I’m sorry! I suck!

Unfortunately, I’ve been overloaded with work on a critical, Top Secret project for most of February. I know that’s dull of me, so as a little bit of a consolation, I thought I’d tell you the things that I’m (more or less) allowed to reveal about it. Hopefully, my publishers won’t put a price on my head.

Put simply, it’s a treasure hunt.

The book (which will be available globally) takes the form of a series of images, accompanied by passages of text. Each image/text combination contains a series of clues, which taken together will point to a specific solution. As a theoretical f’rinstance, a large bear on its hind legs in a picture could suggest a Russian link.

Each of the solutions, taken together, will then point to the final answer.

The first person to solve the answer, and submit it after a specific date, will win money. A _lot_ of money.

The answer exists in only two places: my head, and a highly-encrypted DVD locked in a secure bank vault. Obviously if anything dodgy happens to me — I vanish, get kidnapped, die suspiciously, etc etc — then the whole deal is off. Finding the answer won’t require any specific skill or cultural background; literally anyone could do it, if they try. Fortunately there’ll be no question of going out into the countryside with a shovel and metal detector :)

Pot of Gold by Tao Zhyn

So it’s a really exciting project. I’m not allowed to reveal the title yet, but I can tell you that I’ve been thinking of it as The Labyrinth.

The one piece of advice I’d give to anyone hoping to win is to get to know the way I think. It’s good advice for any puzzle; the better you understand the mind that created it, the easier it is to solve it. There may — just may — be clues hidden here in the blog, and other places where I can be found online. Later on, I’ll probably have a specific Twitter feed and blog too, but I’ll still drop little nuggets here for just you :)

Oh, and no, I’m afraid I’m not open to bribes!

Monkey King by anc (c) Ivan Ricci

Monkey had strength, fearlessness and curiosity beyond all other monkeys, and was recognised as their king. He soon realised the inevitability of death, and became determined to conquer it. He badgered a sage into teaching him the secrets of Taoism, gained his familiar name as Sun Wukong. The sage taught him a huge range of magical tricks, including changing his shape, cloud-somersaulting to travel more than 30,000 miles in a single bound, and making copies of himself. When he could learn no more, he went and caused chaos for the Eastern Sea-Dragon King until the dragon gave him a range of magic weapons. The most important was Ruyi Jingu Bang, the Gold-Banded Cudgel, which weighed more than 7 tons, and had previously held the sea in place.

The Dragon-King’s gifts made Monkey utterly uncontrollable, and in the end the forces of Heaven decided to give him a divine title and job, to help control him. This gambit failed too, and their efforts to control the irrepressible Monkey managed only to give him eternal life, and to increase his strength, resilience and magical power. Eventually, with the courts of Heaven themselves in Chaos, Buddha stepped in. After a period of time buried under a mountain, Monkey was given a chance to redeem himself by helping the monk Sanzang in his epic journey to India to fetch a trove of Buddhist sutras. To keep him in line, an unshakeable golden band was placed on his head; when Sanzang magically activated it, the band tightened agonisingly.

Monkey by Isle of Troggs

The Journey to the West and back took seventeen years. Monkey and his equally ambivalent fellow transgressors against heaven, Pig (Zu Bajie, or ‘Eight Commandments Pig’, after his eight horrible transgressions) and Sand (Sha Wuching, ‘Sand awakened to purity’) defended Sanzang faithfully all manner of horrible dangers, getting into many terrible scrapes. Eventually, the party arrived back in China, and were lauded as heroes. Monkey was eventually granted Buddhahood in recognition for his service, his growth in wisdom, and his immense power.

