Author / Moreau Vazh

by Moreau Vazh

Brief Hiatus

Yes… I know… the internet is littered with people who promised that they would be right back. Then it’s radio silence for about six months and a series of ever-more infrequent posts promising that blogging will resume as soon as they’ve sorted out their career/family/whatever and then the blog is dead… and then it’s permanently shuttered.

I hope this won’t happen here. I am in the process of up-rooting and moving halfway across the country and I need to clear out of my office in order to pack up and start the physical move. Shouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks. Promise.

by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Kiernan is a horror writer who denies that they write horror.

They don’t just deny that they write horror… they angrily deny it and then decide to accept horror-themed literary awards and allow their work to be published in magazines and anthologies with impeccable horror credentials. I mean… between you and me… if your work is getting re-printed in Lovecraft-themed anthologies edited by S.T. Joshi then I don’t think you get to be sniffy about whether or not you write horror. You might not only write horror but you’re writing horror.

Unlike Margaret Atwood, who famously denied that The Handmaid’s Tale was science-fiction on the grounds that it didn’t contain any space squid, Kiernan’s objection to the ‘horror’ label seems rooted less in economic self-interest and literary snobbery than in the nature of their relationship to the tropes that horror writers tend to deploy.

Caitlín R. Kiernan is an author that found their voice remarkably quickly. Go back and read their first novel Silk and you will find a story about the boundaries of madness, identity, sexuality, fantasy, and self-delusion that deploys horror tropes to represent the emotional landscape of fragmenting, marginalised selves. A similar set of themes and motifs recur in Kiernan’s most celebrated novels The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl but while Silk can feel diffuse and gestural, The Drowning Girl feels not just raw but downright uncomfortable.

I believe that Kiernan’s objection to the ‘horror’ label lies in the assumption that horror tends to be about monsters in a rather abstract and untethered way. Kiernan’s books are full of monsters, but the monsters are neither abstract nor untethered as Kiernan uses them as a kind of vocabulary for articulating their innermost thoughts and ideas. The real difference between The Drowning Girl and a lot of Kiernan’s earlier work was the clarity, legibility, and rawness of that self-articulation.

After The Drowning Girl, Kiernan seemed to drop back from the psychological coal-face. The raw brilliance of their past two novels was replaced by a series of extraordinarily ill-tempered YA urban fantasy novels in which the protagonist was continually bemoaning their presence in the story, as though the author felt obliged to produce the work but would rather have been working on something else.

First published in 2017 as the first in a series of three novellas, Agents of Dreamland marked Kiernan’s welcome return to longer-form adult writing but rather than a continuation of the work done in The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl, Agents of Dreamland feels like a step sideways and an attempt to reconcile the experimental and personal impulses that inspired Kiernan’s greatest work with the somewhat less raw and more conventional impulses that inspired the creation of early successes like Threshold.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: The Vessel by Adam Nevill

After an absurdly long fallow period, literary horror is showing signs of a return to commercial success and cultural visibility.

As you might expect of a cultural milieu that is only just starting to re-imagine itself as a thriving creative community, critics and literary historians have looked back to by-gone eras of commercial success in search of insights into what went right and what went wrong. For example, see Grady Hendrix’s Paperback from Hell for a wonderful overview of the publishing industry’s increasingly desperate and doomed attempts to ride on the coat-tails of Stephen King.

As wonderful and satisfying as this narrative may be, it is worth bearing in mind that there have been a number of failed attempts to re-ignite popular interest in horror literature and most of them ended in failure. Multiple generations have discovered and re-discovered King’s work but the industry has always struggled to find a second or third author towards whom King’s readers might be channelled.

About fifteen years ago, Adam Nevill (a.k.a. Adam L.G. Nevill) was the next big thing in literary horror. It turns out that fifteen years is a long time.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Scream of the Mandrake

It is interesting to note that the overwhelming majority of Call of Cthulhu adventures tend to fall into one of two camps: Either they are vast sprawling campaigns that will take years to complete, or they are stand-alone adventures with settings so precise that it is all but impossible to fold them into any kind of on-going campaign.

This is because the nature of available Call of Cthulhu adventures is shaped by the market and the market is informed by the reasons for people buying Call of Cthulhu adventures in the first place. In truth, if you are in the market for Call of  Cthulhu adventures then you are either looking to pay top-dollar for a luxury product produced by Chaosium, or you are looking for a single-session adventure that you might be able to squeeze into a break between D&D campaigns.

