Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Pegasus Books, 2017; $25.95 hc; 336 pages
John Llewellyn Probert won the British Fantasy Award for his 2012 novella The Nine Deaths of Dr. Valentine, inspired by the works of Vincent Price, particularly The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and Madhouse. As an homage to a particular type of film, it certified Probert’s skill at constructing and pacing longer pieces of fiction while at the same time cementing his obvious love of horror cinema. As such he seems an unobvious choice to write a Lovecraftian novel, a subgenre that is notoriously uncinematic, and yet that may exactly be the point. Given Probert’s credentials, it would be interesting to see what he would produce. Such challenges, asking a writer whose work is unrelated to the Lovecraftian oeuvre to step into the Mythos, has worked in the past. The most notable example is Colin Wilson who for better or worse took the Cthulhu Mythos in new directions with his novels The Mind Parasites (1967), The Philosopher’s Stone (1969), and The Space Vampires (1976), which introduced overt psychological and philosophical elements to the Mythos, elements that had only been hinted at previously. It is such challenges, the drive in new and interesting directions, that will not only keep the genre alive but also move it into the future. However, it must be acknowledged that such ventures are fraught with risk and that success is not guaranteed.
This is not to say that Probert’s All Hallows Horror is a failure, but it is not quite a success, either.
The novel begins with promise, as a pair of boys intruding into a British construction site discover an ancient, moldering corpse and an urn. Those who examine the body end up having hallucinations and nightmares that cause at least one professional to gouge his own eyes out. This causes the locals to call in expert help in the form of Bob Chambers (a nod to Robert W. Chambers, author of The King in Yellow). Chambers works for the Human Protection League, a clandestine organization set up by J. Edgar Hoover to combat the horrors from beyond. Chambers suffers his own hallucinations and discovers a queer scroll that links to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and then to the long abandoned All Hallows Church.
At this point, about one quarter into the novel, Probert’s love of genre shows through, and the story becomes somewhat familiar, mirroring Richard Matheson’s Hell House, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Stephen King’s Rose Red. Unable to summon help from the League (who are busy with an uprising of Deep Ones, aquatic humanoids that worship Lovecraft’s inhuman squid-god, Cthulhu), Chambers puts together a small investigative team, including a newspaper reporter, a professor of medieval studies, a representative from the Church, an amateur ghost hunter, a professional medium, and a horror film enthusiast. Together they investigate All Hallows Church, learn its secrets, and hopefully prevent a hinted-at apocalypse. The expedition encounters what can be thought of as the expected supernatural with ghostly appearances, demonic encounters, spiritual corruption, impossibly weird art, and catacombs with resident corpses. It’s familiar territory, and it’s mined well by the author and twisted in interesting new directions. It’s almost as if Probert has taken previous haunted house novels, charted their landmarks, and then cut a new path, rearranging the familiar into something bold and perhaps even daring, and in the process the investigators are slowly whittled away.
But just when you think you know where that path is taking you, Probert drops you someplace completely else.
For All Hallows Church isn’t just any haunt; it sits on top of the gate to Hell, specifically Dante’s Hell, with its descending circles filled with the damned. Chambers and the surviving members of his party have no choice but to go down, exploring each level, going deeper and deeper in, fleeing from the hateful dead and their monstrous tormentors. Human culture may have evolved since Dante’s days, but Hell still holds the same sins and the same punishments (though the visuals may be a little more modern):
The yellow light through which they passed was warm and comforting. Chambers had little desire to leave its reassuring embrace, and when he emerged on the other side, it was with a vague sense of disappointment and an overwhelming desire to return to the golden aura that had made him feel safe.
It was not to be however. The light was gone, and in its place was a long refectory table that ran the length of the chamber in which they found themselves. The room’s walls were of rough gray stone, and for a moment Chambers thought they had gone back into Limbo. Then he saw the ornate windows of stained glass twenty feet above his head that met with the vaulted ceiling at least as far away again. The shades of green, blue, and red in the mullioned windows were too dark to be able to discern anything on the other side of them, but they were admitting a pallid light, mixed into a myriad hues [sic] by refraction and painting the banquet hall in shades that were not at all unpleasant.