An abridged version of “Journey to the West” was translated into English by Arthur Waley as “Monkey” (1942), and the story was made into a Japanese TV series titled “Saiyuki” (1978). This was also titled “Monkey”, after Waley’s work, when the BBC dubbed it into English. Both book and series have proved highly influential in the west.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie; and with strange aeons, even death may die.”
– the Necronomicon

A tome of the very darkest wisdom, invented for the Cthulhu mythos cycle by HP Lovecraft, the Necronomicon first appeared in “The Hound” (1922). The Necronomicon is a detailed treasury of information on the true nature of the universe, and mankind’s horribly precarious and brief place within it. The book goes into significant detail about the Great Old Ones – particularly Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth – and their minions, and the black arts required to summon and control these beings. It also has unpleasant spells for a variety of other purposes. The Necronomicon is extremely disturbing to read, and has driven lesser men stark raving mad. The wisdom it contains reveals things that mankind really wasn’t meant to know. Only the most evil can gain anything other than shattered peace of mind from perusing its horrible contents.

One of the more prominent passages reproduced from the book reads, in part:

“Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen … As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They rule again.” (From “The Dunwich Horror” by HP Lovecraft, 1928)

The Necronomicon was written early in the 8th century AD by a crazed, decadent Arabic cultist, Abdual Alhazred. He titled the book “Al Azif” (with a supposed literal meaning close to ‘the nocturnal howling of the demons of the desert’). He died a short time later, ripped apart in a crowded Damascus bazaar by invisible demons, but the book was quietly copied and studied by Arab scholars. It was translated into Greek as the Necronomicon (possibly ‘The Book of Dead Names’) by the scholar Theodorus Philetas in 950AD. It was suppressed in 1050AD, but survived to be translated into Latin in 1228 by Olaus Wormius, and then into English around 1590AD by Queen Elizabeth’s magus, Dr. John Dee. Only five copies are known to remain for certain, in libraries and universities in Harvard, Buenos Airies, London, Paris and Arkham. Others crop up in private collections of the most horrible, decadent sort.

In the real world, there remain persistent rumours that Lovecraft did not actually invent the book, but instead was inspired by some real tome of horrors. He always flatly rejected those claims as flattering credulity and nonsense. Several hoaxers have worked the Necronomicon into library catalogues over the years, and librarians world-wide still get queries about it, although it’s difficult to imagine why anyone would actually want to risk read the thing.

There have been several real books produced that attempted to cash in on this interest, but none of them even begin to come close to capturing the spirit of the work.

The Necronomicake, also baked and (c) Milliput Mog

I’m always amazed that Powers isn’t more famous than he actually is. It seems extremely unjust, given that he’s quietly out there writing some of the best fiction on the market. Powers specialises in true Urban Fantasy — thrilling yet haunting stories where reality and true historical events are overlaid with magic, and the two become blended together in strange and unpredictable ways. No vampires, fairies or P.I. wizards here; instead, in Powers’ books, Albert Einstein’s time machine, poets who never were, and Russian double-agents chasing the secret of eternal life.

Last Call by Tim Powers

Last Call is set in the American west. The hero is a poker player, a man who spent his childhood being steeped in the curious superstitions of professional card-players, riding high by following the rules. Twenty years on, he’s still paying for having broken them when things long-dormant start to wake up and he finds himself the subject of some very unwelcome attention. It’s the end of a cycle, and his old debt is being called in.

The resulting journey weaves Fisher King legends, the Tarot, poker, and the glittering dream of Vegas into a dazzling mystic swirl, as dark and seedy as it is beautiful and engaging. It’s a very modern haunting of the American dream-scape, exciting, absorbing and wildly imaginative. Urban fantasy really doesn’t get much better.

Lovecraft was a troubled, reclusive man, and his long-standing personal demons and his alienation from everyday life provided a foundation for everything he wrote. In the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, as his mythology is now know, human life and civilisation is a tiny speck of light floating on unimaginable depths of darkness and horror. We are an aberration, suffered to survive only because the true masters of the cosmos have been locked out of existence for a short time. They are all-powerful, amoral forces of pure corruption and devastation. When the stars are right, they will return, and that day will see the world scoured clean of the careless infection that is life. Even now, banished from reality, their influence and agents sew chaos and misery amongst us, seeking ever to guide humanity to its destruction.

The Necronomicon by and (c) Marc Simonetti

In Lovecraft’s stories, the traces of evil can be seen and felt in wrongness — geometry that doesn’t work, places that have an inappropriate feel, people who have degenerated back towards primitive forms. Encountering this evil is incredibly dangerous; there are no ‘the hero whips out a gun and saves the day’ stories in his work. The usual results are madness and death.

