Move under Ground

Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas does more than fulfill the promise of his first novella, Northern Gothic, in his debut novel. In fact, he's more than fulfilled the promise of any five young new writers. No matter how you end up feeling about the book itself, you just have to admire the guy's hubris at attempting to take two subgenres of fiction that passed the cliché stage decades ago and add in the exceptionally risky practice of incorporating historical characters into fiction. That the result is at all readable would have been a triumph. That it's actually good is nothing short of miraculous.

Jack Kerouac is recovering from a nervous breakdown in Big Sur when he gets a strong urge to go find Neal Cassady, who (if you'll remember from the end of On the Road) ditched him in Mexico. Knowing Cassady will likely be in San Francisco, Kerouac sets out, and soon stumbles upon a sight neither he, nor anyone reading the opening pages of this book who's somehow managed to miss all the synopses, expected to see: R'lyeh, no longer sleeping, rising from the waves. Yes, folks, the Great Old Ones are back, and Jack Kerouac and his longtime travelling companion have to save the world. However, along the way Kerouac realizes that not only is Neal acting strangely-- does he want to save the world, or is he just looking for the ending of his next novel?-- but that the Earth is only a minuscule part of the bigger stakes of a war between Cthulhu and Azathoth...

I mean, come on. You can't read that synopsis and not tell me it's not a recipe for absolute disaster. But Mamatas does things of beauty with both Beat and Lovecraftian literature, spicing the tale with subtle (and not-so-subtle) references to works in both, but keeping it on such a level that the reader doesn't need to have read extensively in either genre to get something out of this book. You probably don't even have to know who Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady are; they're just two guys driving across the country trying to save the universe from descending into utter chaos.

Come to think of it, that sounds rather like the plot for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, but believe it-- Nick Mamatas can write rings around Kevin Smith.