Fantasy Magazine, April 2011

This is a review only of Jonathan L. Howard’s Johannes Cabal story The House of Gears.

(I also read Kat Howard’s Choose Your Own Adventure, which was beautiful and chilling and marvelous.)

(Other authors in this issue are Peter S. Beagle, Carrie Vaughn, John Joseph Adams, N. K. Jemisin, and Genevieve Valentine.)

spoilers

Necromancer vs. Steampunk AI. The description of the mechanical brain is marvelous, clanky, clunky yet eerily Kubrick. There is Howard’s trademark dry humour: Cabal hiding behind an Aspidistra in a Chinese pot waiting for the antagonist to change his mind when an improvised flash bomb wipes out one day’s long-term memory; Samhet’s apotheosis conveyed in a shot of his brain in formaldehyde, pickled in a jar of pickled onions. There is also horror of the proper old sort: the brief mention of of dried blood and bone dust clogging a drill, indicating Samet’s sheer determination to endure the pain of days or weeks of decanting. What Lovecraft needed two pages of piled up adverbs and adjectives to convey, Howard achieves in two sentences.

The choice of the image of Möbius loops for the memory devices. The hideous aesthetics of the poor little mad genius. The dull horror of the pithed, mechanized necromancers. Cabal’s efficient vengeance in the form of reprogramming Samhet for Cabal’s own future use. The only difference between them, then, that Samhet is actively malevolent; Cabal only reactively so.

Howard’s stories alternate between supernatural and steampunk. The steampunk is excellent, but the supernatural is better: Cabal’s personality is deeper, more nuanced, and more interesting in the horror stories; he is slightly more sketchy or perhaps stereotyped or perhaps, dare I say, mechanical, in the steampunk stories.