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Obviously, don’t read this if you are trying to avoid spoilers.

It’s been a while since a show stirred as much discussion as True Detective (the Red Wedding was what, six months ago? And then there was the finale of Breaking Bad. Anyway.) So when it came time for the finale, I don’t think there was any way it could live up to the expectations, the dreams, and the crazy conspiracies of True Detective‘s finale. Sure enough, lots of people were disappointed.

I’m not all that concerned with the mainstream reaction. I am, however, interested in the way fans of H.P. Lovecraft–and adherents of weird fiction writ-large–reacted. For some, it was not pretty.

To understand why, you’ve also got to understand the not-so subtle division that drives through the center of the Lovecraftian community today. Lovecraft is defined, in part, by something called “cosmicism.” More or less, cosmicism posits that mankind is insignificant in the face of a vast and uncaring universe.

The problem with “cosmic indifference” is that it easily turns into nihilism. Mankind doesn’t matter. Life doesn’t matter. Nothing anyone does matters. It’s all fated to fail. What you might call hyper-cosmicism is very much in vogue these days, and given the cynicism of the current age, that’s no surprise. In fact, one might call hyper-cosmicism atheism’s first literary movement.

If all that sounds like gobbledygook, then think of it this way. You know all that existential, nihilistic philosophy Rust Cohle spouted for the first five or six episodes of True Detective? That’s hyper-cosmicism. (If you want more of it, Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron are often thrown out as examples of this style of writing. I’ve read Barron and enjoyed it quite a bit. I have not read Ligotti, who is apparently deeply pessimistic.)

Now, you gotta understand, there are people who take this VERY seriously. There’s a not insignificant portion of the Lovecraftian community who believe that every story must end with everyone dead or insane. Hope is absurd, any notion of good vs. evil, anathema.

I reject this view, but it sure seemed like the creators of True Detective didn’t. And the hyper-cosmiscists ATE IT UP. But if you’ve seen the True Detective finale, you know what happened.

I give you the last lines from the show, after Rust has his catharsis, his epiphany.

COHLE: “It’s just one story: the oldest, light versus dark.”

MARTY: “I know we ain’t in Alaska. But it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”

COHLE: “You’re looking at it wrong, Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.”

I can’t tell you how much I loved that. Mostly because it fits exactly with my view of the subject and with what I strive to accomplish in my writing. But I gotta tell you, I also got a little kick out of the fact that around the country, some of my Lovecraftian friends were throwing things at the television. They saw that ending as the ultimate betrayal. One person actually told me that they had hoped the show would end with Marty and Rust dying.

But it didn’t. It was much better than that, much deeper, much more complex, much more fulfilling. True Detective was always a story about people. It was the story of relationships, and of two men growing and changing. Two men obsessed with truth, with putting away the bad-guys, with making the world just a little bit better than it had been before.

That character arc was completed in the finale. Were Rust and Marty able to completely conquer the evil they faced? No. They were not. As Marty says, they were never going to be able to get them all. The evil was just too big for two men to defeat. But they were able to win a small battle. They faced The Yellow King in his home territory of Carcosa, and they defeated him.

Nihilism is easy and it’s trite. What True Detective managed to do was not. It should be celebrated, and it should be emulated. The darkness may have more territory, but surely, the light is still winning.

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That Which Should Not Be has been out for a while, but in many ways it’s still going strong, and every now and then it still gets some great review. I wanted to share this one from Horror After Dark, a website that specializes in reviewing the world of horror fiction. One of my goals in writing the book was to encourage people to check out Lovecraft, so sentences like this one make me happy.

In years to come when I look back on the authors that shaped my recent conversion to the sub-genre of cosmic horror as created by Lovecraft, two names will top that list. The first is Tim Curran. The second is, now, Brett J. Talley.

I’ve got plenty more to share from the Asian portion of my trip, but this seemed appropriate given today’s events.

Here’s a picture of Independence Square, as it looked a year ago, and as it looked during the recent revolution.

