Author Topic: Pseudopod 106: Jihad over Innsmouth  (Read 18326 times)

Sgarre1

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Reply #25 on: October 18, 2008, 12:11:55 AM
I enjoyed this.  Lots of fun, pulpy ideas.

There was a little too much pop-culture name-checking (the very INVISIBLES-esque "forcing out the attempted possession" bit would have worked a bit better if we hadn't have had Grant Morrison name-checked for no really discernible reason except, hey, he's cool - which he is, and so is WSB, but come on) and I generally find that stories in which mankind has any hope at all in defeating Lovecraftian entities miss the point of Lovecraft entirely.  But then, this is pulp and so we have to have a protagonist to root for, I guess.

And I can't help but find it funny that the story gets praised for having a non-stereotypical "Muslim in hijacked airplane scenario" with nary a peep about a twinkling Dr. Smith (another name check, that) stereotype breezing through. Less prickly subject, I guess.

But it was all meant in good fun and good fun it was. Looking forward to more from this writer.

Also, as I never tire of this interesting subject, this was a another good example of a story that "read" well - I mean that not as a comment on whether it was good or bad story (I'm sure much Tom Clancy technospyfetishcrap "reads" well to whatever poor sods buy those audiobooks) or a well or poorly written story, but that the style lent itself to being read aloud.  An example in the other direction was "The Teacher" which seemed like a story I probably would have enjoyed more on the printed page, but found a bit muddy and unfocused when read aloud (and, again to clarify, that's no comment on the reader's abilties either, which is another factor in the mix).  There's no quantifiable approach to my theory-in-progress yet (other than the obvious "first person narratives work better"), but I'm beginning to feel that something more than personal subjectivity might be at work.

No comments on the preceding few stories as they didn't impress ("Pattern Masters" had promise, even with the un-engaging slacker artist characters, but for the monumentally underwhelming yet over-considered ending.  "Dear Killer" - what can I say except that I saw this on an Alfred Hitchcock Presents repeat from the 1960's when I was 8 and then read it in an issue of "House Of Secrets" when I was 10 and then...).

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Corydon

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Reply #26 on: November 06, 2008, 04:21:26 PM
This was my first Pseudopod story.  I'm not really that interested in horror, but I do have a soft spot for Lovecraft (whom I see as more fantasy, and not that scary, anyhow), and was intrigued by the title.  It didn't disappoint, for all the reasons that others have outlined above: great mood, exciting story, neat inversion of the terrorism trope.

Two minor beefs, concerning two minor characters.  I found the swishy flight attendant was a little grating (and yeah, an unnecessary stereotype).  And the comic book guy read as a real Mary Sue: the unexpectedly badass geek who tags along, unfazed by a little supernatural violence.  Which, given the knowing (and sometimes winking) pastiche that makes up the rest of the story, may have been intentional- but it was a false note in an otherwise terrific story.



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Reply #27 on: November 01, 2009, 05:07:17 AM
This was a cool idea.  I liked how the obvious stereotypes in the beginning were turned on their head.  I'm not familiar enough with Lovecraft's work to get the Arkham reference or know who the Dagons are.

But, there were a few places it fell flat for me, which dropped the story from a "love it" to a "pretty good".
1.  The Stephen King name drop was pointless.  I'm supposed to like the story because it mentions a famous horror writer?  Nah.
2.  The Dagon, after being described as being such a major threat, is taken down too easily.  After the whole flight is terrified including this guy, and then he takes him out in a couple seconds without any particularly spectacular moves.
3.  The guy who helped him suddenly turning out to kick ass was kind of tacked on, like the writer wrote himself into a corner and didn't know what else to do.



jalan

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Reply #28 on: November 02, 2009, 05:03:44 AM
story=ugh.



