Move Under Ground

Copyright

Copyright © 2004 by Nick Mamatas

Foreword copyright © 2020 by Brian Evenson

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2020, is an unabridged republication of the work published by Night Shade Books, San Francisco and Portland, in 2004. A new Foreword has been specially prepared for this edition by Brian Evenson.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mamatas, Nick, author.

Title: Move under ground / Nick Mamatas.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2020. | Originally published: 2004. | Summary: This thoroughly unique novel begins with the rise of the lost city of R’lyeh, portending certain doom for human existence. The witness to this deadly harbinger is Jack Kerouac, who recruits fellow beats Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs for a cross-country road trip that will climax in a confrontation with a murderous cult— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019054555 | ISBN 9780486841861 (paperback)

Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Horror fiction. | Fantasy fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3613.A525 M68 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054555

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

84186301

www.doverpublications.com

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2020

FOREWORD

AT FIRST glance, the concept of Nick Mamatas’s first novel, Move Under Ground, sounds like the kind of thing you’d think up when very, very stoned. You and your buddy are sitting on either end of the couch, your best bong between you, multiplayering Doom 3 (Move Under Ground was originally published in 2004, after all). You start talking about how awesome Lovecraft and his contingent of Elder Gods are, and he responds, "No, man, Kerouac’s On the Road is where it’s at." You argue, but after a few more flicks of the lighter you simultaneously come up with the brilliant idea (dude!) of writing a book that combines both Kerouac and Lovecraft. A book both of you can love.

Usually such ideas don’t survive in the cold, sober light of day. They’ve lost their sparkle, maybe, and no longer appeal. Maybe they weren’t as good of an idea as they seemed when your state was altered. Maybe you simply slept the idea off and forgot you ever had it. Or maybe you realized that actually writing the book would be a lot of work.

But Mamatas didn’t forget, and he isn’t afraid of work: he actually wrote the book. The amazing thing about Move Under Ground is that it approaches what could be an absurd premise in a way that actually works. Not only works: it’s stunningly good.

Move Under Ground is a strange little telepod experiment that brings together styles and concepts from two different writers and two different genres to create something altogether different from either one. One reason the novel is good (besides the strength of the writing itself) is that Mamatas is not an acolyte. He views both Lovecraft and Kerouac with a critical eye, clearly aware of their strengths and flaws both as writers and as human beings. So much writing that follows in the furrow Kerouac drunkenly plowed is slavishly imitative, replicative, and ends up reproducing some of the clumsiness of Kerouac’s writing without capturing his verve and velocity. Similarly, many 21st century stories written in a Lovecraftian vein are little more than pastiche: they just make you wish you were reading Lovecraft instead (though admittedly many of Lovecraft’s own stories make you wish you were reading another, better Lovecraft story instead). But Mamatas begins in an altogether different place. He is not a joiner or a follower; he is the kind of writer who is deeply engaged but skeptical, not willing to accept anything on faith. He is less interested in imitating either Lovecraft or Kerouac than in seeing how the sparks fly when he makes the Lovecraft and Kerouac vehicles have a head-on collision.

There’s something exhilarating about the specificity of the genre combination here. Often when writers combine or straddle genres they do so in a way that’s fairly loose, but here it’s quite precise. In that specificity, Move Under Ground was ahead of its time: it reminds me more of the sophisticated genre hybrids people started publishing about ten years after the book was first published. Move Under Ground is also the opening salvo in a larger critique and questioning of genre as a mechanism of control that Mamatas has engaged in across all of his books. You should be determining and directing the genre, rather than giving in to its clichés and allowing the genre to determine you.

