Dune is one of those BIG sci-fi books... you know, influential, Hugo/Nebula-awarded, loved by millions, made into a bad movie, etc. But is it any good? Well, it's fun, anyhow--kind of like Edgar Rice Burroughs only with legitimate, extrapolative science fictional concepts as opposed to giant green monsters with cutlasses. Herbert’s prose isn’t exactly brilliant... characters tend to the ultra-heroic or the ultra-villainous (the bad guys are all gay perverts, to boot) and the dialogue is that milord/milady, pseudo-medieval claptrap found in every cut-rate sword-and-sorcery novel... but what keeps you (or, rather, me) plowing through the turgid writing is (a) an engaging and entertainingly complex plot, (b) the grand inventiveness of the Dune universe (this is one of those books with a glossary and several appendices just in case the author fails to properly introduce some weird concept or other) and (c) Herbert's fascination with consciousness... he seems to be personally convinced that by harnessing the powers of the mind, anything is possible.

The Bene Gesserit, for instance, are a vast, secretive sisterhood whose members possess the power to analyze, predict, and control situations with a sort of hyper-psychological perception. Additionally, they scheme to influence the course of history for the better by eugenic intervention and apolitical intrigue. Our hero Paul, who has been trained by his mother--the Lady Jessica (ooh)--to become a male Bene Gesserit, becomes an unstoppable üaut;bermensch when, after various betrayals and treacheries, he and Jessica end up going native on Dune. His biosystem becomes so infused with the psychoactive spice that permeates the planet's atmosphere (and is the priceless commodity that drives the novel's plot), that with his Bene Gesserit training he begins to perceive reality in a prescient psychedelic fugue all the time:

It was as though a clockwork control for a bomb had been set to ticking within him. It went on about its business no matter what he wanted. It recorded minuscule shadings of difference around him--a slight change in moisture, a fractional fall in temperature, the progress of an insect across their stilltent roof, the solemn approach of dawn in the starlighted patch of sky he could see out of the tent’s transparent end.

Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion, and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation--the curtains whipped away--she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.

(first appeared in Reign of Toads #4)

While a cursory inspection of most manga available in this country might give the impression that they are all about transforming robots, more obscure works like Hideshi Hino's Hell Baby indicate that this is not the case. 

Hell Baby is a grotesque morality tale--in the classic "tragic monster" tradition--about a mutant baby born as a twin to a normal baby. The horrified father discards the "hell baby" in the World's Graveyard, "where lies all the rubbish of this world." Some mysterious energy in the graveyard instills life and purpose into the baby: she feeds off of vermin and dogs to survive and grows to be seven years old. A fearful urge calls her to the city where the energy that animates her demands that she seek revenge. As in a fable, we are inexorably dragged toward the poetic justice conclusion, where the humanity of the humans and the hell baby are weighed.

Like Panorama of Hell (Hideshi's other English-translated work), Hell Baby is a gruesome and beautiful visual experience. Stark black-and-white images of a lonely, depressing world counterpoint vivid, organic depictions of gore and carnage. Unlike wordy Occidental comics, the story is primarily driven by the near-cinematic sweep of panels--a scream that starts on one page, builds as the father sees his horrible child on the following pages, and erupts across another spread--delivering an impact much greater than the It's Alive horror-show narrative might suggest. --K.S.

(review date: 5/17/97)

I was kind of surprised I read the whole thing: a novel acquired afew years ago mainly because (a) it's fairly rare to encounter and (b) I definitely would've bought it if I was still afflicted with the horror fiction geekdom of my high school years. But since I did buy it and--eventually--read it, and here I am writing about it as if it mattered, I suspect geekdom may still be in effect. Head geek H.P. Lovecraft's evaluation (from Supernatural Horror in Literature, reviewed in the Winter '92 Toad) follows:

The House on the Borderland (1908)--perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works--tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege of blasphemous hybrid anomolies [translation: "pig monsters"--ed.] from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.

The chief amusement value of this moldering wonder is probably Hodgson's treatment of the narrator's spinsterish sister as a complete zombie who goes into hysterical near-catatonia whenever her brother marshalls his resources to combat the scary pig monsters. She virtually disappears from the narrative for most of the book, then reappears in lobotomized mode to serve breakfast and smile. She's not so much a character as a plywood construct moved into position for certain establishing shots. Very surreal to any reader used to seeing women presented as reasonably sentient beings possessed of at least the motivational force required to scratch their groins. Also, special bonus: much mystical/psychedelic out-of-body experience writing that gets old fast, particularly the last half the book where Hodgson lays out, from the narrator's earth-bound POV, what it might be like to perceive a time-lapse version of the solar system as it travels to the center of the universe. Booooring.

The pig monster part and the framing sequence where two travellers stumble across the ruins of the house and get all spooked out by rustling in the woods are the best. --K.S.

(first appeared in Reign of Toads #3)

last update 7/30/97


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