THE DEEP ONES: "Violence, Child of Trust" by Michael Cisco

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THE DEEP ONES: "Violence, Child of Trust" by Michael Cisco

2paradoxosalpha
syyskuu 23, 2022, 1:16 pm

Touchstone in the OP is incorrect for Black Wings of Cthulhu; not sure why it defaults to the entry for Volume 2, but this Cisco story is in Volume 1.

3semdetenebre
syyskuu 23, 2022, 4:12 pm

>2 paradoxosalpha:

Ah, thanks. Corrected.

4paradoxosalpha
Muokkaaja: syyskuu 28, 2022, 10:27 am

I had nominated this one based on my prior enjoyment of Cisco's novels. It's quite a tangle with three unreliable and somewhat inarticulate narrators, but certainly a nasty bit of business!

So, Todd engineered a swap of victims, Claire (Julius' daughter) for Ruth.

There are an awful lot of third-person plural pronouns without antecedents, and "they" all seem to refer to the entities propitiated by the rite: "they're all over the room like fog" (426), "then they come, they get into the girl" (428), "They're taking their time coming in" (429), "I can hear them shuffling" (430), "I can feel their greed blending with his hatred" (430).

5AndreasJ
syyskuu 27, 2022, 1:26 pm

It’s technically still the 27th …

6paradoxosalpha
Muokkaaja: syyskuu 27, 2022, 2:38 pm

Oops! Sorry for spoilers. I've put tags on my previous post, and I'll take them off tomorrow.

7paradoxosalpha
Muokkaaja: lokakuu 14, 2022, 3:44 pm

What, objectively, are the "palaces"? Any ideas?

I'm reminded of some sort of degraded hekhalot mysticism, but I just don't know.

8AndreasJ
syyskuu 28, 2022, 2:15 pm

I was very confused about the narrators at first - the way my e-reader rendered the headings (identically to the incipits of the sections) didn’t help - and had to re-read the first couple sections to which work it out. That sorted, though, I rather liked it.

I took the palaces as, well, palaces, albeit otherworldly ones.

9housefulofpaper
lokakuu 14, 2022, 2:13 pm

The reader has to do a lot of work to fill in the gaps here. I have to wonder how I'd interpret the story if I hadn't read it in an anthology subtitled "twenty-one tales of Lovecraftian horror". Are the multiple narrators a nod to Faulkner? (another author I haven't read).

The ceremony, the "it", brought to mind the Ripper murders as carried out by Dr Gull in Alan Moore's From Hell.

I took the palaces to be the narrator's reported perception of extra-dimensional entities, but that's just an example of me bringing cultural baggage to the story. In my case I read those trippy, "Cosmic" early '70s Doctor Strange comics etc,. long before reading Lovecraft, and decades before learning anything of merkabah mysticism.