Letters from Hades [Jeffrey Thomas]

It's not often a book begins with its protagonist having killed himself with a shotgun blast...especially where the rest of the narrative is not a flashback of his death foretold. But then Jeffrey Thomas is not your everyday author. Into his several short story collections and novellas, Thomas has infused a unique fevered imagination. Tinged, yes, by classic and popular dystopian fiction and movie culture, but not derivative. If Worship the Night was a wonderful contemporary homage to the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft and Boneland a terrific piece of futu-noir à la Philip K Dick, Letters from Hades is his attempt at epic action fantasy.

Of course, it is not immediately apparent. For a good while, our protagonist is a lonely newcomer in Thomas' rendition of Hell, a world that draws on Dante's Inferno, with heaped helpings of smoke-and-engine-oil steampunk and a healthy spoonful of Guillermo Del Toro style baroque horror. Our hero (never named) starts at Avernus - the portal to Hell - as one of the Damned. Subjected to soul crushing labor and squirm-inducing tortures by their demon warders,  the damned are cursed to never die - even if grossly mutilated, their body parts grow back with all the associated pain for them to once more go through the cycle of unimaginable agonies. The biggest struggle the hero faces is to retain his humanity in the face of all he must undergo. He keeps a diary of his experiences (which serves as our chronicle) in a book that houses as punishment the eye of another damned with whom he develops a sympathetic understanding.

Sympathy is what distinguishes our hero and drives his actions. At one point when making his way through a hostile alien jungle, he rescues a demoness from death by a group of the damned, a deed that will trigger further consequences. He eventually reaches the city of Oblivion (some whiff of influence from China Mieville's Bas-Lag?) and discovers that Hell is not much different from a seedy version of Earth. Thomas covers in some loving detail the industrial yet almost sentient architecture of Oblivion, and you can almost smell the rust and toxic fumes. There he once again meets with the demoness he rescued and the aforementioned 'further consequences' are set into motion. Without going into spoiler territory, I can say Thomas sets off a powder keg of incendiary action with a literal war between demons, angels and the damned, our hero and his demoness in the midst of it.

Letters from Hades does not aspire to be high art. The interracial (or inter-species) romance is more mainstream than how Mieville would have dealt with it, and the depiction of angels in Hell as bike-ridin' shotgun-totin' toughies is a little on the nose. But what it is, is a thrilling ride with some terrific horror and action set-pieces, brisk to the point of breathless with an ending that simply begs for more. The book would make for a kickass blockbuster film if Hollywood were visionary enough to fund Jeffrey Thomas' imagination for, say, the price of your average Marvel Studios product. Perhaps Mr. Del Toro can be convinced to helm?

Don't Disturb the Dead [Shamya Dasgupta]

While there are flaws in Shamya Dasgupta's Don't Disturb the Dead (DDtD), a book on the Ramsay Brothers and their films, I am on the whole pleased because it was a volume that needed to be written. Most times, in the name of books related to the history of Indian cinema, we only get biographies, or rather hagiographies, of famous film stars. Also audiences, especially those born after the 80's, are unaware of the significant contribution, warts and all, made by the Ramsays towards acceptance of horror in the Indian context (Some young 'uns even think Indian horror initiated with Ram Gopal Varma's Bhoot).

DDtD is thorough in its portrayal of the Ramsay heritage, starting with patriarch FU Ramsay (the family was originally called Ramsinghani and came from pre-partition Lahore. The surname was shortened to Ramsay for the convenience of the British clients at FU's radio store, and has stuck ever since). It chronicles how FU and later his children (Kumar, Tulsi, Shyam, Keshu, Gangu , Arjun and Kiran) got into film-making and how they hit upon their patented horror film formula. The making of a Ramsay film was literally a family affair, with the sons working together in various aspects and even the women of the house pitching in with the hospitality arrangements (Keshu's wife Kavita later did costume design for some films). Tulsi and Shyam were joint directors on most Ramsay flicks; from what we read here, Shyam was the more horror-focused, while Tulsi concerned himself with ensuring the right mix of other ingredients - song & dance, comedy, sexual frisson - that would make their films commercially viable. Keshu Ramsay after a point left the family and started his own production, dropping the Ramsay surname for the films he made, including several Khiladi ventures with Akshay Kumar and then the blockbuster Khakee (which he produced).

