THE DEEP ONES: "The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon

"The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon

Discussion begins March 4.

First published in the April 9, 2001 issue of The New Yorker.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/the-god-of-dark-laughter

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?102118

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Book of Cthulhu II
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now
The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chabon
http://www.wired.com/2012/03/michael-chabon-geeks-guide-galaxy/all/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/what-make-finnegans-wake/
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-michael-chabon/
http://tinyurl.com/qxz6yy2

Now that's the kind of cover we don't see too often in this neck of the woods! It is pretty weird, though.
:-D

I'll be reading from American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

Yeah, we don't journey into New Yorker land too often here at the WT. :)

American Fantastic Tales for me, too (picked up a used copy for a buck!).

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories for me.

I could have gone for The Weird, but I think I'll read it from American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now.

A typo in the printing of this story in American Fantastic Tales: on page 472, where it reads "He uttered an printable oath", it should read "He uttered an unprintable oath."

Google Translate gives me About the Sinister Laugh as the English-language translation of Über das Finstere Lachen. I believe the title is Chabon's invention (for a moment I thought it might have been Robert E. Howard's).

>6 artturnerjr:

I remember an LT review found quite a few typos, either in this book or in volume one. I skimmed over the one you found, but I did spot the missing word in "asleep and snoring in the periodicals room over a copy of Grit." (page 475).

My favorite piece on Chabon, authored by the late great Steve Tompkins for the much-missed blog The Cimmerian:

http://leogrin.com/CimmerianBlog/kavalier-not-cavalier-clay-and-reh/

That was an excellent story. I especially appreciated the distinct unreliability of the narrator, a feature supported subtly throughout the story until its conspicuous emergence toward the end.

As was doubtless Chabon's intention, I really did alternate between delighted amusement and visceral horror during the course of the tale.

Yep - this was really, really good. The atmosphere is brooding and sinister. It would have been so easy to go wrong with the dead clown - I had my doubts at "It was a giant, floppy bow tie, white with orange and purple polka dots." - but Chabon keeps it firmly in the realm of the uncanny. Most impressive is that the the turn into Mythos-land doesn't feel forced at all. The "baboon" is a nice nod to apes found in both Poe and Lovecraft, although at one point I had to squint at the mental image it produced and wonder if that baboon wasn't actually a ghoul instead. Nah...

This may be the best shaggy dog story I've ever read, because of the way it uses the Cassandra trope to leverage a conspiracy (criminal and cosmic) into a nexus of personal pathos, and then makes the fact that it is a shaggy dog story metaphysically significant.

This paragraph near the end nicely conjures not only HPL's writing style, but also the later ideas of Ligotti, et al:

But we were fools, she and I, arrant blockheads, each of us blind to or heedless of the readiest explanation: that the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line.

I also appreciated the possible explanation hinted at for the clown's death, that he was a Yê-Hehist skulking about in a circus, ever fearful of a deadly encounter with and Aiite.

>10 paradoxosalpha:

Unreliable, indeed. Is he an alcoholic cop driven delusional by the accidental death of his son and suicide of his wife or is that all incidental considering he's living in Yuggogheny County, the very name of which suggests its inherent strangeness to the knowledgeable reader? I wonder if this story ever popped up in innumerable online discussions as a possible influence on the TV show True Detective?

>13 gwendetenebre:

The comparison to Ligotti had occurred to me too.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

"makes the fact that it is a shaggy dog story metaphysically significant"

Excellent observation! True Detective was also a shaggy dog story, although it doesn't work as well as Chabon's story at achieving the same kind of effect.

I agree it was a fun story, and worthy contribution to the Mythos.

Somehow the narrator's tone didn't quite work for me. It doesn't bother me that he was erudite: the small-town DA who is widely read and takes in a good deal more than his neighbours is a standard character in crime fiction and literature, and works for me. Somehow it didn't quite gel, though I'd guess Chabon was after someone from Poe or HPL. It wasn't so much a failure as a missed opportunity, I guess. Some interesting turns of phrase that can only be justified by such a narrator, yet didn't add much for me, e.g. the "Plutonic draft" from the cave.

I liked this story a lot. Actually, I've enjoyed just about everything I've ever read by Chabon - fiction, non-fiction, short-form, long-form - you name it. He has a way of seamlessly and subtly combining tropes from different genres that I think is unexcelled by any other living writer (including his friend Jonathan Lethem, who writes in a similar style).

Has anyone else here read his Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay? Gosh, that's a great novel, and one I'll bet that many of our members would particularly enjoy.

>13 gwendetenebre:

Yeah, that passage is distinctively Lovecraftian; reminds me of what is perhaps my all-time favorite quote from a HPL tale (At the Mountains of Madness):

How it could have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth-life as a joke or mistake...

Although I wouldn't have gone so far as to call it a spoof, I did get the impression that this was a tongue-in-cheek Weird Tale, and that the New Yorker crowd would be able to pick up on the tone, and could feel in one the joke even if they'd never read a line of Lovecraft (or Howard, or Robert Bloch, etc.).

I was surprised to see the author (in the miscellany links) denying it was anything other than a straight-ahead genre story.

Pleasant enough for me, but it never really rose to the level of the truly weird or disturbing. (Maybe my appreciation was slightly dulled by listening to a podcast of Robert M. Price, right before reading this, expounding on actual Gnosticism.)

The story has some nice bits of black humor. However, for me, it was a bit too diagrammatic in its opposing cults and the revelation of them. There was a bit too literary a touch when we learn the secret of how and why the narrator’s son and wife died and the diagrammatic opposition between the rational narrator and his Theosophist mom. But I don't mean that in a complimentary way but as unsurprising and formulaic plotting often used in the literary fiction genre.

Chabon set another story in this locale, "In the Black Mill", and I liked that one better.

There was a bit of serendipitous echoing of theme when I read part of Robert Silverberg's "Born with the Dead" right after finishing this story.

The "rekindled" dead of that tale view the world around them as a joke, a world made of plastic.

>16 elenchus:

At first I found the narrator's tone somewhat off-putting. But as the story continued, I decided I was meant to be put off, and my consequent distrust of the narrator showed me threads in the story I otherwise might have missed.

>18 housefulofpaper:

Well, keep in mind that Mythos writing is sort of in-jokey by its very nature, so that's actually kind of appropriate. I never got the impression, from either the story or any other writing I've read by/about Chabon, that his appreciation for weird fiction or any other genre fiction that he likes is anything less than sincere. Quite to the contrary, I've always seen him (along with Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, and a few others) as one of our "inside men" in the literary fiction world.