Last year about this time–well before the Ukrainian people rose up to defend their rights and the Russians decided to invade–I had the distinct honor and pleasure of traveling to the cradle of Slavic civilization, Kiev.

Independence Square

I had been to Moscow before, and I found it to be the most unfriendly city I had ever had the displeasure to experience. I chalked it up to the scars of Communism, relics of the distrust and misanthropy engendered by that evil ideology. I expected the same from Ukraine. I was wrong. Instead, I found a wonderful people, eager to help a stranger, even willing to acknowledge my meager Russian when English failed us, despite the fact it is the language of their oppressor.

A monument to the victims of the Holodomor, the enforced starvation of 7.5 million Ukrainians by the Soviets.

Today, the Ukrainian people are under attack. They face a hostile army, intent on re-establishing its old empire. The name has changed, but the enemy remains the same. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

The Motherland Monument celebrating victory in WWII

I was inspired.

Why should this matter to us? Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe we should look inward to our own problems and ignore the cries of oppressed peoples around the world. But that has never been our way. We have always borne the burden of being the world’s great defender of liberty. We have paid in blood and treasure so that others could be free. And all we have ever asked, as Colin Powell once said, is for enough land to bury our dead.

I’m not saying we should fight a war against the Russians.  But neither should we abandon a nation, in a critical part of the world, that wants to turn West. A nation where one girl told me, beaming, about how excited she was that Kiev was about to open its first KFC.

The Russian beast is preparing to devour Ukraine. It cannot stand against that kind of enemy alone. I hope that it will not have to.

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The vast majority of my posts are fun and freewheeling. This is not one of them. There’s some truly dark stuff ahead. My trip to Cambodia began in one of the most amazing places in the world. It ended in one of the most evil.

This is a school yard.

Or at least it was. The white tombs give a clue to what it became.

This is what one of the rooms of the school house looks like today.

This is what it looked like on January 7, 1979, the day that Vietnamese troops marched into Phnom Penh, ending the reign of the Khmer Rouge and the operation of Security Prison 21.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge, a Maoist outfit led by Pol Pot, captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. They intended to implement true communism. Everyone would be expected to put in the same amount of work in the fields. And everyone would receive the same amount of food. All property, including personal effects, was banned. In order to facilitate this new equality, the cities were emptied. Phnom Penh, a city of millions, became a ghost town over night.

The Khmer Rouge had a long list of enemies. The religious, the educated, the literate, those who wore glasses. For these people, they had a saying–“It is no gain to keep you. It is no loss to lose you.”

The Khmer Rouge were in power for less than four years. In that time, they murdered 3 million people, a quarter of the country’s population. 150 execution centers were set up to facilitate the Khmer Rouge’s goals. The prison known as S-21, located in the middle of the capital, housed nearly 20,000 prisoners over the course of its operation. Here are the ones who made it out.

Everyone else was murdered.

Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge were meticulous in their record keeping. They photographed every one of the prisoners who entered S-21, and many of those photographs survive to this day. Here are some of the victims.

Many of the victims were tortured to death. Here’s a deep bucket, with shackles in the bottom. They would hold the victims upside down in the water and shackle their hands so they couldn’t escape.

Torture took place during long interrogations. The rules of those interrogations are written here, on this blackboard. This is what it says in English (roughly).

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.

2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.

3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.

4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.

5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.

6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.

7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.

8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.

9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.

10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

If torture didn’t kill the prisoners, they’d find other ways. Note the bullet hole in the back of the skull.

Others were burned or skinned alive, some were electrocuted, and some died from experiments such as draining them of blood or removing their organs one at a time.

Most prisoners didn’t die at the school. They were taken to a scenic spot outside of town, the location of an old Chinese cemetery. Today, we call that place the Killing Fields.

This is a ceremonial stupa built at the site of the Killing Fields.

It contains tens of thousands of skulls.

The skulls are arranged by sex and age at the time of death. They bear the marks of their owners last moments of life. Because the Khmer Rouge wanted to conserve ammunition, the preferred method of execution involved blunt force trauma. Other times, prisoners were simply thrown into open pits and then buried alive.