Lovecraft’s stories have a cumulative power. The more of them you read, the more his world seeps into your bones, the more disturbing and unpleasant it becomes. Despite the broadly contemporary setting (for the time, anyway), they really aren’t quite set in our world. Lovecraft conjures vivid places, histories, institutions, artifacts and pieces of lore, then weaves them into reality so that the lines start blurring. It is this sense of hidden decay that really represents the mythos, rather than any primal god — and also why a book, the Necronomicon, is the aspect of the mythos that is most widely known.

There are plenty of problems with Lovecraft’s work, of course. His xenophobia and racism are almost comical to the modern eye. Ditto some of his more obscure vocabulary. He hated writing dialogue too, so almost all of his stories are presented through a narrator who tells you what is going on. Despite this, the sheer force of his vision makes him absolutely worth reading.

If you want to have a go, and haven’t read any Lovecraft before, I’d recommend:

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

The Dunwich Horror

The Whisperer in the Darkness

The Rats in the Walls

The Colour out of Space

Dreams in the Witch-House

At the Mountains of Madness (which is long),

and, once you’ve read at least one other story and got to grips with the style a bit, The Call of Cthulhu, which is probably his ’signature’ piece.

As is often the case, all delight aside, I’m a little surprised by this book. For only the second time ever, the surprise is pleasant. The book is a hard-back, which I didn’t expect, with an unusual padded cover. The cover illustration is a bit random, but that’s par for the course. The text has made it through editing without any significant mangling. The illustrations have been nicely coloured, and the page textures are reasonably sympathetic, both of which are pleasant bonuses. The only real negative is that the publisher took my name off the cover for the UK version, which is a bit offensive. Still, all in all, I’m very pleased.

The Greatest Puzzles Ever Solved, by Tim Dedopulos

The book is a selection of the most historically significant, scientifically important and/or culturally interesting puzzles ever produced. This includes deliberate recreational puzzles like Crosswords and Sudoku to philosophical dilemmas, riddles, and mathematical problems. They range from very easy to insanely hard, although obviously the vast majority are, I hope, entertainingly challenging. I’ve done my best to give proper context for all the puzzles, so that their importance is clear, and to explain how the answers are found. I always get annoyed by complicated puzzles where the answer just says “23″ or whatever. In other words, I’ve done my best to do a good job, and it’s nice that the book itself is a decent physical thing.

In the interests of full disclosure, it is important that I point out that I’m not getting any royalties for this book *sigh*. So if you go and buy a copy, I’ll never even hear about it, let alone get any money from it. So, please, only buy this book if it actually sounds like you might enjoy it…!

(Yes, that is one of my infamous table runners in the picture.)

At first introduction, the heroine of the title seems like an impossibly tedious chiché. She’s a tragic orphaned heiress, young, lovely and fey, forced into semi-squalor by the machinations of her callous half-brother. She is studying at university when she meets a tall, dark, handsome prince who promptly begins sweeping her off her feet. Even here though, there are clues that Marianne is more than she appears. She is unusually bloody-minded and fierce beneath her gentle appearance, and wages an intriguing daily war against the forces of random chaos.

A genuine aura of menace surrounds Marianne right from the start, conjured expertly via her seemingly innocuous surroundings. This builds swiftly until Marianne suddenly finds herself flung, amnesiac, into a series of twisted nightmarish alternate realities. These border worlds are everything you’d expect from Sheri Tepper — dark, peculiar, engaging and stunningly creative. Marianne herself approaches them as a grown-up Alice might, with fiery resolve and pragmatic ruthlessness. Her dashing Prince Charming attempts to rush to the rescue, but frankly he’s barely needed.

Tepper’s gender politics are well-known, and have weakened a lot of her later work, but here they’re a delicious under-note rather than an overwhelming spice disaster. The result is simultaneously gripping, charming and strange. The Marianne books aren’t easy to find any more, but if you do spot them around, do yourself a favour and give them a go.