DDtD covers the making of several Ramsay features with special attention going to their landmark presentations including Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, Purana Mandir (PM) and Veerana, and later their hugely popular tele-serial Zee Horror Show. There are enlightening interviews with Ramsay stars like Mohnish Bahl, Aarti Gupta-Surendranath and of course Aniruddha (Ajay) Agarwal, the iconic monster-man of several Ramsay features like PM, Saamri and Bandh Darwaza. All of them are very complimentary towards the Ramsay family, about the atmosphere in which those films were shot, how even under the conditions of low budget and short shooting schedules, they did the best they could. It was especially heartening to see input from Aarti Gupta. With Ramsay films like PM, Saamri and Tahkhana she was, for a short spell, the Scream Queen of Indian horror, but soon after, she quit acting, married ad-man Kailash Surendranath, and became a producer and well-known Mumbai socialite. One feared she would be dismissive of these links to her low-brow horror past, but she fondly recalls the warm convival spirit of the shoots, and even though she regrets the negative impact of doing low-budget horror on her acting career, she never has anything bad to say about her experience (unlike beefcake Hemant Tarzan Birje, who blames the Ramsays for his career decline - he did Tahkhana and Veerana with them - and refused to provide any input for the book).

The interviews with the Ramsay family members and their collaborators form the highlight of the book, for which the author must be commended. There is a good amount of anecdotal information presented with a refreshing absence of condescension towards the subject. It is also worthwhile to pick up the paperback for the several memorable stills collated from the shooting and publicity events, which will surely thrill Ramsay fans. However, repetitiveness and padding are an issue. Too many times we are made to hear that the Ramsay policy was to "make them cheap and fast", how their audience was restricted to adult males or young couples, their essential criteria for selecting lead actors being solely "how smart or sexy they looked". The other caveat is the stupendously boring extended exploration of the life and career of all the current generation Ramsay kids (of whom only Shyam's daughter Saasha is currently into horror).

A few things I would have liked to see here: a better critical appraisal of the films themselves. Some of the Ramsay films (like Dahshat and PM) are arguably superior to the others in terms of their construction and impact, and needed to be discussed in that context. Interviews with regular Ramsay stable actors like Deepak Parashar and Anil Dhawan would have been nice. While there is chapter devoted to how the Ramsays got their masks and latex props fabricated by a Mr. Chris Tucker (no relation to the Rush Hour actor, I presume) I wish more had been explored about the make-up work in their films (for instance, what was the semen-like goo covering evil guy Nevla when he emerges from his coffin in Bandh Darwaza?). It's great that Shamya could get quotes about the influence of Ramsay movies from famous film buffs like Sriram Raghavan, Ram Gopal Varma and Sajid Khan, but his repeated reliance on the opinion of blogger Beth Watkins is puzzling, considering she has no specific interest in Indian horror. It would have been more relevant to talk to Omar Ali Khan, who has reviewed a lot of Indian horror on his website, or to the people at Mondo Macabro who licensed several Ramsay films for their Bollywood Horror DVD sets.

Mr. Dasgupta also sometimes displays a degree of naive extrapolation that borders on ludicrous. While Aarti Gupta was apt for her parts in the Ramsay films, suggesting that she could otherwise have fitted into a pantheon of female Indian megastars including Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit is outright laughable. His speculations on the fate of the Ramsay family heritage and the future of their offspring should have also been left on the editing table.

Its misses notwithstanding, DDtD serves as a frequently entertaining and informative look at India's pioneers of the horror film and should definitely picked up by people interested in the topic.

A word of warning: Please skip the introduction written by a dolt called Jai Arjun Singh - it's rambling and pretentious, and more interested in flaunting the writer's knowledge of films than having anything relevant to say about the book that follows.

