2016 has been a banner year for smart, thought-provoking takes on Ye Olde Cthulhu Mythos. The first standout was Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and now we’ve got Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers On Bone, a neo-noir with all its tentacles in the right place.
The book starts off on safe enough ground – a private eye welcomes a client into his office. Only in this case, the private eye is both more and less than he seems to be, and the client is a small child named Abel who wants his stepfather murdered. It seems that stepdad’s likely to murder Abel’s brother, and there’s no one else that he can turn to, and…and of course there’s far more to it than meets the eye, but the delicious inversion of the standard noir trope where the very face of innocence comes in demanding murder for hire lets the reader know what kind of ride they’re going to be on.
Then there’s the private eye, who goes by the ironic name Mr. John Persons. It’s ironic because a person is exactly what he isn’t, though as the story progresses it’s clear that humanity is exactly what he wants and struggles to hang on to. And this is despite the universe – or several universe’s – best attempts to forcibly rip it away.
A great deal of Lovecraft pastiche is, for lack of a better word, bloodless; restricted to dusty libraries and protagonists whose personal resources are such that they can in fact afford a copy of the latest edition of Von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten because their old one got dog-eared when they loaned it to some chap at Miskatonic. Khaw demolishes that from the get-go, placing her otherworldly horrors right in the middle of the working-class world. It’s the factory floor and the neighborhood shebeen that are the places horror pokes through to the everyday world, not some far-off plateau or glittering dreamscape. The extradimensional monstrosities and basic human urges get synergistically mixed up, creating something fresher and more emotionally true that so many other excursions into Cthulhiana.
Nor is Khaw afraid to take on the sometimes too-rigid conventions of the idiom she’s working in. While lovers of canon may gasp in outrage at the way she reworks some of the core pillars of the mythos, the end result is a more vibrant, inviting look at what seemed like utterly alien, unknowable, and in some cases, flat entities. Persons’s motivation for lurching around in human skin is simultaneously outside anything you’d expect in a story like this and entirely reasonable that when it’s revealed, it’s a laugh out loud moment of “but of course” inevitability. Khaw’s not here to tell us that the universe is full of vast, uncaring powers; we know that already. She’s more interested in the intersection, for good and ill, of those powers with the mundane and the precious.
If there’s one place the book slips a little, it’s in the climactic fight scene. The muck and grime of Khaw’s London is apparent everywhere except when Persons and the critter-tainted stepfather throw down. The fight feels distanced, the outcome foreordained, and it drains a frisson of tension from the goings-on. But that’s an exceedingly minor quibble in the face of everything else that’s going on, and truth be told, the point isn’t the defeat of the monstrous stepdad. It’s in what that reveals, and in the journey to confrontation.
Hammers On Bone is a remarkable read, It breathes new life into often-stale tropes and conventions, using noir to open a new window on Lovecraft and Yog-Sothothery to freshen up some of the moldier aspects of noir. A reader looking for faithful recitation of what has gone before might be baffled, but anyone looking to delight in a new exploration of the possibilities of those golden oldies will find the book irresistible, and will be waiting impatiently for more of Mr. Persons’ adventures as soon as Khaw can deliver them.
(Tor.com, 2016)