House of Leaves — like The Book with No Name and John Dies at the End — started out life as an internet serial. The latter works are crazy, surreally humorous horrors, whose charm lies mainly in their zany narrative rather than the quality of their writing. MZD’s book, on the other hand, is first and foremost a wonderful piece of writing. It’s a horror — or perhaps a love story hiding within a horror’s clothes — and it is engrossing, archly satirical and at times extremely creepy. It certainly isn’t trying to be funny.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielwski

House of Leaves is not a work to be taken lightly. It presents itself as a manuscript gathered — and heavily annotated — by a tattoo artist. This guy claims to have assembled the manuscript by piecing together the notes of a blind man who died in disturbingly inexplicable circumstances. These notes take the form of a detailed and scholarly critique of a movie called The Navidson Record. This in turn is a documentary made by a cameraman, one Will Navidson, of his increasingly peculiar new house. The only trouble is that the tattoo artist can find no suggestion that the movie ever existed.

The house at the centre of all these layers is a dark, forbidding place that appears to be playing games with the Navidson family. First certain areas seem to change size and depth, and then entire new sections appear, leading into… well. I don’t want to spoil anything.

There are a lot of different layers to the book, even before the Navidson House starts shifting space around. The story weaves around between them deftly, dripping with menace and dark glory. Then the book itself starts playing with, changing page orientation, fooling around with the use of space on the page, sometimes taking you into claustrophobia, and other times into agoraphobia. It becomes as much part of the experience as the words themselves. It’s not always easy, either physically or in a literary sense, but it’s well worth the effort. The result is one of the genuine masterworks of dark fantasy, a dazzling but truly horrible dream, powerful and unforgettable.

book itself requires effort to read – the words are not always printed in regular blocks, or even in the same orientation on the page. The effort is worth it, however; this is a masterwork of dark fantasy that reads like a truly horrible yet dazzling dream, and carries just as much power. It’s the opposite of easy reading, for sure, but it will stay with you.

Y’see, swearing reflects the things that a culture considers taboo or abomination. It is used as a strong marker of social identity, and in-groups often rely on it (amongst other things) to identify and marginalise outsiders. How you swear reflects not only where you’re from, but your social class, your personal beliefs, and even the way you think.

Saying ‘gosh darn-it’ in a blue-collar bar can be as big a mistake as saying ‘mutha-fukka’ in church. Some cultures (including Anglo-Saxon) swear by reviling the body and its processes. Scandinavian cultures use the devil for swearing. Latin and Greek cultures prefer to insult a person’s religious icons or parents.

New vampires in vampire society are going to be looked down on, just like newcomers in any group. Their ingrained patterns of swearing are going to be one of the things that mark them out. Almost all people will attempt to conform to a dominant group they need, so the way I see it, vampire society would have developed its own language of swearing and insults, which newcomers would need to pick up swiftly to avoid sounding like hopeless wide-eyed rubes.

I don’t have anything resembling a good set of vampire curses or insults yet. However, some of the areas I’m thinking about include:

* light - “blind me”, “burn me”, “sunbeams”, “scorch you”

* weakness - “toothless”, “wannabe”

* attachment to humanity – “lost boy”, “puppy”, “teddy bear”, “meatfucker”

* human stereotypes – “twinkly”, “rock star”, “Lugosi”

What about you? How do you reckon vampires would swear?

I haven’t settled on a title yet, but the Ghostwoods project is an epic vampire novel set in a dark urban fantasy version of the modern world. I want to tell the story from the vampire point of view, rather than just having them as plot devices for a human-focussed tale. I’ve been thinking a lot about the vampire map of the Earth recently, which has yielded some interesting results. We tend to forget how much the boundaries and borders of our world change over time.

The events of the story are starting to shape up nicely, and I’ve got some fun characters starting to come together. I’ve got a good feeling about this project. It’s going to have some dark and twisty corners, but mainly I’m aiming for it being a compelling read, and an interesting look into the vampire world.

I’ll be sharing more about the project as it continues, and if you have any questions — about the process, the setting, characters, themes, whatever — then please, fire away in the comments!