Amazon India link for Don't Disturb the Dead

Weird Tales of a Bangalorean [ Jayaprakash Sathyamurthy]

Weird Tales... is about as functional a name as you can give for a book that's, well, what it says. But it's also another clever conceit in this sinuous volume packed with slyness: Jayaprakash's Bangalore is the fulcrum of his narratives, a sentient presence, ancient enough for soul-swallowing secrets. There may occasionally be some ostensible location changes but as the author himself says, "Parts of Bangalore aren't in Bangalore at all". It would appear that this Bangalorean always finds bits of his city wherever he goes (perhaps unknowingly he carries them along). Jayaprakash's stories delve into those intriguing facets of the city that have evoked his qualities of observation and imagination, its protagonists almost always transparent surrogates for his Bangalorean self.

With slipped in phrases, whispered references and mostly subtle sleight of hand, he threads the individual stories into a stealthy cloak of collective experience. Certain concepts resonate across stories, but in a sufficiently distinct way as to render them as variations on a theme.

In every sort of creative endeavor, but perhaps more so in in the Weird Tale, every new voice carries with it the spirit of earlier voices. You can find in Jayaprakash's work echoes of both HP Lovecraft's cosmic horror and Thomas Ligotti's existential horror - My Saints Are Down for whatever reason had me thinking back to Ligotti's Last Feast of The Harlequin, which in turn was a homage to Lovecraft's The Festival - we come full circle here.

In a collection everyone will have their favorites, mine is The Song of The Eukarya - here he takes the time to first build an emotional resonance with the characters which he then craftily employs to make us feel their horror as it unfolds. If I were to nitpick I'd say the last entry (Bean Town Blues) seems a little forced in its attempt to join up the earlier experiences, like some cast bow after the curtains fall. But that's, like I say, a nitpick, and one that in no way effaces the brilliance of everything that comes before it. I finished the book almost entirely in a single short duration flight and intend to return to it soon to revel in the simply marvelous spider-web of imagination that is Jayaprakash's work.

King Solomon's Slaughter

Call me a politically-correct wuss, but some 50 pages into King Solomon's Mines by Rider Haggard, I'm more than a little horrified by what constitutes heroic adventure here. A trio of white men lead a band of African natives to look for the brother of one of the white men who was last heard of making his way towards the mythical mines. In the course of this expedition, they enter wild country and their first reaction is "Oh look, animals. Let's shoot them all. This brother hunting mission can wait." And it's not like they shoot what they can eat. Not even close. After shooting a giraffe, the 3 white men out of a total party of 10 shoot down 8 full grown elephants from a herd. That's nearly one elephant per man. And the rest of the herd gets to escape only because these trigger happy blokes got tired of chasing after them. Apart from these 8, there's a badly wounded bull elephant who goes on a rampage, finally running blind toward the white man who shot him in the first place. Just when you think that some redemption is at hand, it's not he who dies but a poor native who steps forth to hurl a lance at the beast to save his "I'll shoot me down a brace of elephants" master.

I'm wondering if I should go ahead with this.

Anyway, the book in question being out of copyright, I can safely paste the text that offended me:

Presently we caught sight of the herd, which numbered, as Ventvögel had said, between twenty and thirty, standing in a hollow, having finished their morning meal, and flapping their great ears. It was a splendid sight, for they were only about two hundred yards from us. Taking a handful of dry grass, I threw it into the air to see how the wind was; for if once they winded us I knew they would be off before we could get a shot. Finding that, if anything, it blew from the elephants to us, we crept on stealthily, and thanks to the cover managed to get within forty yards or so of the great brutes. Just in front of us, and broadside on, stood three splendid bulls, one of them with enormous tusks. I whispered to the others that I would take the middle one; Sir Henry covering the elephant to the left, and Good the bull with the big tusks.

"Now," I whispered.

Boom! boom! boom! went the three heavy rifles, and down came Sir Henry's elephant dead as a hammer, shot right through the heart. Mine fell on to its knees and I thought that he was going to die, but in another moment he was up and off, tearing along straight past me. As he went I gave him the second barrel in the ribs, and this brought him down in good earnest. Hastily slipping in two fresh cartridges I ran close up to him, and a ball through the brain put an end to the poor brute's struggles. Then I turned to see how Good had fared with the big bull, which I had heard screaming with rage and pain as I gave mine its quietus. On reaching the captain I found him in a great state of excitement. It appeared that on receiving the bullet the bull had turned and come straight for his assailant, who had barely time to get out of his way, and then charged on blindly past him, in the direction of our encampment. Meanwhile the herd had crashed off in wild alarm in the other direction.

