Underland Stuff

It occurs to me that I haven't heard much about Underland Press in a while, but they had two books published this year.

In Extremis, by John Shirley 

In Extremis features more than twenty of Shirley’s most intense stories originally published in anthologies and periodicals like Asimov's Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance, and New Noir. In addition, this volume contains two never-before-published pieces that are sure to roil the genre’s most hardened readers.

The Other, by Matthew Hughes

Meet Luff Imbry, an insidiously clever confidence man . . . He likes good wine, good food, and good stolen goods, and he always maintains the upper hand. When a business rival gets the drop on him, he finds himself abandoned on Fulda—a far-off, isolated world with a history of its own. Unable to blend in and furious for revenge, Imbry has to rely on his infamous criminal wit to survive Fulda’s crusade to extinguish The Other.

Now, I have this inexplicable manner of deciding which books I want to read and simple descriptions tend to not play into it, but one thing that helps is history.  Underland Press is the publisher of The Pilo Family Circus, Last Days, and Finch.  Good stuff (and, in the case of Finch, great stuff).They've published a Joe Lansdale collection which I really have to read one of these days.  All of this is to say that I think I need to track down these two Underland books.

Underland Press

One thing I have not done much of at all is write about particular publishers. Oh, I have my favorites and different reasons for each of them, but I just don’t write about them. And yes, I do believe that who the publisher is does matter. There are certain expectations of quality and sometimes of content that comes with who publishes a particular book. A reputation.

I’m five chapters into Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch. In a couple of text messages I attempted to convey the sense of atmosphere, the rot of Ambergris that seeps into the mind of the reader. I explained the basic concept of the novel, the grey caps, the rot. Then, knowing that she very much enjoyed two previous novels I recommended, I mentioned that this was the fourth novel from the same publisher of Last Days and The Pilo Family Circus.

That’s when I got the response of “ooh”.

The publisher matters.

I’m talking about Underland Press. Underland Press was created by Victoria Blake, a former fiction editor at Dark Horse. From the publisher's "Mission" page:

WE LIKE STORIES that scare us. We like the macabre-monsters and magic and men with nothing to lose. More than anything, we like to be intrigued and entertained.

UNDERLAND PRESS was started to bring the best of the world’s scary and strange stories to life and to light.

CALL IT THE NEW WEIRD, or fantasy, or dark fantasy. Call it what you want. We like reading by flashlight under the covers at night. We want to make books you can’t put down.

Blake published Underland Press’s first four books in 2009 and it was an impressive debut year. 2010 sees Underland taking over the Best American Fantasy series with the third volume. Both Last Days and The Pilo Family Circus were disturbing and twisted and quite good. I haven’t had the chance yet to read Chaos, but given that Blake published it, I have high expectations – though my stomach is wary.

So, I’m reading Finch. The first five chapters are fantastic and that isn’t a surprise. When I do my Year’s Best lists in late December I only go to the Top Nine because I never know what book I missed or didn’t get a chance to read. It’s early yet, but I kind of think it might have been Finch.

Published by Underland Press.


Oh, and here's a great interview Victoria Blake did with Charles Tan last year.

The Pilo Family Circus, by Will Elliott

The Pilo Family Circus
Will Elliott
Underland Press: 2009


Jamie is a bit of a loser. He’s nothing special, just a guy who one day sees three clowns committing a crime and discovers a bag of some strange powder they leave behind by mistake. Jamie, being a bit of a loser, decides to ingest some of this powder – despite the fact that he doesn’t know what it is. Yeah. Loser. Anyway, this brings him to the attention of the clowns and he soon finds himself in the middle of a nightmare he can’t escape from.

“You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got?”

The clowns are absolutely insane. Two of the clowns he first saw, Doopy and Goshy, are barely functionally retarded. Seriously, they are not all there and not in a polite way, either. Gonko, the leader, is a nasty git. There are two more clowns, and they are no more sane or gentle than these three. Perhaps because of the powder, Jamie is recruited into the circus and with the trashing of his flat, the alternative is death. Passing his audition, Jamie finds himself is some sort of alternate reality where the circus exists somehow out of time. The clowns are at war with the acrobats, the owners – the Pilo brothers – are nearly insane and not to be crossed. This is a nightmare dreamscape of a circus and when Jamie puts on the facepaint, he turns into JJ – a vicious (if cowardly) clown with no moral center.

Welcome to The Pilo Family Circus.