Mamatas takes from Kerouac his fluidity, his sense of tumbling progression, but after a chapter or so he torques this, shows how such a voice has to be transformed once shambling shoggoths stand in the place of squares in this void-cursed version of America. And yes, Lovecraft’s beings are here, but they’re torqued as well, integrated into the social structure of America but only visible to those who know how to perceive them, those whose perceptual doors have been blown wide open—kind of like John Carpenter’s They Live but with Beat enlightenment in the place of special sunglasses. Neal Cassady, the individual who seems most aware of the Elder Gods and the most interested in trying to manipulate them for his own purposes (when he can stay focused, that is), is very different from the tortured occult-obsessed seekers found in Lovecraft’s stories. He’s also a seeming expert in self-deception, in convincing himself to do what he obviously shouldn’t: I think I should give myself over to the Dark Dreamer, and then, bound to that power, I can use it to protect reality from the on-rushing chaos overhead. In other words, give yourself to chaos to protect yourself from chaos—what could possibly go wrong? Or as he says a page later, Maybe it’s not so bad. Is it really any worse than what happened before? People killed themselves for reasons just as foolish. People go to work, stuff themselves full of meat, get down on their knees and wail before something or other, crap out babies from bloody crotches, then feed the worms. . . Is it even any different? I think the argument of the book is that it most definitely is, and that self-deception seems to be as rampant in the turn on/tune in/drop out generation as it is in the squares. Even if you thwart Cthulu, if you’re not vigilant you might still end up becoming the very thing you’ve been fighting against. After all, writing On the Road wasn’t enough to save Kerouac from becoming the kind of person who ineffectually yelled at the hippies on TV as he drank himself to death in his mother’s house.

The writing in Move Under Ground is a little like Kerouac, enough to give the feel of him. It owes a great deal less to Lovecraft’s often purple prose, but there’s a thickness to the patterning, an imagistic density, that strikes me as the kind of thing I wish Lovecraft had done more often. Mamatas manages a retooling and re-engineering of both Lovecraft’s style and Kerouac’s style into a new seamless and rollicking whole. China Miéville says it as well as anyone when he calls the book An intense, inspired crossbred bastard homage-cum-critique-cum-vision. That, for me, is one of the great things about Mamatas’s work, and what separates him from lesser writers: he knows he doesn’t have to choose. He understands you can have an homage that is also a critique and that also, ultimately, opens up an entirely new horizon—that all these things can work with and against one another in a complex way.

Kerouac may be the central character, but, as I’ve said, Cassady is there as well, often as a focal point, as he is in On the Road—though for good stretches of the novel he is absent, with Kerouac trying to find him. Even when he is there, it’s not altogether clear that it’s really him who’s there. Just as important is William S. Burroughs, who only shows up about halfway through, and who strikes me as the book’s defining spirit. Indeed, Move Under Ground implies that if you combine Kerouac and Lovecraft you might end up with something that reads a lot like Burroughs, at least in terms of content (no cut-ups here): the shoggoths are bugs of a sort, which seems decidedly Burroughsian, and they are called mugwumps as well, like the creatures found in Naked Lunch. As Mamatas’s Kerouac says of Burroughs, Of course he didn’t care about the beetlemen, they may as well have run off the pages of his own damn book. There’s something deeply weird about Burroughs in general, and tonally Move Under Ground recalls Naked Lunch and The Nova Trilogy. Burroughs’s sensibility, more than Kerouac’s, seems naturally receptive to the vibrational frequency of weird horror.

Ultimately Kerouac finds himself somewhere in the middle ground between Cassady, who wants to embrace the darkness, and Burroughs, who is out to kill all these goddamn bugs. He has to figure out how to properly thread the needle between these two to prevent the world from ending. Where that, ultimately, leaves Kerouac is the subject of the Epilogue. By keeping the world from going to hell, as it turns out, he may have simply chosen a different, more personal form of hell.

Move Under Ground is, in addition, a scalpel-sharp demythologizing of On the Road and of Kerouac in general. It has a similar maddened carnivalesque feel to it as Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, in which Richard Nixon is buggered by Uncle Sam, or A Political Fable, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president, to be eventually skinned alive and eaten. But Move Under Ground is a darker carnival, its ribald touches rarer. That’s not to say that if you’re a fan of Lovecraft or Kerouac you won’t find a lot to enjoy here: you will. One of the joys of the book is that bi-focused reading, the remembering and reconsideration of the stories and authors behind this book as you see how Mamatas is playing with them. The thrust of that is essentially metafictional: as well as having an engaging and crazed plot, this is a book about how Lovecraft and Kerouac’s writing works, about how they both succeed and fail, about how to both acknowledge them and move beyond them.

All in all, Move Under Ground is a smart critique of two writers who are too often not subject to real, informed critique. It ends up ricocheting off both of them to get somewhere entirely different than either of them manages to get on their own. It’s a radical book very much ahead of its time, strange and highly original, and well worth the read. Enjoy.

