write a book review on horror
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The Best Horror Books of All Time
At the Mountains of Madness. by H.P. Lovecraft. ...
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Explanation:Something from Below by S. T. Joshi review
It goes without saying that the majority of S. T. Joshi’s critical work is of great value. His fictional output is also worthy of consideration. Joshi’s Assaults of Chaos (2013, Hippocampus Press) was quite a charming novel, I thought, even though Joshi allowed his authorial voice to be overwhelmed by realistic pseudo-quotes from his (usually historical) characters a bit too much. The stories collected in The Recurring Doom (2019, Sarnath Press) are also fine weird fare, with “Some Kind of Mistake” being a stand-out tale that deserves to be collected again elsewhere. I am, however, less impressed with Joshi’s Something from Below (2019, PS Publishing). This novella, while tightly plotted and, strictly speaking, mostly well-written, is nowhere near as satisfying as Joshi’s other fictional work.
Something from Below by S. T. Joshi book cover
Something from Below concerns Alison Mannering returning to her hometown of Dunsmuir after an extended time away at college. Her father has died and been buried while she was gone, and Alison comes back to the fading community to answer the simple question of how and why her father passed away. Naturally enough, a weird mystery ensues, and Alison soon finds herself swept up in the action of the plot (which could, I think, be well served by expansion into a full novel). On the level of the core idea, the novella is satisfying, if a bit simple, but the last few chapters of the book undermine the effort put into reading the whole, and this element is exacerbated by two overarching issues running throughout the text.
The first of the major problems with Something from Below is the narrative point of view. The majority of the book is told in the first person from Alison’s perspective. This would be fine, but Joshi has not succeeded at creating a convincing voice for a modern-day twenty-two-year-old woman. Alison’s narration sounds like Joshi’s writing in general – a quick comparison with the narrator of The Assaults of Chaos reveals unfortunate similarities (compare “a rambling three-story Victorian home – close to a mansion – where his wealthy and successful grandfather Whipple had become the centre of his universe” (Assaults, 12) with “This tiny house – one story and unfinished basement – was exactly the sort of place you’d expect a (now-deceased) coal miner and his suffering wife to own” (Something, 2)). This problem is compounded by the few interchapters that occur in Something from Below, which serve to give the reader a window into past events. These interchapters are told from the third person omniscient point of view, but they read as indistinguishable from Alison’s voice in the rest of the novella. If the novella had been written entirely in the third person, allowing Joshi’s narrative voice to speak in place of Alison’s, it would have been far more successful than it is in its current form.
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