovecraft essayist, horror, and fantasy author. He lives in rural Pennsylvania with his wife Heidi. His work has appeared in The Lovecraft eZine, Samsara: The Magazine of Suffering, Tigershark eZine, Turn To Ash, and The Eldritch Literary Review Journal. John is presently editing his original epic fantasy work, Dark Union Rising.

Mr. DeLaughter says about this article:  “The essay “H.R. Giger: His Dreams, Our Nightmares” is a distillation of two articles I wrote about H.P. Lovecraft and H.R. Giger (September 21, 2014 & July 10, 2015) on the Lovecraft eZine website.”