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Monday, 14 August 2006 02:17

The whole book is heat and flash and freaky hallucination, with little in the way of explanation.

 

Ya gotta love the idea of a literary mash-up—in theory. Two genres collide, and it sounds so intriguing—like those hard-sell pitches to studio green-lighters:

“OK, here’s the deal. It’s a Victorian bodice-ripper, but with vampires and werewolves.”

“Imagine a Tom Clancy–type technothriller…but in Nazi Germany.”

“Lolita meets Clan of the Cave Bear: How young is too young when you’re a Cro-Mag?”

Throw two genres together, and see what happens. It could be a disaster. At the very least, it’ll be fun. Right?

Well...yes and no. First-time novelist (and accomplished editor) Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground is a mash-up of two cult hits. It’s a road odyssey, starring Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs, paired with H.P. Lovecraft’s Chthulhu mythos. To save the world, our On the Road heroes will have to fight many-tentacled demons, brainwashed servants of evil, and hallucinogenic foes that flit between this reality and another. It’s a tempting mix.

Mamatas employs a couple of tricks to marry the competing genres, including telling the story from Kerouac’s point of view. That means run-on sentences not so much written as captured as they fly from the fevered imagination of the original Beat (“Animals, humans are just animals, wheedling and baring their teeth for food, cringing from fear of the dark, setting up their clockwork sciences and groaning agricultural faiths, just to keep from looking down”). After all, Kerouac and Lovecraft were both stuck in overdrive.

(Also, Mamatas imagines that the American masses, “squares” conforming to narrow 1960s notions of normality, are not slaves to rigid mores, but to ancient evils swirling about as dark gods prepare to pierce this veil. Only an enlightened few comprehend the horror.)

And it’s the pacing that dominates this enterprise. The whole book is heat and flash and freaky hallucination, with little in the way of explanation. In particular, the Lovecraft mythology, a hodgepodge of devilish creatures with names like Cthulthu and R’lyeh, is presented prima facie—either you’ve read the 80-year-old books that permit an understanding, or you haven’t. The reader is dying for an occasional play-by-play explanation to anchor the color commentary.

Lovecraft’s achievement was to beckon the most vivid and repulsive things from the subconscious to slither into man’s waking world. It’s clear Mamatas is a fan of the author, and of Kerouac, whose urgent questions were disguised in languid, stream-of-consciousness washes. Mamatas channels both men’s styles, but with a rushed, breathless pacing that zooms right past the basics of taletelling.