For awhile we debated whether to go after the wounded bull or to follow the herd, and finally deciding for the latter alternative, departed, thinking that we had seen the last of those big tusks. I have often wished since that we had. It was easy work to follow the elephants, for they had left a trail like a carriage road behind them, crushing down the thick bush in their furious flight as though it were tambouki grass.

But to come up with them was another matter, and we had struggled on under the broiling sun for over two hours before we found them. With the exception of one bull, they were standing together, and I could see, from their unquiet way and the manner in which they kept lifting their trunks to test the air, that they were on the look-out for mischief. The solitary bull stood fifty yards or so to this side of the herd, over which he was evidently keeping sentry, and about sixty yards from us. Thinking that he would see or wind us, and that it would probably start them off again if we tried to get nearer, especially as the ground was rather open, we all aimed at this bull, and at my whispered word, we fired. The three shots took effect, and down he went dead. Again the herd started, but unfortunately for them about a hundred yards further on was a nullah, or dried-out water track, with steep banks, a place very much resembling the one where the Prince Imperial was killed in Zululand. Into this the elephants plunged, and when we reached the edge we found them struggling in wild confusion to get up the other bank, filling the air with their screams, and trumpeting as they pushed one another aside in their selfish panic, just like so many human beings. Now was our opportunity, and firing away as quickly as we could load, we killed five of the poor beasts, and no doubt should have bagged the whole herd, had they not suddenly given up their attempts to climb the bank and rushed headlong down the nullah. We were too tired to follow them, and perhaps also a little sick of slaughter, eight elephants being a pretty good bag for one day.

Bat Lash

Spotted this as one of the DC Showcases available on Flipkart, and since the price was significantly lower than the standard ones, I did a recce on it. Turned out the price was low since the Showcase itself was significantly smaller - Bat Lash was a character with a very short run. I did some reading up which made these comics seem my sort, so I took the gamble.

Bat Lash is a Western hero come up with by Sergio Aragones (MAD magazine, Groo) and Dennis O' Neil (lots of my fav Batman era comics). When I saw that line-up I knew I had to check it out. Having read through the entire volume in a couple sittings, I can say I didn't regret it. Lash is in most of his outings the old-skool happy go lucky type, attracted to the ladies and while (very unsuccessfully) not looking for a fight, doesn't flinch away from one that comes to him...and one always does. The character is very similar to Terence Hill's Trinity and to a smaller extent, Bruce Campbell's Brisco County Jr. (a major difference being that Brisco is on the side of the law). Most episodes are self-contained and feature Lash getting into and out of a scrape, and kissing a pretty girl at some point. Towards the latter part of the series, Bat Lash's origin is revealed: His family was a duped by a land grabber and apathy from the law drove him to become a murderer and fugitive. The episodes dealing with the origin have a darker tone than the other stories. On the whole this is decent light reading if you like that sort of thing.

The Coroner's Lunch [Colin Cotterill]

Equal parts crime thriller, ghost story and political lampoon, The Coroner's Lunch mixes these éléments divers to provide an engaging tale. The unlikely hero here is Siri, a septuagenarian doctor in communist Laos compelled by those in authority to be the state's sole coroner, though he has neither aptitude nor inclination for the job. With only a cheerful magazine-reading nurse and a Down Syndrome afflicted attendant by his side, Siri must rely on outdated manuals and scarce chemical resources to do the best he can, which is barely competent, and only his wry humor keeps him from losing his control with an incomprehensible bureaucracy. And oh, Siri often encounters the ghosts of his autopsy 'patients'.

The mystery kicks off with the death of the wife of a high-ranking bureaucrat, seemingly an accident. But aided by his investigative instincts and more than a little help from his "friends on the other side", Siri finds himself reeling in a tangled thread of murder and conspiracy that would not be out of place in a Raymond Chandler book. Siri however is no Marlowe clone; his bitterness is far mellowed by age and resignation, and he retains more faith in his fellow-men (and their post-death avatars) than that archetype of the burned out sleuth.

