Another fin del mundo comes as Alan Moore’s Neonomicon. While Supergod is almost plotless – more a series of provocative ideas strung together, Neonomicon is a train on rails to hell. Every page brings you closer to Cthulhu in an FBI investigation of a Lovecraft copy-cult in Brooklyn. Instead of hitting all of the high notes of a Cthulhu story like Nick Mamatas did in Move Underground, Moore brings you the creeping dread, the knowledge of the potential coming. There’s one monster in the book (other than the people) but most of it is more about the dark at the top of the stairs rather than the monster stomping into view. Also, a secret about Alan Moore I have noticed: the secret to horror is killing real people. When a person with no connection to you dies, it means nothing to you. So, before Moore begins killing people in his stories, he connects them to you. Most writers don’t want to waste character time and exposition on people that they know are going to disappear later – they are having enough trouble getting you to care about the main character. Moore is fast at fleshing out people, so he has the time to make his secondary characters real characters with just hints and flashes of their past.
For me, the Brooklyn setting is icing. My adopted city is perfect for this sort of story, and if Moore gets some of the details of BK wrong, it is still creepier to read a horror story written WHERE YOU LIVE! Imagine “The Wilderness Downtown“, but after dark on a moonless night. That gives me another idea for a project – a short story set in your house, right where you live.
Tag Archives: cthulhu
Book Review: Move Underground by Nick Mamatas
In the darkness, Kerouac dreamed of cultists and the dread ovipositor of Lovecraft pushed into his ear, punching eggs softly into the fat membrane in his skull.
Years later, these dream children wormed forth through time into the deep voids of Nick Mamatas’s heart, wrapping their slimy tentacles around his ribs and working his arms. He made this.
It’s a book that tells of an america turning sick after the events of “On the Road” and the grim dreams of Lovecraft rotting it hollow. But it isn’t really much about Lovecraft, is it? The adventure is about the changes of the later years after adventure has dried up and withered.
It ends less than 200 pages later, in the only way it could and it is a warm, shining, genius masterwork. If he continues to produce work like this we will have to kill him so the other writers have something to do.