Burroughs, Kerouac and Cassady Vs Cthulhu. Ok then. It’s On!

Bear with me for a moment. It’s the 1960′s and Jack Kerouac is in a bad way, several decades of alcohol have taken their toll and he is distraught with the state of the world he lives in. He decides to leave his Big Sur hideaway and seek out Neal Cassady (his real life inspiration for ‘On The Road’) whose hallucinatory sojourns have caused the unintentional release of Cthulhu. Jack holds a grudge against our tentacle friend as he believes it is he who is responsible for the slow destruction of society and the apathetic mindset of the multitudes.

They team up along the way with William Burroughs appearing as a gung ho, trigger happy exterminator (hardly a massive stretch then) and Allen Ginsberg as a prophet, who lives in a sewer (like Splinter) to destroy the evil and an associated band of cultish sorts. In short, this is one of the most insane premises for a book that I have read in a very long time. It’s a bit like Ewan McGregor’s pitch to his work colleagues in ‘A Life Less Ordinary’. Imagine that first paragraph being read by an enthusiastic Scotsman, blissfully unaware of the eventual success and celluloid banality that awaits him.

The book is called ‘Move Under Ground’ and is written by Nick Mamatas. I didn’t imagine all of this in my head. I promise.

I have ordered my copy, but in the meantime I am ploughing through the available PDF which the author has very kindly made available.

Mamatas clearly has a great working knowledge of his subject matter and is clearly having tremendous fun along the way. It is not unusual for literary characters to be worked into contemporary storylines, but the mixture and treatment of the characters here really works. Cthulhu is very much flavor of the month in terms of internet hipster referential bonus points, so it’s worth mentioning that this novel was written in 2004, predating the unprecedented gush of Lovecraft fans who started babbling endlessly about him after Steampunk started to become popular. Funny that, they were probably all erroneously quoting Poe a few years back when it was all about the Goths.

Goths are like an endangered species now. Occasionally I’ll see one and get all excited. They’ve also had to adapt into survival mode, they’re all really hardcore now. You never really see any half arsed Goths anymore. Maybe we could get onto the WWF and National Geographic and do a special on their numbers and whereabouts. Initiate some form of breeding programme to make sure that they don’t die out when we think there are still loads of them, like manatees.

Manatees that frequent Whitby.

Oh yeah, the book…

Basically……

It’s a fantastic pulp novel, one which I will happily display alongside the works of the men in question.

You can read ‘Move Under Ground‘ HERE

Or Buy it HERE

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