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blatherskiteJust finished Cherie Priest's Maplecroft: the Borden Dispatches, and like the other examples of her writing that I've read, I can recommend this one highly.
Maplecroft is a carefully researched "what if?" about the historical figure of Lizzie Borden ("Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks..."), crossbred with a Lovecraftian "bad things happen to good, bad, and indifferent people because the universe at best ignores us and at worst, actively hates us". The basic premise is that Lizzie wasn't a crazed murderer, but rather someone who fell into Lovecraft's world and was forced to defend herself and her loved ones as best she could, with wholly inadequate tools. It's far more restrained linguistically than Lovecraft, and (for obvious reasons) not misogynistic, and therefore it's more deeply affecting. The story is told as an epistolary (i.e., via letters and journal entries), which proves to be a very effective way of introducing many POV characters who don't always understand what the other characters are doing or thinking. Priest combines the best of first-person narration with unreliable narrators, and does so masterfully.
Lizzie, though our main protagonist, is accompanied by several other key viewpoint characters. Like a late-Victorian Buffy the Vampire Slayer with her "Scoobie gang", Lizzie courageously fights the forces of darkness that have chosen to destroy her family, while simultaneously dealing with the "mundane" and in many ways equally horrible ravages of "consumption" (her sister's losing fight with tuberculosis)*. Like Buffy, she and other characters make many well-intended mistakes (some tragic) that have profound consequences. I won't spoil things by telling you how the story turns out, but it's a deeply human tale of a struggle against impossible odds and incomprehensible forces. As in the best Lovecraft, there are costs and consequences for everyone who gets drawn into the darkness. Nobody escapes completely intact, no matter their intellect or virtue.
* A very interesting parallel if you want to go all lit-crit.
One non-spoiler false note: Because the 1890s are a key period during which the scientific enlightenment really got rolling good and hard, several protagonists try to explain what's happening to them in scientific terms, even as they learn that this worldview doesn't match their increasingly Lovecraftian world very well*. This is fine so far as it goes; we humans use our mental models of how things work to understand our world, and the scientific worldview was a key mental model at this time. Where this goes astray is when Priest enlists it as a valid mechanism for dealing with the inexplicable and fighting the unfightable. To me, it would have been more effective to leave the inexplicable unexplained and show how the mental model failed; when you cling to a reassuring belief (here, that anything can be understood through the application of logic and science) while the world falls apart around you, the horror is compounded when that belief proves false. This authorial choice doesn't in any way ruin the book, but it diminished some of its punch towards the end.
* Brian Lumley wrote a bunch of stories in this vein. They're enjoyable works on their own terms, and a nicely executed response to Lovecraft (i.e., humans *can* fight successfully against madness and a hostile universe through rationalism and technology or technologized magic), but as a result, I felt they lost some of their punch. Charles Stross strikes me as doing a better job of mashing up science and Lovecraft, particularly in the deeply chilling A Colder War.
Maplecroft is a carefully researched "what if?" about the historical figure of Lizzie Borden ("Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks..."), crossbred with a Lovecraftian "bad things happen to good, bad, and indifferent people because the universe at best ignores us and at worst, actively hates us". The basic premise is that Lizzie wasn't a crazed murderer, but rather someone who fell into Lovecraft's world and was forced to defend herself and her loved ones as best she could, with wholly inadequate tools. It's far more restrained linguistically than Lovecraft, and (for obvious reasons) not misogynistic, and therefore it's more deeply affecting. The story is told as an epistolary (i.e., via letters and journal entries), which proves to be a very effective way of introducing many POV characters who don't always understand what the other characters are doing or thinking. Priest combines the best of first-person narration with unreliable narrators, and does so masterfully.
Lizzie, though our main protagonist, is accompanied by several other key viewpoint characters. Like a late-Victorian Buffy the Vampire Slayer with her "Scoobie gang", Lizzie courageously fights the forces of darkness that have chosen to destroy her family, while simultaneously dealing with the "mundane" and in many ways equally horrible ravages of "consumption" (her sister's losing fight with tuberculosis)*. Like Buffy, she and other characters make many well-intended mistakes (some tragic) that have profound consequences. I won't spoil things by telling you how the story turns out, but it's a deeply human tale of a struggle against impossible odds and incomprehensible forces. As in the best Lovecraft, there are costs and consequences for everyone who gets drawn into the darkness. Nobody escapes completely intact, no matter their intellect or virtue.
* A very interesting parallel if you want to go all lit-crit.
One non-spoiler false note: Because the 1890s are a key period during which the scientific enlightenment really got rolling good and hard, several protagonists try to explain what's happening to them in scientific terms, even as they learn that this worldview doesn't match their increasingly Lovecraftian world very well*. This is fine so far as it goes; we humans use our mental models of how things work to understand our world, and the scientific worldview was a key mental model at this time. Where this goes astray is when Priest enlists it as a valid mechanism for dealing with the inexplicable and fighting the unfightable. To me, it would have been more effective to leave the inexplicable unexplained and show how the mental model failed; when you cling to a reassuring belief (here, that anything can be understood through the application of logic and science) while the world falls apart around you, the horror is compounded when that belief proves false. This authorial choice doesn't in any way ruin the book, but it diminished some of its punch towards the end.
* Brian Lumley wrote a bunch of stories in this vein. They're enjoyable works on their own terms, and a nicely executed response to Lovecraft (i.e., humans *can* fight successfully against madness and a hostile universe through rationalism and technology or technologized magic), but as a result, I felt they lost some of their punch. Charles Stross strikes me as doing a better job of mashing up science and Lovecraft, particularly in the deeply chilling A Colder War.