When they were discovered, the Killing Fields were marked by mounds of dirt, sores on the earth caused by a buildup of gasses from decomposing bodies. Open pits remain.

The graves, however, were extensive and not all of them have been excavated. Thus, bones and scraps of clothing regularly wash up. The caretakers of the Killing Fields collect them at regular intervals and put them in the stupa. Until then, they are stored in boxes around the site.

Which means that as one walks around the area, bones and clothing sticking up from the ground are a regular sight.

Without a doubt, the most chilling part of the Killing Fields is this tree. It was here that Khmer soldiers bashed in the skulls of children before burying them in a mass grave nearby.

From another tree, they hung speakers that played revolutionary music so as to muffle the screams and cries of the victims as they were being murdered.

All and all, a rough day. One might wonder why anyone would bother visiting such terrible places. In my view, foreign travel can become a little bit like going to Disney World. Seeing all the fun things, and ignoring the bad. But it is hard to do that in Cambodia. You almost never see any old people there. No one over 70. There’s a reason. The Khmer Rouge killed them all.

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So it’s that time of year again when the final Stoker ballot has been announced. There are several great works on the list, and I wanted to share my favorites with you so that you can check them out. First of all, here’s the full list. All of these stories are worth picking up. And now, my votes!

Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel

Special Dead by Patrick Freivald — the terrific follow up to Twice Shy, this novel is as a good or better than the original.

Superior Achievement in Long Fiction

“The Slaughter Man” by Benjamin K. Ethridge — I admit, I’m a little biased about this one, but Slaughter Man is one of the most creative pieces of fiction you are ever going to read. A cornerstone of the growing Limbus, Inc. universe, Anne Petty would be proud.

Superior Achievement in Short Fiction

“Snapshot” by Patrick Freivald –Freivald continues his march of domination in the horror world. Delicious little story.

Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

Laird Barron is the master of short-form dark fiction, and this is his best yet.

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I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, but I am just now getting around to it. In other words, I am way behind, and I need your help to catch up. So sign up today! I won’t spam you, and I certainly will never sell or share your information. I just want to be able to keep in touch. Thanks guys!

“Along the shore the cloud waves breaks,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

………………………………….In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

…………………………….Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

………………………………Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

……………………………..Lost Carcosa.”

Cassilda’s Song in The King in Yellow. Act I. Scene 2.

For those of us who love weird fiction, Lovecraft, Derleth, Chambers, and all the great and talented ones who have come after, we have waited for years for our literary movement to break into the mainstream. We came close when Guillermo del Toro attempted to bring The Mountains of Madness to the big screen. But then budgetary concerns killed that dream, and we wondered what the next break through might be. And then came True Detective from HBO.

At first, True Detective seemed like a very good police procedural. Then came Episode Two, when it was revealed that our victim had met a man who opened her eyes to a whole new world. He was, she said, “a king.” But not just any king. He was a king in yellow, and he came from a city called Carcosa. Then in Episode Four, we learned that our main suspect was a part of a cult, one that worshiped certain forbidden gods with sacrifices on ancient stone slabs spread throughout the dark lands beyond civilization. Given that the show is set in Louisiana, all I need is an  Inspector Legrasse and I’ll be in heaven.

How far will True Detective dive into the unimagined truths that lie at the edge of man’s understanding? We cannot yet know, but no matter what the answer, for millions who have never seen the Yellow Sign, a new journey into heretofore unknown worlds of mystery has begun.

Heard about the King in Yellow on True Detective and don’t know what to think? It’s time to experience it, first-hand… (Just to warn you, the format is a little wonky with this book, but the stories are all there and if you can get past that you should enjoy it. You can also get the original King in Yellow for free, but it does not include Chambers’s later weird fiction, such as “The Maker of Moons”).

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And you get Harry Shannon’s Biters as a bonus. 🙂  If you are a member of LibraryThing, just click on this link and scroll down. You’ll see our books and will be able to enter for a free one. We are giving a ton away, so your chances of winning are actually pretty good. Good luck!