While I have gone back-and-forth on their product a few times, I think it’s fair to say that Type40 are in the business of publishing terrible adventures with really good production values. If you buy a Type40 product, you will get some really good hand-outs, some pre-generated characters, a more-or-less evocative idea for a scenario, and very little else. Sure… there’s usually a basic plot and writer Allan Carey might come up with an interesting puzzle or set-piece but there’s usually no real plot and most ‘adventures’ amount to little more than an initial set up, a dramatic conclusion, and a few notes to help you guide your party from Step A to Step B. It’s shitty, it’s lazy, it’s grotesquely over-priced, and it’s utterly devoid of anything approaching creative ambition, but it is accessible and therein lays the rub.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Vaesen – Mythic Britain and Ireland

Back in October 2022 I arrived late for a party. After falling out of a taxi with a bottle of vodka in hand, I ventured into the universal love fest that was the critical reaction to Free League’s Vaesen and announced ‘Eh… not for me’.

Vaesen is one of the most disappointing RPGs I have ever purchased… The problem was that I loved almost everything about it: I loved Johan Egerkrans’ quirky and humane artwork, I loved the production quality of the book itself, I loved the idea of a game set in 19th Century Scandinavia, I loved the elements of base-building that come from having you level-up the group’s headquarters alongside their characters, and I loved the idea of a game that was about industrialisation and the conflict between modernity and tradition.

While I loved all of these things, I loved the last of them the most and that is where I felt that Vaesen let me down. Just as Vampire the Masquerade was a combat-heavy urban fantasy supers game that presented itself as an introspective gothic story-telling RPG, Vaesen presents itself as a meditation on tradition, change, and the growing pangs of modernity but in reality it’s a game about travelling to the countryside in order to hunt and kill fairies.

Both games are examples of what people in video-games studies used to refer to as ‘Ludonarrative Dissonance’: That is to say that there is a tension between the narrative told through the game’s story and the narrative that is told through the actual gameplay.

The dissonance in Vampire the Masquerade was born of market forces: The intent may have been to produce a game about exploring transgressive desires and the limits of humanity but the punters wanted books with lists of magical powers and so the minor dissonance of the original rule-set slowly grew into an unceasing howl of discord between what the game professed to be about and what it actually was about. Vaesen’s problem is born not of market forces but of a failure to do the work required to produce a game that engages with its intended themes.

Vaesen’s problem is that it has a great set of themes but it has no system for dealing with the conflicts that arise from those themes. Vaesen’s story is all about trying to resolve the conflict between modernity and tradition but the only relevant rules for conflict-resolution are some hand-wavy stuff about rituals and a combat system. So while the game may profess to be about the growing pangs of modernity it is actually a game about Swedish people murdering fairies in order to make the world safe for commercial farming and strip-mining. Had the game included some rules for resolving conflicts through any means other than conflict then it might have been true to its bittersweet themes but instead the game is nothing more than a series of bug-hunts. This lack of thematically appropriate conflict-resolution rules could have been ameliorated with solid advice on adventure design and tonal control but the GMs advice and most commercially-published adventures all point to a game about Swedish people travelling the countryside, tracking down the local fairies, and murdering them in cold blood.

Vaesen is basically the ideological opposite of Werewolf the Apocalypse; it is Princess Mononoke written from the point of view of the humans who want to wipe-out the forest spirits in order to expand their mining and logging operations. It is a game about the mundane and the profitable waging genocidal war against the magical and the bizarre.

So why did I go out and buy a supplement? Well… turns out that I’m an absolute fool as The Mythic Britain & Ireland supplement for Vaesen is somehow even more slapdash and disappointing than the original game.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Ghost Hunters by Ed Warren, Lorraine Warren, and Robert David Chase

Ghost Hunters is wonderfully strange piece of writing, even by the standards of books on the paranormal.

The book recalls a series of psychical investigations conducted by Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Warrens were a pair of American ghost-hunters who first shot to fame in the 1970s based on their involvement in the infamous Amityville haunting. Their lives and exploits then went on to form the basis for the interlocking Conjuring and Annabel series of horror movies. Ghost Hunters is actually the second in a series of six books, all of which were published in the 80’s and 90’s, after the couple’s star had begun to fall.

The first intriguing thing about this series of books is the weirdness of the format. Books about the paranormal are in and of themselves an interesting edge-case when it comes to categorisation: Are they fiction? Are they non-fiction? Are they memoir? Depending upon the rhetorical style adopted by the author, there’s actually a good deal of variation in how information is presented and, by extension, which literary genre the books most closely resemble.

This book presents as a series of case files from the Warrens’ archives that are basically self-contained short stories. Despite supposedly being co-written by the Warrens, different stories contain either extended quotes attributed to the Warrens or weird little vignettes where someone is asking them questions. Once you move beyond the Warrens’ own words (more on which later), the book is not just well-written but written with a good deal of literary panache. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that Ghost Hunters works better as an accessible horror short-fiction collection than it does as a book about paranormal investigation.

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by Moreau Vazh

On “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft

Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I will slowly be working my way through.

A truly classic piece of horror fiction that speaks directly to the fears and anxieties that made Lovecraft the man he was.

