I may be the wrong person to review this book. I've never read any of the Beat writers who Nick Mamatas lovingly imitates and appropriates in this book, not even Kerouac's On the Road.I have, however, read plenty of Lovecraft, and other authors treading in Lovecraft's mythos. And, umm, I grew up in California. Albeit not in the 60s. So I kinda know what Mamatas is playing with here.Move Under Ground was Mamatas's debut novel, and it's quite a trippy read. It really is about Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady trying to save the world from Cthulhu.R'lyeh rises in the Pacific, and Cthulhu hangs as a ghostly specter over the West Coast. The world starts going mad. San Francisco is flooded. So Jack Kerouac hits the road heading East. He hooks up with his buddies Bill and Neal and they try to outrun the end of the world, even as Azathoth is absorbing the East Coast. There are cameos by Allen Ginsberg and probably a bunch of other people whose references I missed.So, is this a Beat novel or a Lovecraft mythos novel? It's both! As I said, I have not read any of the Beat writers, but Mamatas sure has a compelling and convincing style here, and at the same time, he captures the hopeless, alien madness of encountering the Elder Gods like few Lovecraftian authors I have seen. As Kerouac and his blitzed, boozy buddies drift through the blasted Midwest, a Shoggoth-infested Chicago, and on to a post-apocalyptic New York, it's not so much an adventure as a road trip through a hell that would make Virgil piss his pants.Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of cultists, some of them sprawled out on the street, elongated chitinous scythes where their hands used to be dragging across the ground, hundreds of others gathered around storefront churches or crowded onto corners, all waiting and buzzing. "Wup! Wup! Neal approaches! The Man Of Two Worlds, chosen one of Azathoth! All hail Neal!" I cut the wheel hard and proceeded to downtown Chicago, but there wasn't a true human on the streets anymore. Only mockeries of life: flatulent mugwumps in clouds of swampgas, children oozing along the streets on a mass of thick cilia, hawking newspapers of human skin scrawled with unspeakable blasphemies, letters you couldn't even trace upon a page without the madness coming for you. And those were the remnants of our sweet race, the folks who were people once before R'lyeh rose and the missiles tore their way up from the deserts--there were plenty of pretty girls with a smile for our dream car and swarthy working stiffs, chests broad as barrels and V-shaped torsos leading to chinos and black boots, but there were not women, they were not women, they were not men. Shoggoths to a being they were, phalanges, avatars of insanity and destruction mocking me with human form and countenance.It's a bleak, bleak trip, man. Full of shoggoth orgies and rivers of shit and unspeakable blasphemies.It may be hard to follow the narrative since Kerouac is narrating like Kerouac and he's stoned most of the time (who can blame him?). Images are nightmarish and surreal. Cthulhu filling the sky as a new feature in the celestial firmament. A man pinching stars out between his fingers. Shoggoth orgies.The plot is barely there, though there is a climax. I nearly gave it all away, but under the world I made, I saw the one Neal made: drowned coasts, the dead everywhere, clicking beetlemen working in their dark, satanic mills, illusions of gilded trade laid bare. Was it any less beautiful? Of course not--misery is mayfly, beauty dross. Only the spirit, ineffable, remains eternal. There was a choice though; I was given a coin and just had to flip it. And there was a choice for me too.To be Buddha, to embrace bliss, and leave the world as I'd left it after my travels, in ruins. Or to cut loose the silver chord, to set the world alight by offering up my own divine spark, my chance for escape from suffering. Psychic suicide, that's what it was, nothing less. I'd pour every single joy I ever had into Creation, or it would collapse back into Neal's nightmare. Or I could wring myself dry like a dishrag, and walk the earth dead inside, the neighborhood dog-catcher or the blocked writer in front of an eternally blank and unspoiled page, without even the buzz of sweet Marie in my ear anymore.What's the difference between having no desire and having desire for nothingness? Neal didn't know; that's why he threw his lot in with late-night poker games and cross-country chases for his own tail. He loved his own Nealness too much to lose it without wanting to take the rest of us with him. He desired nothingness, but thought he had no desire. How could the Dark Dreamer not awaken from his feverish sleep and embrace the poor boy? I wasn't too clear on the distinction between the two choices myself, really, but rational thought isn't the key to answering the irrational question, is it?For all that it's an absurd concept, Move Under Ground is a brief little aberration with literary chops, written by an MFA-ish writer who embraces genre fiction and gives it a big sloppy kiss with tongue, then adds tentacles and grue.That said, I can't say this book really made me want to read On The Road. Not my style, Daddy-O. But if you are into either Beat prose or Lovecraft, even if the mixing of the two sounds bizarre, then you should certainly check out this unique work. 3.5 stars, which I'd like to bump to 4 but despite my bemusement by the concept and my appreciation of Mamatas's literary stunt-writing, the story ended up being too much a vehicle for the style and the author's cleverness.
After the publication of 'On the Road', Jack Kerouac is hiding out in a cabin in Big Sur on the edge of the pacific when he starts getting letters from his old road buddy Neal Cassady. Something is seriously sick at the heart of America and only the beats and the poets and the bums can see it. Mugwumps, beetlemen, squid handed girls and murderous cultists are on the streets and the only way to avoid them is to move underground. Oh, and somewhere out in the dark waters the dead city of R'lyeh is rising and a dreaming god is about to wake up.In a nutshell this is HP Lovecraft crossed with Jack Kerouac on a road trip across America. What could have been a simple parody is actually a surreal bit of beat poetry that captures the tone of both of its sources in a remarkably effective and ultimately horrifying way. As well as Neal Cassady, other characters from the beat generation including Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs put in appearances with nods to their particular oeuvres. Fans of 'Naked Lunch' will appreciate the importance of arming yourself with canisters of bug spray ...An excellent short read, and available as a free e-book too.
