Hit the road, Jack. Cthulhu's coming to get you!

A lot of speculative fiction is based on intriguing and thought-provoking 'what if?' questions that are then rigorously worked out with the resulting extrapolations forming the gist of the narrative. Nick Mamatas' second novel, Move Under Ground (published in 2004 by a small press, but made available in a more widely-distributed edition only in 2006)is horror, but it's based on just such a 'what if?', although possibly one that's a little further out on a limb than most: what if HP Lovecraft's malevolent Elder Gods took over the world, and the only person who could defeat them was Beat author Jack Kerouac? 

Yes, that's right. Jack Keroauc. Vs. Cthulhu.  

Insane, isn't it?

But does Mamatas pull it off? Actually he does, for the most part. The novel is written in a sustained pastiche of Kerouac's own jazz-influenced loping, improvisational prose - a pretty remarkable feat of extended literary mimicry in itself. The book reads remarkably like a lost Kerouac novel, and it is possible at first to dismiss the weirdness as being akin to the DT visions described in Big Sur, which also deals with a Kerouac-like figure holed up in a cottage, filling scroll after scroll with spontaneous writing. However, as Kerouac hits the road to find Neal Cassady and figure out what is going wrong with the world, it soon becomes clear that this isn't just another hallucinatory binge leavened with touches of Buddhist mysticism. Early on his journey however, Kerouac is stalked by a horde of dead-eyed suburbanites along the highway, in a Romero-esque sequence that ends with him watching R'lyeh, the city where 'dead Cthulhu waits, dreaming' rise out of the Pacific Ocean, off the California coast. The sense of menace and terror in this sequence is very real, apart from providing us with a great visual set-piece of high strangeness.

From this point on, we're treated to a roller-coaster road trip through the heart of a diseased, monster-haunted America, as Kerouac rips across the continent to find his ally Neal Cassady. Along the way, Kerouac and Cassady are joined by natty old shotgun-toting William Burroughs. The ensuing road trip is a completely weird experience - it's so remniscent of Kerouac's wild, chaotic booze-and-bebop fuelled travelogues. At the same time, Mamatas' vision of a world in which the Great Old Ones, ancient gods from another dimension with powers beyond our imagination and an attitude of utter contempt for human life, are slowly taking over is genuinely disturbing. It's a slow, subtle shifting of reality at first, which gradually gains in momentum as Kerouac waders further into cultist-held territory, and Cthulhu, a constant presence in the ravaged sky, sinks his tentacles deeper into the world.

Along the way, Cassady is seduced into joining the other side and only Kerouac and Burroughs, the drunkard and the junky, are left to somehow travel to New York and confront the primal evil that is gaining power by the hour. Burroughs of course knew all about fighting nightmarish terrors with tentacles, wrote about it all the time, and is the natural companion for Kerouac in this freakishly bizzare buddy-movie roadtrip race to save the world. Things get a little unhinged about three-fourths of the way through, as Mamatas' mix of Beat expressionism and Lovecraftian terror throws up one disjointed, nightmarish episode after the other. Still, it all ties together in the end, and Kerouac saves the day in a rather clever way, that also reflects the real Kerouac's interest in Buddhist philosophy. There's a somewhat superfluous epilogue to tie things up, and it's all over.

This was an audacious and accomplished horror novel - certainly one of the most original things I've read in this genre for a while. I look forward to reading more of Mamatas' fiction in the future.