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by Moreau Vazh

Thoughts on Clerics, Hierarchy, and the Joys of ‘Levelling-up’

This morning I did something that I have not done for a long time: I disappeared down an internet rabbit-hole. I could not tell you how I got there, but I found myself reading the Wikipedia entry for Holy Orders in the Catholic Church.

What drew my attention is the fact that, from the third century right up until the second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Catholic Church had an internal hierarchy that included both higher and lower holy orders.

The higher holy orders were pretty much what we think of today when we use the term ‘Holy orders’: they start with Sub-deacons, then it’s Deacons, Priests, then finally Bishops. This structure is then complicated by the fact that in addition to those four levels, you also have offices (like Cardinal or Archbishop) and titles like Monsignor that started out as offices before becoming terms of address and honorifics that are kind of the Papal equivalent of a knighthood. Paul VI apparently tried to get rid of papal orders entirely before settling on this weird compromise whereby you only get to be called a Monsignor if you’ve distinguished yourself as career bureaucrat who has served in either the Curia (the sinister motherfuckers who administer the Vatican) or the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. Similar to the way that the British royal family only gives the title ‘Royal Highness’ to members of the family who ‘work’ by opening supermarkets or appearing in public whilst wearing a crown for the purposes of opening a new Lidl or whatever it is those parasites call work.

While I will never not be amused and fascinated by the way that the Catholic church manifests institutional power, what really got me was this Wikipedia graphic of the different colours of hats and number of tassels associated with the different orders:

The comedian Denis Leary once had a bit about how Catholicism is a religion of hats. The closer you get to God; the larger the head-gear and, quite frankly, where is the fucking lie?

I then moved on to reading the page about minor orders and noticed something fun. There were originally four lower orders: Porters, Lectors, Exorcists, and Acolytes. The Porters were literally the bouncers at the church door while the lectors were the people responsible for reading aloud excerpts from the scriptures or the liturgy. Things get a little bit more interesting once you reach Exorcist as Exorcists were people who had made it to the third level and so were granted the power to expel demons. Level up from being an exorcist and you became an acolyte who not only lit the candles in the church but also administered the Eucharist to the faithful. In other words: Every time you go up a level, you get fancier clothes, you take on more responsibilities, and you gain more spiritual powers.

Is it just me, or does this sound exactly like a cleric in D&D?

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by Moreau Vazh

FR: The Witch Farm

For Real is an occasional series about scary, horrific, and unsettling stuff that presents itself as non-fiction. This might include the paranormal as well as true crime and odd occurrences. The rest of the series can be found here.

Early in 2021, the BBC launched a series of podcasts written and presented by someone called Danny Robins. At that point, Robins was already a playwright and he had helmed a series of episodic podcasts called Haunted. Though well-produced and centred on the UK, Haunted was not all that different to any of the hundreds of paranormal podcasts that remain scattered across the internet: You had an attempt at re-creation, you had interviews with people who may or may not be disturbed, and you have the familiar paranormal framing device of pretending the whole thing is some kind of open-minded scientific investigation whereas in fact it’s just an excuse to tell ghost stories. Haunted was not a huge success but Robins’ connections and the series production values were enough to turn some heads at the BBC and so Radio 4 commissioned what would wind up becoming a bit of a break-through hit in so far as lots of the people who listened to The Battersea Poltergeist would not otherwise listen to a podcast with paranormal themes.

 In hindsight, it is pretty obvious why The Battersea Poltergeist became a global success: The production values were superb, the dramatizations included serious acting talent, and Robins himself was an engaging active host who pushed the series relentlessly on social media. However, over and above the formal successes of The Battersea Poltergeist, I think the series real success lays in the way that it reached beyond the merely paranormal to the psychological forces at work within the family. To this day, I frequently think of the way that the girl who was once at the centre of the hauntings seemed to just ‘grow out’ of ghosts and went on to live a normal life while the professional ghost-hunter spent years returning and returning to the house in the hope of re-establishing contact with what was manifestly nothing more than a pre-teen girl’s need for attention. I actually wrote something about The Battersea Poltergeist last year and my feelings about the series have only grown warmer with the passage of time.

Robins launched another podcast named Uncanny for Halloween 2021. It returned to the episodic structure of Haunted and failed to re-capture that broader audience. To be honest, I listened to the first few episodes and rapidly lost interest as the format of dramatic re-creation, interviews, discussion, and frequent online calls to action seemed to overwhelm the content and served to compress each story down to the point where everything felt really insubstantial and rushed. I also found the constant musical stings and Robins’ attempts to drive audience engagement quite irritating.

For Halloween 2022, Robins has ditched the stand-alone episode format of Haunted and Uncanny in favour of the more sustained examination of a single case that worked so well on The Battersea Poltergeist. However, despite again boasting some real acting talent and showing signs of evolving the formula, I don’t think that Robins’ The Witch Farm is anywhere near as fun or as thought-provoking as The Battersea Poltergeist. It all feels a bit too… well… glib for my liking.

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