The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilleyby Randy Attwoodreviewed by Preston McConkie
As “Four Boys of Broomhall” author Hamish McGlasson recently told me, “The best H.P. Lovecraft stories are usually written by someone other than Lovecraft.”
This eternal truth is demonstrated not just by McGlasson’s own work, but by a plucky novelette, The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley, by eFiction Magazine contributor Randy Attwood.
Being myself a non-fan of Lovecraft, I was still pleased to discern in Pilley many parallels to Lovecraft’s last written story, “The Haunter of the Dark” (though that’s probably like being reminded of that one “Star Trek” episode where Scotty saved the ship with a last-moment breakthrough in physics). A student of Lovecraft’s work I am not, but there has been so much said about the man, and his stock images and phrases are so familiar, that I recognized a skillful Lovecraft tribute.
The essentials are all there: a narrator speaking directly to the reader and warning of horror and calamity, with an opening sentence announcing the main character’s probable doom: “Edward Hawthorne had no premonition of the first disturbing and later horrifying consequences that would result from his joining the Friends of Pilley Park Garden Society.”
The other tropes abound: a building or grounds exuding spiritual darkness and foul odors; denizens driven to madness and murder; a discovered document holding an awful secret; demonic forces that crush men’s faith in visible reality; a confrontation with underworldly power; a secret language; knowledge and power that would destroy humanity; and at last, the protagonist’s frantic attempt to destroy or bury the emergent evil.
Oh, and plenty of purple prose.
Attwood says he wrote Pilley after finishing a much longer project, and wanted to try writing in a different voice. He did not directly copy Lovecraft’s settings of the Atlantic North, but adapted the tropes to his own region. Instead of Puritan cities crowded with Italian immigrants, it is set among the defeated former Confederacy Instead of a crystal talisman hidden in a Rhode Island church spire, evil lurks at the bottom of a pond in a public park near Attwood’s own Kansas City.
As the pond is drained to allow landscaping improvements, residents on its edge begin to go mad, with some killing themselves or each other. The protagonist, a city codes inspector, discovers the secret of the evil force in a document attached to an 1870s-era building permit, hidden “in the bowels” of the county courthouse, left as a warning to future generations that the pond, on the site of the former Kirk Pilley mansion, must never be drained.
The document’s ong-dead author tells that Pilley was a Confederate Civil War veteran and sole survivor of a forlorn hope known as Pinson’s Defense. With a fortune won by questionable means, Pilley had bought the land where he and 19 other Rebels had held off 200 Union soldiers. He grew wealthy as a canny land speculator and slumlord, and with his fortune built a great mansion over the gravesite of his dead comrades. But even decades later there are still truck loads of dirt being excavated from under the home’s foundations. Fifty years after the war, Pilley and his wife remain unnaturally young, along with their butler, an ex-slave voodoo priest.
The writer of this history, a newspaper reporter hired by Pilley’s estranged wife, enlists the aid of an elite exorcist priest, and together they creep into the mansion’s dungeons. There they discover the secret of Pilley’s longevity, along with ghastly partial cadavers and a legion of men, formerly corpses from Pilley’s slums, who labor like orcs to expand the dungeon. Confronting Pilley, the power of the priest’s knowledge and relics meet unexpected repulse, and in the struggle more than one man goes to his doom.
Attwood ties this tale into the present through the eyes of the codes inspector, who foresees his own impending madness as he confronts the re-emerging evil.
The story is not only an emulation of all things Lovecraft, it contains things more thoughtful than a typical Lovecraft tale. Attwood authentically captures the tone of a Wilson-era news writer, despite one or two trivial stumbles (such as using “normalcy” before President Warren Harding had coined the word, and in having Pilley marry his “high school sweetheart” in a place/time without high schools).
Altogether, Attwood is above probably five percent of writers who attempt the style of a bygone age. Having spent half of my own reading in the classics and the works of recent centuries, I enjoy most historical fiction as much as a crushed-glass enema. Attwood not only captured the cadence and lingo of the time, but skillfully uses epithets that most writers now pretend never existed.
Their use isn’t gratuitous, but shows how well Attwood groks the minds of people two generations before his birth. His character, the fearless progressive news writer, records,
[Pilley] was a shrewd bargainer with farmers who felt more comfortable selling to a fellow former confederate soldier than to damn Yankees, niggers, or catholic foreigners. Pilley, however, had no compunctions about turning that land into housing developments where he was happy to sell homes to damn Yankees and to rent niggers claptrap houses. It was from those shantytowns of former slaves that Pilley recruited the labor to build the house he would require.
This passage succinctly illustrates Pilley’s wicked character, long before reporter and priest confront him in unholy catacombs, but through the eyes of the 1910s, not the 2010s.
This is a major way in which Attwood manages to out-Lovecraft the original Lovecraft. He weaves in subtle social commentary, in the quoted example and elsewhere, such as gently lampooning the motives of civic organizations and the self-preserving instincts of bureaucrats. The story has a plot—something frequently absent from Lovecraft’s works—and draws attention to realities of both historical and contemporary culture.
Lovecraft, we might say, was so fascinated by the ineffable otherworld that he had little to say about this one.
At 23 pages, The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley is barely a novelette. But as a $.99 e-book from either Smashwords or Amazon, the readee is worth the spendee.