This novel is nuts. The Circus is populated by grotesque people, all who once were regular humans like Jamie, but transformed by the Circus, by the powder, by the Pilos, by the Master Manipulator. Will Elliott has an insane imagination and he tells a solid story of Jamie’s experience in the circus, his desire and attempts to find a way out, and how putting on the facepaint changes him. Jamie and JJ are two different people, each with control of the body depending on whether the facepaint is applied. It’s crazy, grotesque, nasty, impressive, and just plain nuts. That is probably the best word for The Pilo Family Circus.

I described the circus as a nightmare, and that’s exactly what it is. It changes the members into gross exaggerations of who they might be (perhaps the opposite of who they truly are, but this is not clear). There is a hint of an explanation of how the audience finds the circus, and what the true purpose of the circus is (it isn’t pleasant). The whole situation is monstrous, and Will Elliott is so over the top that the storytelling can be seductive at points.

It can also be utterly rude and disgusting (let me simply reference the consummation of the “relationship” between Goshy and a plant), but that is part of the point here. Everything is rude and disgusting and over the top in terms of violence and language and absurdity. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but it should be noted. If you like the horror and you like the nasty, and you’d like another look at some evil clowns, The Pilo Family Circus is exactly what you’re looking for.

The Pilo Family Circus is the second novel published by Underland Press and it’s another one readers should come into with a fortified and strong stomach (though it isn’t as flat out nasty as the physical mutilation of Last Days was). If the first two novels can be used as a gauge, Underland Press is building a strong, if somewhat sick, lineup of fiction.


Reading copy provided courtesy of Underland Press.

Last Days, by Brian Evenson

Last Days
Brian Evenson
Underland Press: 2009

Mr. Kline is recruited by two men to investigate a murder, only Kline refuses to take part. Rather than have the story end in the first three pages, Kline is then abducted and coerced to conduct the investigation at the compound of a mutilation cult. Investigate or die. That’s the deal for Kline. The reason Kline was sought out is because when face with “the gentleman with the cleaver”, Kline didn’t flinch. Kline let the man take his hand, cauterized his own stump on the stove, and then shot the man through the eye using his off hand. The cult, the brotherhood, believes Kline is one of them. An amputee. A self-cauterizer.

In the terms of the brotherhood, Kline is only a “one” with only one body part amputated. Normally, if he was not a special case and a self-cauterizer, Kline would barely be allowed entrance into the brotherhood, let alone be able to speak with the higher-ups in the brotherhood (eights, and above). Even so, Kline is hampered in his investigation because he is only a “one” and those he must speak with are “eights” and “tens”. The investigation is rife with lies, misdirection, and a constant threat to his life.

Last Days is an expansion of Brian Evenson’s 2003 novella The Brotherhood of Mutilation. While I haven’t read The Brotherhood of Mutilation I believe that rather than taking the core story of the novella and making into a full length novel, Last Days the novel is simply The Brotherhood of Mutilation the novella + Last Days the novella. This is neither praise nor condemnation, but rather an acknowledgement that this is a story told in two parts. It reads as such. There are two distinct stories in Last Days, though the second ties to the first.

The jacket copy describes Last Days as “intense and profoundly unsettling” and “a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult”. Last Days is, in fact, intense and profoundly unsettling. Last Days is downright disturbing. The mental images Evenson creates simply by having a cult which takes pride in amputating body parts, places respect for the more parts removed, is deeply unsettling. The obsession of the brotherhood, the extremes to which they will go for their identity…well, it’s what drives the novel. Not the investigation. The investigation is a side show.

The prose is reminiscent of a more twisted Don DeLillo. DeLillo never wrote about people who dismember themselves, but the dialogue, the manner of description Evenson uses. There are echoes of DeLillo.

“Look at you,” said Torn-Lip. “Do you want to die in bed?”
“You don’t want to die in bed,” said Low Voice.
“We’re here to save you,” said Torn-Lip.
“I don’t want to be saved,” said Kline.
“He doesn’t want to be saved,” said Low Voice.
Pg 7

The cadence of the conversation, of the questions, answers, and non answers – it flows well and moves right into the description of Kline’s circumstances. The rhythms may be DeLillo, but the story is all Evenson.

Last Days the novella continues the story of The Brotherhood of Mutilation, but it goes off in a different direction and has a different tone. It is a natural follow up to The Brotherhood of Mutilation.

It should probably go without saying that Last Days is not a novel for everybody. This a bloody and gruesome novel, filled with violence and profane language. This is an impressive work of imagination, creative in its use of violence and mutilation. Kline is single minded in his will to survive and Evenson does well in putting together a compelling narrative that drags the kicking and screaming reader along until the reader has no choice but to run and keep up. It’s quite a ride.


Reading copy provided courtesy of Underland Press.