Lecture: Move Under Ground

Auteur: Nick Mamatas

Aussi disponible:

- Gratuitement, en format électronique: http://www.moveunderground.org/
- À rabais, directement de l'auteur, tel qu'expliqué ici: http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1038801.html

Cote personnelle: 4/5

Résumé:

En gros: Avec l'aide des grands noms de la Beat Generation (Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady), Jack Kerouac doit contrer les assauts de Cthulhu et des "Great Old Ones" (créatures de l'univers de H.P. Lovecraft).

Parfait pour ceux qui sont familiers avec les deux univers (Beat Generation + Lovecraft), mais peut-être pas uniquement.

C'est inégal, mais toujours intéressant, avec des passages assez fameux.

Comme ceci, alors que Jack et Bill arrivent enfin à New York. Jack regarde Manhattan, et pense:

"But across the river, topping the brown Hudson like a crown, was Manhattan. Buildings stretched to the heavens, whose brothers the mountains are. It was not like any city on earth, for above purple mists rose towers, spires and pyramids which one may only dream of in opiate lands beyond the Oxus. Majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of mist to play with the flaming clouds and last stars of morning.

But threaded through this beauty were the dark tentacles of great Cthulhu. He had beaten us home, the prize was in his grasp already. The heart of the world, concrete and fleshy, green money blood pouring in and out from every corner of earth though arteries of commerce and culture, all but choked up and poisoned with the madness of dead gods' dreams."

Puis il regarde la rivière Hudson, polluée et dégueulasse:

"And it wasn't the cult that did this, the filth here was all natural, all man. We had everything already, the altar had been laid out, sacrifices prepared. Charnel pits in Europe, hills of dead babies, bombs that could take this city of money changing temples out in a flash of light; the concrete and steel wouldn't even last long enough to crumble down to the ground. We're all so rich now that we're one step away from holding out the begging bowl and blinking away hungry flies. How could the elder gods resist such a morsel--we'd stuck the decorative toothpick in ourselves."

En entrevue, il a aussi dit un truc que je trouve brillant (en bleu):

"You're a Lovecraftian, so putting Cthulhu in Move Under Ground might not be shocking, but what made you want to use Jack Kerouac's voice of bop prosody for a narrator?
I'm a Lovecraftian? What does that mean? I'm surely not receiving invitations to write for all those Mythos anthologies that keep getting published. I just wonder why this question wasn't inverted. "You're a Kerouacian, so putting Jack in Move under Ground, might not be shocking..." Anyway, Kerouac and Lovecraft are two peas in a pod as far as I am concerned. Mother issues, check. New England outsiders, check. Aimed at but fell short of the Ivy League, check. Whispers and rumors of homosexuality, check. The center of circles of correspondents, writers, and now cults of readers, check. Long, baroque sentences that sometimes collapsed under their own weight to such an extent that they punched through space-time and became utterly weightless and perfect, check. Victims of dozens of horrible pastiches, check. Plus, if you read Doctor Sax, it's all there."