Do You like book Move Under Ground (2006)?
"What if H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic demons showed up in a Jack Kerouac novel": this could be a gimmicky lark like the Sherlock-Holmes-versus-Dracula kind of thing various people have done, or it could be the kind of dense historical fantasy that Tim Powers is good at, but Mamatas is on to something different. For one thing, he writes the whole thing as Kerouac, not just mimicking his style but with a real feeling for his character and for the things he cared about. But he's also got a good reason for this particular mash-up, a very ambitious reason - and he lets you know this right off by breaking the first promise such stories normally make, which is to leave something unscathed. It's not just our heroes in a secret skirmish with monsters in the sewer; no, Cthulhu has pretty much taken over the world, America is now a dreamlike hell and we are all screwed. Raise your hand if you sometimes feel like that.Lovecraft wrote a lot about ultimate evil waiting to destroy our bodies and souls - and he wrote like someone who knew nothing about life except what he'd read in Victorian pulp or in Poe, but he still managed to express, in his verbose and nerdy way, the postwar feeling that the established order had cracked and revealed something rotten at the core. What exactly it would mean for it to crack all the way wasn't something he cared to go into, but, thirty years and another world war later, the Beat writers were part of a shift in attention toward those fractures and what might come out of them. What's destruction, what's insanity, is it good or bad; what's humanity, what's freedom, what's worth keeping?So, following Kerouac's own tendency to assign mythic roles to his friends, Mamatas uses the Beats for different responses to the question: "What do you do when the status quo seems very very wrong?" William Burroughs is the best equipped to deal with Cthulhian America: slimy appendages, half-human authority figures and gratuitous cruelty were how he already saw the world, and now he gets to shoot monsters. Allen Ginsberg laughs and retreats into private playtime. Jack can't go either way - he's too interested in people, and he's trying to practice Buddhist compassionate detachment, a point of view that doesn't grant any special status to the apocalypse. Mamatas writes very convincingly from that point of view, and it's a startling effect, undercutting the nihilistic horror of Lovecraft and Burroughs with humane bemusement at the ways people fall into illusion and violence. The Cthulhu cultists aren't the slavering savages Lovecraft was afraid of; they're conformist citizens in a late-stage fascist delirium, dancing to entertain children that they forgot they killed. (The oddly warm-hearted tone, within the carnival of atrocities, also lets Mamatas be very funny. In one of several little travelogue scenes that would've fit perfectly in On the Road, a small-town waitress snickers at the pretensions of local demon-worshippers, who've "never seen a tentacle" because they're landlocked in the Midwest.)The plot, if it's a plot, is provided by Jack's unstable friend Neal Cassady, whose descent into even worse behavior gives Jack something to focus on. Neal thinks the breakdown of reality is long overdue, and he's advanced from con-man to sorcerer without getting any smarter. Pursuing him into the ruins of New York allows Mamatas to bring the epic horror story back in touch with the personal one. It's no surprise that Jack's final effort to connect with this damaged guy is directly related to the last hope of the world, but the last scene is still a surprise. The ending, though it seems just right and is written with love, is hard to take for the same reasons that real life is hard to take.
—Eli
A great premise that seems counterintuitive at first, but ends up working better than you could have imagined. Basically "Move Under Ground" is a crossover novel between the Beat and Cthuluhu mythos'. Nick Mamatas does a great job mixing Kerouac's writing style with Lovecraft's and the result is like a literary reeses' peanut butter cup. It's a shame that this book doesn't seem to be widely promoted/distributed. It's a great treat for Kerouac/Lovecraft fans.Also, Burroughs gets what is probably the greatest one-liner of all time.
—David
Confession: Just before I started reading this book I'd inwardly decided that this would be the last non-Lovecraft Cthulhu themed book I would read. Cthulhu has of late become a cute, and cuddly icon of ironic horror, and the original miasma of unknown dread the character was supposed to have has--for me--become totally lost amongst the internet memes, and cartoon depictions. Along comes MOVE UNDER GROUND.MOVE UNDER GROUND has very little, if any, of the kitsch and wink/nod that you'd expect from something this thematically high-concept; Jack Kerouac and the Beats vs. Cthulhu. I was expecting a "cool-daddy-o" stream of consciousness road-trip across America ending with a super-heroic Kerouac bare-knuckle brawling with an elder god in a coffee, I couldn't have gotten more different experience.MOVE UNDER GROUND reads a lot like a lost Kerouac novel; it's filled with the bodhisattva philosophy that populates Kerouac's actual novels, and while it may not be pitch-perfect, it hits the right notes at the right times. It also contains some very good horror writing, as Kerouac and his dharma bums travel across a nightmare apocalypse America that has fallen under the thrall of Cthulhu and the Old Ones. Beatniks and hipsters remain untouched by the taint of the elder gods, but the straighter the suit, the more insectoid and deformed they become. The country is transformed into a wild landscape of lurid horror-- trains become giant white worms crawling the rails, small town folk shout and kill and revel in death, translucent tentacles shroud the sky, worming their way into the hearts and minds of all the squares.*maybe spoilers*Kerouac is his Sal Paradise character here, seemingly just along for the ride, observing, vacillating between desire and detachment, pushed by the Buddha's palm toward his final destination. Neal Cassady is a vibrating grifter, making off-page deals with terrible gods for terrible power all in the name of truth and adventure. Seeking the role of the hero, but often becoming the heel. Burroughs is played for laughs, mostly. A reedy junky, detached and almost as insect-like as the shoggoths he fights.*maybe spoilers*Just when I thought all of the horror had been drained from the dead dreamer, Mamatas found a way to make Cthulhu scary again.
—Tim
