You likely won’t need a doctorate in post-structuralist hermeneutics to deduce that The Nickronomicon is Nick Mamatas‘s collection of his shorter Lovecraftian fiction, beautifully put together by Innsmouth Free Press with some really splendidly squamous illustrations from GMB Chomichuk. The whole collection of 13 stories is an engagement with, or an interrogation of the Lovecraftian legacy, typified by the kickoff story “Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights,” Mamatas’s piece of fake Lovecraft literary archaeology, based on the chance discovery of a postcard sent back and forth between HPL himself and his correspondent Arthur H. Goodenough. And the metatextual assault on the Lovecraft corpus (and corpse) continues with the Bram Stoker Award-nominated “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft,” co-authored with Tim Pratt, where an unhinged connoisseur of HPL memorabilia actually attempts to project his mind back in time and “collect” Lovecraft himself.
Mamatas has been doing the Lovecraftian mash-up long and well, with his 2006 Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award-nominated Beat Generation splice and full-length debut Move Under Ground, and more recently, his 2011 gonzo journalism pastiche The Damned Highway, co-authored with Brian Keene, and these are shorter excursions in the same general direction, some contemporary with Move Under Ground, others as recent as 2013. Lovecraft crops up as an actual character, as well as an abiding presence, in “Mainevermontnewhampshiremass” and even more memorably in the fascinating “Jitterbuggin’,” where the amiable old racist bigot actually confronts the dread temptation of “a dark power beyond reason”: “I was dancing, dancing to Negro music! And I liked it!” There are enough Lovecraftians of color (various colors, actually) and post-miscegenants fielded to tackle Lovecraft’s bigotry head on, but the stories don’t stay confined to affirmative annihilation: “Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep,” for instance, takes Lovecraftiana into the post-Upload virtual world of Cory Doctorow’s “True Names” to terrific effect.
And as this suggests, you’d be surprised how often this contorted approach to another writer’s hugely influential legacy works when read as straight horror. This is definitely Lovecraftian fiction amply well equipped to survive in the post-modern post-WFA-trophy-redaction-controversy era, crafted in prose so knowing and self-aware it could pass a Turing Test, but any doubts as to its creative posture (or ideology) can immediately be stilled by its brilliant construction. Mamatas is very good at endings. Extremely. The kind that bring together all the threads in a tale and tie it off with a twist sharp enough to snap your vertebrae. The concluding “On the Occasion of My Retirement” is an especially fine example, with its simple everyday little narrative of (spoilation ahead) … a just-former tenured Professor of Semiotics, of color, at Miskatonic University, dismissed over a sexual harassment suit and transitioned, courtesy of a cultish statuette and murderous ex-colleagues (and ex’s), to godhead via anthood and an associated sex change. There, didn’t that just roll off the tongue? Believe me, it’s weird, whacky and wonderful shit, calculated to wean any reader off the black meat of Brazilian centipedes and onto more fungoid delicacies. Recommended.
