Published SCIFICTION, 2004
Some time in the 1860's or 1870's. Jonah Koenig, a Pinkerton detective has arrived in Purdon, a California frontier town, looking for a man named Iron Man Hicks, (or Mullen). Wanted as a suspect in a series of ritual murders, and by no less than P.T. Barnum for stealing valuables while working as a circus strongman. Among them at least one occult book (the real life Dictionnaire Infernal).
After proving himself tough by shooting a local troublemaker and making it with local hookers, Koenig gets an interview with a man named Langston Butler, holed up in a work camp outside town. He and Hicks have had some adventures involving hallucinogenics and occult rituals. Hicks is barbaric and corrupt, but possessed of strange powers, including being able to open holes in space. He's also being devoured by a parasitic fungus. But not exactly. According to Butler, Hicks is in the process of changing or evolving, into something else.
He directs Koenig to "The House of Belphegor", a cave not far from the camp, made by the hands of an extinct race "before the continents split and the ice came over the world."
Koenig finds animal skeletons and bizarre symbols scratched onto boulders (many of them faded with time).
Something happens to him in the cave. He remembers it being large inside than expected; gargantuan statues, being weightless. He comes back in bad shape. He dynamites the cave. He hears that Butler has died. Mullen (Hicks?) has been seen. He finds Hicks in his hotel room and shoots him, to no effect. Hicks grabs his arm, leans toward him - "his face split apart at the seams, a terrible flower....:"
This is an effective story and I like Barron's writing a lot. It manages to invoke Lovecraft cliches without wallowing in them - a nice touch.
Barron is a strange mixture of REH and HPL mixed with the over the top spectacle of an Schwarzenegger. Their is something almost comical about his characters and protagonists. They feel over the top and like a cliché of male power fantasies. Jonah feels almost hyper-competent, an ivy league drop out whose killed 20+ people and is a seemingly unstoppable sex machine?
ReplyDeleteOf course I would bet Barron is doing all of this ironically (although given how so many of his stories are this way it's hard to tell). I think it works as a sort of rug pull. His characters seem like they could take a nuke to the face and strangle a gorilla with one hand. But they always fail before the Mythos. The creatures nearly always leave them shaking and quivering the way no war or gun shot wound ever has.
It's an interesting way to make the Mythos terrifying. In the Call of Cthulhu HPL did this by showing the largest piece of human technology (in the 1920's) being driven straight into to big C's face didn't do any lasting damage. Barron does this by taking the man you wish you were, a demi-god of humanity and having him shit himself with terror at the sight of these things.