Canadian Cosmic Horror Content
You people -- especially you Canadian people -- are all fired. I had to learn about Torontonian Robert Charles Wilson's The Perseids and Other Stories on the streets like a common ammonite, instead of having one of you press it upon me as a book that I quite obviously needed to Read Right Now. "But we thought you'd read it," I hear you whine in cringing self-justification. Seriously -- if I'd already read it, wouldn't I have been badgering you to read it? Think, people.

Technically, I learned about TPaOS on the Internets, while searching for reviews of Nick Mamatas' "Beat Cthulhu mythos" novel Move Under Ground, which concerns Jack Kerouac and the rise of R'lyeh. Anyhow, I stumbled across some website or other that reviewed both books (favorably) as elements of the "new Lovecraftianism" or something like that. The notion that Robert Charles Wilson, whose Darwinia, Chronoliths, and Mysterium all impressed me mightily with their conceit and their intellectual bravery, had written a linked collection of short stories that could be read as a Lovecraftian exercise interested me strangely. So, after much faffing around with Amazon Z-shops, I finally got the thing today (in pristine hardback, for about six bucks all told), and promptly read it in one sitting.

I would argue, at least as a starting place, that Move Under Ground is a satisfactory version of the more common sort of worthwhile Mythos story, in which the author finds one facet of the Mythos that can be shaped to cover the story they actually wanted to write. TPaOS is a still more satisfactory version of the far less common sort of worthwhile Mythos story, in which the author groks Lovecraftian cosmic horror so completely that any actual involvement of the Mythos comes merely as a grace note, like the grassy hint of flavor in expensive top-shelf vodka.[*] I adduce, here, the works of Thomas Ligotti, the surprisingly powerful novel Threshold by Caitlin R. Kiernan, and short stories such as "Details" by China Mieville or "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner. To be fair, one could retro-include Blackwood's "The Willows" in this list, and point out that cosmic horror is only "Lovecraftian" insofar as he was its greatest exponent, and further point out that absolutely no literal "Mythos element" appears -- by name, anyhow -- in TPaOS. But that said, TPaOS feels -- is -- very Lovecraftian.

A smattering of sample phrases, one from (almost) each story: "entities that live and evolve entirely in the logarithms of computers, the high alps of the gnososphere"; "the ideal paracartographical map charts not a territory but a mind, or at least it merges the two"; "One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look in order to understand."; "Brain cells talk in chemistry, did you know that? ... Like insects."; "Artifacts and sleight of hand."; "Vampires you can't see in a mirror. I think what Donald is talking about are monsters you can only see in a mirror."; "as the observer's life grows more unlikely, he perceives the world around him becoming proportionally more strange"; "wasn't that somehow appropriate? That her epiphany should be unspeakable?" Every story reveals about two-thirds of a really terrific idea -- enough that you extrapolate to the real unspeakable shock -- and about a twenty-fourth of one or two others, glimpsed in passing. It's a terrific method for cosmic horror.

It's not all Lovecraftian, by any stretch. I was powerfully reminded of the more philosophical Poul Anderson, especially the stories from his unfairly overlooked anthology The Gods Laughed, and Wilson's "Ulysses Sees The Moon In The Bedroom Window" is comparable in effect, and in psychology, to M.R. James. But even the weakest story in here, a hasty effort at an inverted Demeter myth, "Pearl Baby", is still interestingly crafted and well worth the effort.

Tell you what -- if you read it Right Now, I won't fire you.

[*] The most common sort of Mythos story, the slavish imitation of Lovecraft down to the italics and adjectives, is only worthwhile by accident, or in historic terms, much as I may enjoy it withal.