What? What the heck are you talking about, John Claude?
A few years ago I received Terry Gilliam's movie of Thompson's "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" as a Christmas gift. It was a strange time in my life, somehow in between everything, it seemed. So for a solid month, winding through to the end of January, I watched that movie every day.
Really.
Something triggered in my wee brain, a thought of a Cthulhu story based in Thompson's world, a mash-up of truly bizarre possibilities. I went into my books, looking for the Thompson book, of course, and could not find it. I wanted to go to the source material, get to Thompson's Gonzoid Heart. I was quite surprised to find how well the movie actually uncorporated much of his twisted, drug-fueled tale. Some reviewers have noted how the story initially feels a lot more like the movie than the book (before it completely becomes its own strange beast), but the book is all there, on screen, so I simply followed that starting point...and went off the rails.
Our event had nothing to do with motorcylces, oh no. We--my attorney and yours truly; my attorney being a little green around the gills...--were there to report on, as I wrote, the "21st Century Fox/NASA sponsored Marilyn Monroe Weekend of Memories commemoration of the fiftieth year of her death, a perverse celebration littered with every conceivable Marilyn Monroe imitator this side of Jupiter, culminating in a contest to pick the very best Marilyn Monroe to carry on with a movie contract and manufactured career, and to promote whatever NASA needed them to promote. Whores for the universe, prostitutes in league with Republicans, Satanists, and whatever other demented legions would flock to this horrid place this weekend."
Yes, and that's only the beginning. Well, the middle actually, but...er...
The writer's brain is a strange place, indeed. My brain is a wicked playground, as I like to say. Frolicking with the bizarre ideas is a regular pastime...
Anyway, you can check out the story in the first volume of the Cthulhu Unbound anthology series from Permuted Press. A great selection of mixed genre takes on Cthulhu and his cohorts.
Here's a rambling sample as my attorney and I get situated at the main event. We've both ingested the appropriate drugs for our showdown, and to enlighten our experience. My attorney, in cahoots with Cthulhu, getting the worst of it as...well, you'll see...
***
We were linked as
one, my mind and his, mine in the driver’s seat. His, trembling in the backseat, wishing it
were in the trunk.
In our eyes the
ceiling opened up, and a universe of stars seemed to align themselves in ways I
could never imagine.
“The stars are
right, the stars are right,” screamed my attorney.
“Not quite,” I
said, smiling as satellites within the star systems neared us.
“What? What is that?” My attorney scooted under the
table. Around us, people grumbled at our
antics, not understanding the magnitude of what was unfolding within our
vision.
The True Great Old
Ones ambled into view. My attorney let
out a sound drenched in such fear as to demote all previous definitions of the
word to obsolescence.
It stumbled from the right side of the sky,
the drunken master of dulcet blandness: Dean Martin. From the left, the hideous cyclopean essence
of the ebony one: Sammy Davis Jr.
My attorney
whimpered with such abandon as to lose all hold on his masquerade, dissolving
into a diseased, writhing mound of chum, a squiggly conglomeration of fish
heads and tentacles and fins, flaking scales, aged green sea-algae, and
serpentine madness.
From dead center,
the ultimate in crooning egotism, the Lord of Las Vegas, the Grand Meatball…the
dread that is--
“Sinatra!” cried
my attorney, falling under His spell.
“Sinatra!”
As my attorney
thrashed about, whiplash tentacles decapitating enough Marilyns to make this
more a Jane Mansfield memorial the audience scattered, miffed.
All that was left
was to let it play out. As the concert
went on--the celestial serenade--my attorney began to melt, captivated, and yet
the spell they cast was the one thing that could deter his quest for world domination.
The stench
attained a pungent magnitude that assaulted my nostrils. The percolating eddies of his essence
reverted back to their primal form, the first boiling seeds of life that swam
in the seas. I doffed my hat in
remembrance.
***
And, yes, there's still much more weird nonsense to be revealed! A fun ride, a fun write, pure madness!
Next, well, probably the print version of the collection news, but there's also iong to be some new teasers, perhaps, for the collection, the one you should have already bought, but if you haven't well, what's keepin' ya? Yeah, The Dark is Light Enough for Me, twelve stories of twisted desire, madness, horror, icky stuff, and dark dark dark. Or there's the Christmas, um...story. And even the Bukowski Christmas poem. So, yes, a lot to look forward to. Are you ready? Really? You think so, eh?
;-)
Here's the Lovely cover art from Cthulhu Unbound, Volume 1. Check it out, it's a great and wild ride. What? Oh, yes, see, this was the largest, cleanest picture of the cover that I could find, believe it or not. With the Amazon.com Look Inside deal on it. Yes, I thought that strange, too.
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