A few years ago, we went to a family reunion in Williamsburg, Virginia, a colonial town outside of Richmond. It’s the Dirty South there, y’all.
Something I noticed in Williamsburg: an unpleasant, undiscussed tension. The guests and hotel management were white, the cleaning staff and wait staff black. The black women serving us had knotted jaws, as if there was something they wanted to say, and they’d been waiting two hundred years to say it.
My pale, red-headed brother in-law, the most earnestly liberal man on planet Earth, said: “The black community here should be proud. They’re so empowered!”
When the reunion was over, we drove up the highway to visit Washington, DC. Washington is across the fabled Mason-Dixon Line. It’s not officially the South in Washington. It’s the evil, yankee North, where, to quote Dubya, ‘the big-time lawyers’ live.
We stayed in Georgetown and spent most of our holiday at the Smithsonian. Washington’s black community is massive, and deeply rooted in American history: the Shaw district, the civil war, the speeches of Martin Luther King.
Additionally, the black community in Washington is happy. They’re not cleaning toilets and busing tables: they’re lawyers, politicians, doctors, medical students, policemen and women, and one is President. Is it all related to that line that crosses south of town? I don’t know for sure, but it seemed that way to me.
Southern horror is a special kind of horror. It’s hot, steamy, repressed, and full of sex and repressed historical pain, much like the land in which it’s set. Even the more genteel and classics of Southern literature – the works of Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, and more recently Pat Conroy – possess a sick dread and wickedness that drips from heat. Proper Southern horror – the books of Davis Grubb, Joe R. Lansdale, Ed Lee (in some cases), and most importantly Michael McDowell – is notorious for an ease of passage into the most eerie and disturbing places. The southern predilection for going your own way means just that.
John Hornor Jacob’s Southern Gods is so Southern is might be deep-fried and served with iced tea.
Bull Ingram, muscle for a memphis loan shark, is a mythically large man hired to find an Arkansas bluesman, Ramblin’ John Hastur. When made to listen to Hastur’s music, a terrifying blend of chanting, guitar riffs, and an implacable beat, Ingram feels homicidal. The man hiring him, a music studio exec, sees money in that music and wants to hear more.
As Bull begins his journey into Arkansas, Hornor introduces us to Sarah, an heiress to an old-fashioned Southern estate, and her daughter Franny. Through reading an almost criminally large backstory, we learn that her father and uncle were occult book collectors, and that her grandfather’s first family died in a grotesque mass murder. Sarah begins to translate one of her father’s latin books, while Bull Ingram tangles with the revenants awoken by Ramblin’ John Hastur’s music.
When Bull and Sarah meet, and after Hornor throws in a odd little Macedonian midget priest, the truth is revealed, and it’s… Lovecraft.
No surprise: the reviewers have told us this already. But… Hornor actually explains what man was never meant to know. You know those things, those black and faceless monstrosities that dwell at the edge of the cosmos, that would drive us mad if we ever saw them? Hornor explains them, describes them, and gives them a plot.
“Yes, the other gods. Baal, Cybele, Mithras, Hastur, Chernobog, Rakshasha, Ahriman.”
“They strode the earth, some giant, some tentacled, some with thousands of eyes, some with the shapes of all creatures fused into their flesh which was not flesh. Nyarlarhotep, Kronos, Cthulhu, Powaqqatsi and others.”
“The old ones learned to sever portions of themselves to create lesser gods. These gods – Zidus, Loki, Chernobog, Hastur, Akhkhazu, Pazuzu, and countless other – infested the Earth.”
After I read these passages, I discovered that I had not died of fright. I had not even gone mad. But I did learn something.
If you describe Lovecraft’s fears and legends in detail, it all starts to sound like a slightly fancified version of Ghostbusters. Remember that movie? Zuul possesses Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis with Devil-dog demons, and fills New York with ghosts, until the old god Gozer arrives from the nether dimension? Remember how damn funny and unscary it was? And Bill Murray and his team saved the day by crossing the streams and making a total protonic reversal?
Don’t get me wrong. I liked this book. The setting was authentic. Hornor is a good writer, and he can (and hallelujah!) write good dialogue. But he tried to explain Lovecraft. You can’t explain Lovecraft anymore that you can go onstage at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas and explain just where you put the mirrors as you saw your nubile assistant in half. The gentleman from Rhode Island was a wonderful literary magician, and he’s not around to tell you to stop looking for the answer. The answer is there is no answer. The magic disappears.