Cotterill's prose has that very enviable quality of “readability”. Indeed, it was a cursory glance over the first few pages that prompted me to buy a book by an author I had never heard of before. The characters are sharply etched and the humor, be it the digs at the state's absurd Big Brother mentality or bawdy age-related jokes, constantly nails you - This could easily be the script for a Joon-Ho Bong film (Memories of Murder, The Host).

The Coroner's Lunch is not quite a masterpiece. There are several instances of deus ex machina including Siri's all-too-convenient encounters with the spirit world, which sully the process of unraveling the puzzle. But it's still an entertaining ride, holding up a lot better than Smilla's Sense of Snow so far as stories of unlikely detectives goes.

My verdict for The Coroner's Lunch: Quite palatable!

The Big Sleep [Raymond Chandler]

Though I had heard much of his reputation as a storyteller, The Big Sleep was my first ever experience of a Raymond Chandler book; coincidentally, it is Chandler’s first novel as well.

TBS introduces us to the shadow-draped morally ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s much-lauded contribution to the annals of detective fiction. Marlowe is the noir sleuth archetype: inelegant but professional, cynical but honest, committed to his duty, if more than a little disgusted at the world he functions in. To Chandler’s immense credit, Marlowe escapes being a furnishing of cliché pose and while you may not call him to drive away your blues, Marlowe in his own way is a likable man.

We pick up the line of TBS’ tangled web when Marlowe takes on a case to tackle a blackmailer tapping the wealthy iron-willed but invalid General Sternwood with some incriminating notes regarding his younger daughter Carmen. Marlowe investigates, only to find that things are never as simple as they seem. Events develop a habit of going out of control, one evil thread twines with another, and murder makes appearances with alarming regularity. Time and again, Marlowe is referred by various characters to the disappearance of the husband of Sternwood’s elder daughter Vivian, till he begins to wonder why he has actually been hired.

Chandler's narrative takes through a world that, be it the more-than-“bratty rich” shenanigans of the Sternwood daughters or the gallery of shadowy characters that touch their lives at various points, is a sump of moral decay. Marlowe must make his way through the slime of dark human nature and it is a journey that will bruise him in more ways than one.

TBS is not the sort of detective tale that hangs solely upon the unraveling of the tantalizing whodunit puzzle, that dazzling flourish of ingenuity where the master-of-his-game sleuth surprises and delights us at the conclusion with his impeccable deduction. To quote Marlowe's words, “I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don't expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it.”

What Chandler offers here is a gripping and insightful journey into the darkness that lurks in the heart of a society where you don't need to pull a trigger to be a killer and morality sleeps the big sleep. TBS has a fine ending, to be sure, but it's a great book long before we get there.

P.S. this review was written a good while back when TBS was the only Marlowe book I had read. Subsequently I went through The Long Goodbye and Farewell, My Lovely. The plots are different but they follow a similar character path so yes, it's like variations on a theme but  Chandler plays them well enough to be enjoyable all over again. These books are definite candidates for the re-read pile.

Fifty-One Tales [Lord Dunsany]

For a book that contains 51 tales this is a remarkably slim volume at around a 100 pages. That's because this collection of Lord Dunsany's work (my first exposure to it) consists entirely of little fables, fragments of dreams or mood pieces.

Going through it one easily understands the fascination that H.P. Lovecraft had for Dunsany's writings. Sorrow over the relentless and unthinking march of modern civilization and the loss of glories past, a love of nature and rusticity, and deep affection for ancient mythology...yes, themes that were reflected in some of Lovecraft's works in what he referred to as his 'Dunsanian' phase.

Considering the brevity of the content it is but given that none of the stories carry much complexity or forceful impact, and there is a sense of "variations on a theme" traveling through several of them. Really what this collection is worth going through for is Dunsany's prose style, which has an unmistakable lilt to it - the simple yet majestic construction of sentences that ask to be read aloud and, like really fine brandy, savored on the tongue.

Consider this little example, the closure to a short called Charon:

...the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.

"I am the last," he said.

No one had ever made Charon smile before, none one before had ever made him weep.

 Thanks Nivedita, for a very thoughtful gift.