Dark Gods: A Retro Review

Digging into bookshelves is a bit like archaeology. There are treasures to be found among the double-rows of volumes. On the most recent excavation, I unearthed a jewel from the past: Dark Gods, a collection of four novellas by T.E.D. Klein. Klein’s prose is insightful and delightful. It delves into the basics of fear, that awareness of something terrifying lurking close by, while knowing that all the introspection in the world can’t keep it at bay. A jaundiced sense of humor, a witty riposte, a philosophical outlook, or an acknowledgement of the malevolent adversary are shabby temporary defenses.

Excellently establishing mood is another Klein characteristic. Consider, for example, this atmospheric paragraph from the first novella in the collection, Children of the Kingdom: “Certain things are not supposed to happen before midnight. There’s a certain category of events — certain freak encounters and discoveries, certain crimes — for which mere nighttime doesn’t seem quite dark enough. Only after midnight, after most of the world is asleep and the laws of the commonplace suspended, only then are we prepared for a touch, however brief, of the impossible.” Reading that paragraph felt like a literary epiphany about how to distill an ominous tone as a preface for what is to come. Eldritch horrors exist with the mundane in the urban and provincial New York settings of the four novellas in Dark Gods. The unique aura of 1977 New York City is depicted in Children of the Kingdom as a place of uneasy societal concurrence: “Less than half a block can make a difference in New York. Different worlds can coexist side by side, scarcely intersecting. There are places in Manhattan where you can see a modern hi-rise, with its terraces and doormen and well-appointed lobby, towering white and immaculate above some soot-stained little remnant of the city’s past — a tenement built during the Depression, lines of garbage cans in front, or a nineteenth-century brownstone gone to seed, its brickwork defaced by graffiti, its front door yawning open, its hallway dark, narrow, and forbidding as a tomb.” The tale’s astute narrator is shaken out of his comfort zone when, after relocating his elderly grandfather to a retirement home adjacent to an unsavory area of town, he discovers that NYC may well be populated by supernatural creatures from long ago and far away. Lovecraftian in theme, most certainly, but this superb story is very much Klein’s own.

The second story in the collection is less successful. Petey is about a city couple who score an unbelievable deal on a dream house in the country. They invite a large group of friends/associates over for a dinner party to flaunt the acquisition. The evening starts rather like a large cast version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with its booze-infused backbiting, but later turns into something far more sinister. While some of the repartees are witty, the chief problem of the story is that the characters are largely unlikable and somewhat stereotypical. However, the yarn does feature a sly simile that summarizes the author’s mordant viewpoint: “He stared into his drink; the ice had shrunk and lost its shape, floating on the surface like a jellyfish, evolution in reverse.” The quote is also a bit of a reveal about the previous owner’s activities.

Black Man with a Horn is Lovecraft on steroids. Lovecraft himself is quoted throughout the narrative whose protagonist, a writer of horror fiction, has a conflicted view of the horror master. There is reverence … and resentment. Lovecraft is perceived by the narrator protagonist (said to be based on author Frank Belknap Long) as an artistic rival, whose fame has eclipsed his own: “With Howard gone these more than forty years I still lived out my life in his shadow; certainly his tales had overshadowed my own. Now I found myself trapped within one of them.” Indeed, Lovecraft is a proverbial spiritual guide of the writer providing the first-person narration, as well as guiding the hand of T.E.D. Klein in the writing of this novella. Meta to the max. Lovecraft’s racism is addressed in the storyline, and the protagonist reflects that he himself has a modified apprehension concerning people of color: “It was, in fact, a thorny problem: forced to choose between whites whom I despised and blacks whom I feared, I somehow preferred the fear.” And, with terrific build-up, another fear manifests.

Creative writing becomes a curse in Nadelman’s God, in which a poem provides impetus for Frankensteinian experimentation. Middle-aged Nadelman works in an advertising agency, having forsaken the youthful dream of making a living as a fiction writer. Although, he does feel that his ad man career has parallels with fiction writing, and suspects that his co-workers are also frustrated fiction writers. When he gets a fan letter from an unhinged man, praising lyrics from a heavy metal band song derived from a poem Nadelman wrote in college, there’s this reflection: “Fan letters from semiliterates were, at best, a dubious honor, and though most of his associates were aware that an old college poem of Nadelman’s had lately been turned into a rock song, he wasn’t sure it was politically wise to remind them of it. They were all failed writers here, after all, and not inclined to look kindly on a fellow employee who dabbled, however humbly, in the arts.”

The fan is convinced that the poem is a recipe for constructing an embodiment of a dark god. As for Nadelman, belief in deities seems superfluous: “He himself had reached a somewhat more reasonable conclusion: rather than worshipping God as a divine and highly arbitrary executioner, it made more sense to see the position as vacant. There was no one in control up there. The office was empty. Nobody home.” Healthy atheism promotes healthy skepticism, but it is inevitable that Nadelman is on an occult collision course for which he is to some degree responsible.

Assuming responsibility, the questioning of one’s role in the larger picture, are threads that run through Klein’s writings. In Nadelman’s God, they are writ large. The novella is splendid on many levels and was the worthy recipient of the 1986 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. T.E.D. Klein is an extraordinary writer who has only a few published works to his credit. He has been lauded by Stephen King and genre critic S.T. Joshi. Dark Gods, first published in 1985, displays his enormous talent and is a must-read for all aficionados of horror.