Here’s the book trailer again if you forgot what it’s about…

There are a lot of things that are fun about writing a book. Making the book trailer may be the best part. I hope you enjoy this introduction to my new book, The Reborn.

After leaving Siem Reap, I took a boat down the Mekong River all the way to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. A gritty, vibrant city, I expected to find the normal hustle, bustle, and inordinate amount of  motorbikes that one is apt to see in a Southeast Asian city. I did not expect this.

So what brought twenty thousand Buddhist monks and countless more ordinary citizens out to the square in front of the national palace? It turned out we had just happened to arrive on the day of the official public funeral of the King of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk. For a westerner generally unfamiliar with Buddhist customs, it was altogether fascinating. Here is a video I took of some of the proceedings.

It was quite an experience, and despite the fact it was a funeral, a joyous event. I can’t say the same for what we did the next day. I’m a big believer that you shouldn’t treat the world as your own personal Disneyland. So if you see the good, you should experience the bad, too. And you can’t go to Cambodia without visiting the Killing Fields.

Lorde’s “Royals” is without a doubt my favorite pop song of the last year, but I actually like Kina Grannis’s cover better than the original. What do you think?

During our swing through southeast Asia, we visited the great treasure of Cambodia—Angkor Wat. The ancient site boasts the ruins of the largest religious complex in the world. It did not disappoint. It was a treat of Lovecraftian proportions.

Sunrise

Bike Share

Reminds me of Star Wars

Wearing the appropriate shirt

Spooky, and awesome

The great explorer

From Bangkok we journeyed to Siem Reap, Cambodia, but it was no easy road to get there.  It began with a 5:55 a.m. train from Bangkok, one that was as third class as it could be. It was a cool morning, however, and with the windows open, the breeze kept the trip from being unbearable. That is, until the fires. We’d seen them burning in the distance and didn’t think much of them. Just farmers burning their fields, releasing nitrogen, whatever it is that farmers do. Then all of the sudden the fires weren’t off in the distance; they were all along the railroad track. Our train drove straight into a tunnel of flame. Smoke and ash and fire were leaping into the train car, while we huddled on the floor, trying to avoid all three. But the fun was only beginning.

After exiting the train a little more well-done and covered in soot than when we entered it, we took a tuk-tuk to the Cambodian border. After dodging the scam visa office, we exited Thailand, bribed a Cambodian border guard, and made our way to a tourist holding pen where buses routinely left for Siem Reap. Twelve of us or so ended up piling into a mini-van. I was blessed with the front seat. I had air-conditioning. I wasn’t packed like a sardine in a can. I thought I was pretty lucky. I was wrong. I was so wrong.

While the rest of the passengers chattered away in the back, I had a front row seat to a spectacle of terror that defies proper description. I have seen bad driving before. I though the Thai’s were rather reckless. They have nothing on the Cambodians. We fired along a Cambodian highway at 100 clicks an hour, swerving in and out of traffic like we were in a NASCAR race. It was a two-lane road, but you would never know it. I’m not sure what was the most terrifying–going three wide on the road (i.e., the car on the right, the car passing the car on the right, and us passing both cars) while a huge truck was heading directly towards us, flashing his lights like a mad man; shooting the gap between two cars, one heading towards us and one we were passing, something we did five or six times; or the fact that we did all this while our drive answered his cell-phone and fumbled with his iPod. For 200 km, with no seat belts, we drove. At some point, I resigned myself to the fact that if I was going to die, there was nothing I could do about it.

By some absolute miracle, we made it to Siem Reap. Wonders never cease. But the true wonders were to follow.

So I’m stuck here in the great frozen tundra of Washington, D.C., but I sure wish I was where I was this time last year–Thailand. I think I’ll let the pictures–and the videos–do the talking for me on this one. Next up, Cambodia, one of the most amazing places I have ever been, but also one of the darkest.

Monkeys, hanging out on the kayak I took through the mangrove forests of Krabi (those are not my feet).

They eat a lot.

And they will kiss you, too.

And you don’t even need a saddle!