That was what they had to be in now—a banquet hall. The refectory table that ran down the center of it had to be nearly twenty feet long and had been fashioned from polished pine. Instead of chairs, long benches of similar length had been positioned either side for diners to sit. Down the middle of the table, at regular intervals, silver candelabra had been placed. Each bore six red candles which burned with a light that seemed almost holy.
In between and surrounding the candelabra, delicious-looking food had been arranged. Roasts glistened on silver trays surrounded by crisp potatoes sizzling in the meat’s juices; dishes of lightly boiled vegetables steamed on shining plates; loaves of freshly baked bread sought to escape from handsomely sized wicker baskets; and in between these large courses, delicately interpolated between highly polished platters, were shining saucers of canapés of all shapes and colors. Everything had been cooked to perfection, and the aroma in the room was so mouth-watering it brought tears to his eyes as well as saliva to his mouth.
There is a descent through Hell, with each level being handled in almost a single chapter and the highlights covered. There is also a hurried ascent with our protagonist on the run and surviving by his wits alone. Probert’s Hell is a fascinating place, fully worthy of larger exploration and exploitation, but in this novel we barely get a glimpse of each level, as it seems so very rushed. It’s a whirlwind tour of Hell akin to the old tours of Europe that were once done, “ten countries in seven days,” but instead it’s five levels in just a few chapters. It leaves the reader unsatisfied and wanting more.
It also generates the novel’s biggest logical contradiction, one I’m not sure that can be overcome. The concept of Hell presented here is fundamentally Christian; its primary purpose is to punish sinners who have presumably broken some divine commandment. That implies a rather specific cosmology, one that includes not only Hell but the demons and devils that inhabit it, and Heaven including the angels and, presumably, a God. It is a cosmology that is wholly anthropocentric, a stark contrast to the universe proposed by Lovecraft, whose milieu was at best non-anthropocentric or perhaps even anti-anthropocentric.
Such cross-ideology tales have been tried before. August Derleth recast Lovecraft’s universe into a cosmological battle between the “malign” Old Ones and the “benign” Elder Gods. Similarly, Kevin Lucia has had some success in mixing Lovecraftian monsters with Christianity. In both cases, critics have been clear that regardless of the strength of the stories, the fundamental Lovecraftian nature of the setting has been significantly altered, perhaps even corrupted. The same must be said of Probert’s novel. Indeed, in looking back at the novel as a whole, the weird elements that may have made it potentially Lovecraftian never really coalesce as such, and they can instead be viewed as rather mundane elements of the supernatural variety. In fact, the whole novel is rather destitute when it comes to Lovecraftian names like Cthulhu or Azathoth, and it would be relatively easy to troll through the text and replace these few occurrences with demonic names from more familiar, more recognizable myths. It is as if Probert had written a novel about demons and a haunted church and Dante’s Hell and then casually shoved a few Lovecraftian references into it. As a traditional novel of demonic doings, it is fine or perhaps even better than fine; it might border on what has emerged as literary horror, but as a Lovecraftian novel trading off that name and all it entails, it is somewhat lacking.
The novel appears to be part of a shared world series, The Lovecraft Squad, one created by famed editor Stephen Jones. Readers will be reminded of Charles Stross’s The Laundry or perhaps Delta Green, the faux agency used by Adam Glancy, Dennis Detwiller, and John Tynes in both fiction and roleplaying games, but there is only a passing similarity. Delta Green deeps deeper into the psychology of how the military deals with such things while Stross has his Bob Howard stuck somewhere in a bureaucratic nightmare of cosmic horror. As a start for these Lovecraft Squad stories, All Hallows Horror appears rather weak. Not just because of the lack of Lovecraftian themes but also because of the lack of any real squad. For all the talk of the Human Protection League and their vast global resources, they seem noticeably absent both in manpower and in gravitas. Fans of Lovecraftian fiction may be disappointed, but readers looking for an old-fashioned haunted house story may be pleasantly surprised.
Peter Rawlik lives in Royal Palm Beach, Florida.
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