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Reply #29 on: December 22, 2009, 04:11:59 PM
For anyone who liked this story, but isn't caught up on Escape Pod stories, you might want to check out the outro for EP228:  Everything that Matters. In the outro is closing music titled "Heartache Over Innsmouth" by Norm Sherman, which is a love song about a man who is in love with a Dagon(sp?) girl.  It's really hilarious.  How can you not like a song with the phrase "quasi-Icthian angel"?  :D
http://escapepod.org/2009/12/10/ep228-everything-that-matters/



Fenrix

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Reply #30 on: March 20, 2010, 12:25:40 AM
This was a cool idea.  I liked how the obvious stereotypes in the beginning were turned on their head.  I'm not familiar enough with Lovecraft's work to get the Arkham reference or know who the Dagons are.

But, there were a few places it fell flat for me, which dropped the story from a "love it" to a "pretty good".
1.  The Stephen King name drop was pointless.  I'm supposed to like the story because it mentions a famous horror writer?  Nah.
2.  The Dagon, after being described as being such a major threat, is taken down too easily.  After the whole flight is terrified including this guy, and then he takes him out in a couple seconds without any particularly spectacular moves.
3.  The guy who helped him suddenly turning out to kick ass was kind of tacked on, like the writer wrote himself into a corner and didn't know what else to do.


I don't mind the Stephen King name drop. King name drops HPL and his mythos on a regular basis. I recall a section in Needful Things where a character goes to some other town to get a car. Spraypainted on the wall of the storage garage was "Yogg Sothoth Rules!" I recall this because the edition I was reading had the spray paint artist rendered and covering at least half a page. Checking the checker is an acceptable practice; being a fanboi of a fanboi does not necessarily make a story fanfic. :)

The creature was becoming a Deep One. Dagon is their god (based on an old Philistine or Moabite god), one of the Great Old Ones who lives under the sea and will one day rise up and devour us all. I recommend picking up a copy of Shadow Over Innsmouth and giving it a read (or pick up the movie Dagon, which is a pretty decent interpretation of that story) and this story will make more sense. There's probably a bunch of other stories that will make more sense after reading that. I'd categorize that story as one of the keystone stories in the HPL mythos.

I saw the extra guy as the another player character, and this story was the introductory portion of a Hunter campaign. I'm ok with that.

Thanks for the EP recommendation. I've put it in my queue.

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Millenium_King

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Reply #31 on: July 01, 2010, 12:04:11 AM
Yuck.  I just started listening to this one (I'll edit this and finish my review when I'm done).  I found the author's attempt to immitate Lovecraft's voice clumsy and irregular.  It's really off-putting to suddenly hear "shew" in the middle of a story which is otherwise told with very modern diction, cadence and syntax.  It's like the story was written in modern tone, then a "find-and-replace" search done with a Lovecraft dictionary.  I also disliked the "cramming in" of as many mythos elements as possible in the first minute or so (Azathoth, the pipers, the Black Man etc.).

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Millenium_King

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Reply #32 on: July 01, 2010, 09:33:20 PM
Okay, I listened to the rest of it.  I'll offer a dissenting opinion here and say I was pretty underwhelmed.  My gripes about the jarring inclusion of archaic and Lovecraftian words still stand and I found the concept as a whole a little shallow.

I am naturally predisposed against these sort of takes on the mythos, however.  I feel confused when other people call them "original takes" on the mythos.  The way I see it, Lovecraft did all the heavy lifting: inventing brooding worlds of terror, monstrous inhuman abominations and an atmosphere of encroaching cosmic madness.  These sort of works take his elements, cram them into a more modern plot and expect them to stand on their own.

Any fear or dread elicited by the fishy-horrors in this story were entirely Lovecraft's doing.  The author said the words "Innsmouth" and "Dagon," but relied on Lovecraft to make them scary.  If the Innsmouth creatures were replaced by identical, but differently named creatures unatached to the mythos, they would come across as goofy and relatively non-threatening.  Only because Lovecraft already did all the hard work of making them scary does this story work.  In my opinion, that's more than a little lazy, and doesn't really hold a candle to other mythos works - even those derivitive ones by other authors ("Terror in Cut-throat Cove" by Robert Bloch comes to mind).

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