Tentacle Death Trip by Jordan Krall
Cover art by Hauke Vagt
Published by Eraserhead press
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
When I saw this book on the new-book shelves at our local library, I glanced over the cover and blurb and figured it sounded interesting enough to check out. However, I was reading a lot of other things at the time, so it ended up sitting on a shelf for a number of years, until our library changed its lending policy. With limited renewals now in force, I decided to clear the decks and get some of these books out of my to-be-read space.
It's a sort of Death Race 2000 in a Mad Max style post-apocalyptic America in which Lovecraft's cosmic horrors -- or at least things bearing their names -- have pushed their way into the power vacuum that results from massive disruptions of society. But it's a lot darker and nastier than any of those films -- at least with movies, you've got Standards and Practices to put a floor on the depths of depravity that can be shown on the screen.
Although Lovecraft's work was often deeply disturbing to its original audience, it's astonishing in retrospect just how geneteel his treatment of the horrific was. Again and again, the worst horrors are told rather than shown. In "At the Mountains of Madness," we encounter the slaughter of several members of the expedition by the Elder Things only after the fact, and whatever awful thing was on that plain as the two survivors fly away, we can guess at its nature only by its effect upon the one character who looked. Similarly, in "The Dunwich Horror," we know only by report a good deal of the Whateley family's disturbing doings -- the mysterious disappearance of Wilbur's mother Lavina, the fate of the families destroyed by Wilbur's monstrous twin after its escape, etc. In fact, it's been argued that Lovecraft's horror is weakest when it is shown too closely, viz the details of Wilbur Whateley's hybrid anatomy, as revealed after his death.
If this author had written that novel, I have no doubt that Lavina Whately's fate would've been lovingly detailed, along with the horrible moments in which the titular Horror burst into the homes of those families and presumably devoured them. Sometimes it almost seems as if this author enjoys wallowing in the horrors of what people are doing to one another in his imagined post-apocalyptic landscape, from the mad cultists to the people wearing fetish gear in public, especially the goons of the various strongmen who now rule a ruined America.
It made me think of a comment that Ian Sales, editor of the Rocket Science anthology of hard science fiction, made in his blog about tropes he'd really like to see disappear for good. One was rape as cheap characterization or character motivation device, and another was people in post-apocalyptic settings being gratuitously nasty to one another. And having read this slender tome, I' heartily agree with him, because there's way too much of both tropes in so few pages.
Throughout most of history, "the strong take what they want and the weak suffer as they must" has been the general rule of life -- but there were still rules and limits on how far the powerful were to go. Yes, some very powerful people would indulge perverse desires or grind people's faces in their powerlessness for the fun of it -- but it was generally kept quiet and behind closed doors, not flaunted for all to see. The post-apocalyptic society this author imagines seems to be one where all social restraint has broken down and people shamelessly indulge in their basest urges, to the point it becomes disgusting.
I don't consider myself a particularly squeamish person -- I've done a fair amount of reading on the Holocaust, the Holodomor, and many of the other atrocities that turned the 20th Century into such a bloodbath. But that was research for material I was contracted to write, not entertainment, and even then I found that if I read too much at a time, even primary-source materials written by survivors, it tended to numb the mind's ability to be shocked at man's inhumanity to man, until the next account just became another interchangeable NKVD or Gestapo thug being nasty to people, ho hum.
When I read for entertainment, I'd rather not plumb the depths of human depravity. I'd like to see some sympathetic characters whose sole claim on my sympathy isn't how cruelly they've been victimized. And that's one of my biggest problems with this story -- there's not one character that inspires me to like without feeling sorry for them. Or worse, wince because their victimization has driven them over the edge.
Take for instance Junko (probably named for Junko Furuta, who was tortured to death over a span of 44 days by two young thugs who got away with murder because they were underage), a transgender former sex slave who escaped horrific abuse by killing her former master. On the basis of that description, one would think that she would be a sympathetic character with just the right combination of tragedy and spunk to make us cheer her on. Except that her mind has been so badly damaged by the abuse she endured that she enacts stomach-turning self-harm rituals quite publicly in her car as she awaits the green flag to begin the race -- and the announcer comments upon it with a certain icky glee.
Then there is Samson, who in many ways looks like the real protagonist of the novel, with his backstory of having his happy family destroyed by the thugs of one of the warlords who rule over the ruins, only moments after telling his wife and son that at least they had each other. When I first read that scene, I thought his wife was raped to death, but this was an impression created by the chapter break. When I picked up reading the next chapter, I discovered that she had survived -- and responded to her husband's failure to save her from gang-rape and their son from being kidnapped by fleeing in the family car, leaving Samson alone in the ruins with more aches and pains.
Which is an unusual example of the "rape as cheap character motivation" trope, since it doesn't happen directly to the viewpoint character, but it most definitely gives him the drive that makes him a significant character in the story. A man who tries to maintain some fragment of basic decency even as he begins participating in races put on by the mysterious and disreputable promoter Mr. Silver, culminating in participation in the titular race. A race in which Samson acquires a co-pilot, a little boy that could be seen as a stand-in for his kidnapped son, but shows signs of some far darker secrets behind those chubby little-boy cheeks.
I'm not going to even bother discussing the unpleasant personal habits or psychological obsessions of such characters as Lord Bing Bong or Hoghead Slim. All they do for me is ratchet up the unpleasantness of the imagined world, perhaps because our minds become numb to horror after a while and need new, worse things to maintain the level of shock.
I will say that the ending has some surprising twists, and yes, the bad guys lose, nastily. However, it's only after the only character who seemed to have any good-guy potential has been ground down to nothing and destroyed. Which is why I have absolutely no desire to read it again, or anything else by this author. I still prefer my horror in the original Lovecraft tradition, a shuddersome meditation on how very small Earth and humanity are in the great cosmic scheme of things, of deep space and deep time, in which the horror comes from beings orthogonal to our existence doing harm just by existing too close to us, rather than endless human malice and disgusting behavior.
Buy Tentacle Death Trip from Amazon.com
Review posted January 1, 2021