Brian Evenson

CONTENTS

Foreword

Book One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Book Two

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

For Oliver

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I WAS in Big Sur hiding from my public when I finally heard from Neal again. He had had problems of his own after the book came out and it started being carried around like a rosary by every scruffy party boy looking for a little cross-country hitchhiking adventure. They’d followed him around like they’d followed me, but Neal drank too deeply of the well at first, making girls left and right as usual, taking a few too many shots to the face, and eating out on the story of our travels maybe one too many times. Those boozy late-night dinners with crazy soulless characters whose jaws clacked like mandibles when they laughed are what got to him in the end, I’m sure. They were hungry for something. Not just the college boys and beautiful young things, but those haggard-looking veterans of Babylon who started shadowing Neal and me on every street corner and at every dawn-draped last call in roadside bars; they all wanted more than a taste of Neal’s divine spark, they wanted to extinguish it in their gullets. Neal was the perfect guy for them as he always walked on the edge, ever since the first shiv was held to his throat at reform school when he was a seven-year-old babe with a fat face and shiny teary cheeks. He wanted to eat up the whole world himself like they did, I knew from my adventures on the road with him, but I didn’t learn what was eating him ’til I got that letter that drove me to move under ground.

The letters had become more infrequent while I was out on Big Sur living in Larry’s little cabin, due to me at first, I thought. I was working on my spontaneous writing, which sounds a bit contradictory but discoveries need to be plumbed, not just noted, and I was turning out roll after roll of pages about the stark black cliffs and how it felt that the world wasn’t just shifting under my feet but how I was sure one day I’d end up standing still while the big blue marble just rolled out from under me to leave me hanging over the inky maw of the universe. I didn’t take breaks except to pick my way into town every week or ten days to get some supplies: potatoes and beans, some cooking oil, whiskey, chaw, more rolls of paper which came in special just for me thanks to Larry, and stamps and my mail. Letters, only three were from Neal, most from mother and my aunt and one or two from my agent with checks so big I couldn’t even cash them but instead had to sell them for a dime on the dollar to the one-eyed shopkeeper at the general store that held my mail for me. By that time I could hardly stand to hear anyone’s voice so I never spent more than a few hours in town, just enough to do my errands, get my socks washed by the old unsmiling Chinaman and wolf down some cherry pie with ice cream. Even the great belly laughs of the old-timers who had shuffled up from Los Angeles when the strawberry crops had turned black on the vine grated on me when I heard them now, but those curlicue swirls on Mémère’s letters were soothing and stainless like the sky. I’d read them as I’d hike back up to the cabin, smoking a great Cuban just to have some light to read by if I didn’t get home before dark.

Neal’s letters were something else altogether, and he was still something else, too, as the kids say. The first letter was typical Neal, full of big plans to play connect-the-dots between girls and writers. Oh dearest Jack, he wrote to me, once you’re all settled and have ironed up after your latest crack-up I’ll come down from San Fran in Carolyn’s father’s great old battleship of a car, then drive right back up the coast in reverse through Oregon where the trees hold up the vault of the sky. Then we can tour Vancouver; it’s a wet warm pocket of life up in those frozen wastes and I know Carolyn has a friend named Suzette you might like as she is very deep into Spengler . . . and he’d spin more and more of his golden grift. I’d read his old letters over and over ’til the ink ran off the wrinkled page but only once got around to writing him back. It was too hard to think, being lost in the words of his letters, but they were the only things that kept the horrible roar of the ocean against the cliffs from overwhelming me. No matter what, I couldn’t find the Buddha in the rhythmic crashing of the waves anymore, so instead I drank myself into concrete unconsciousness.

In Neal’s second letter, the empty spaces between existence became a bit more clear. He could feel it too, how the world was pulling itself apart somehow, and how some dark dream had begun to ooze into the American cracks. He didn’t need to say it; Neal was always best understood between the lines. Far be it from me to suggest that two old Catholic boys take off their clothes, scramble down the bluffs and toss themselves into the foam just to stain the waves red for a precious heartbeat of a moment all to gain the attention of some Three-Lobed Burning Eye, but even when I’m nestled between Billie’s legs taking in her fecund smell, I just feel that we ought to . . . he wrote, but I knew he meant something else. He was trying to stitch something together; he had some weird forlorn hope that he could save the world from what we both could feel was lurking in the Outer Deep. Usually, I thought of smiling old Neal catting between wife and girlfriend, grinning and pretending to write, misunderstanding Nietzsche in the most brilliant of ways, but now I could only conceive of him as some blind fly picking his way along highway webbing. I didn’t write him a letter back after that. Not at first.

I wrote at him though, on my old Clark Nova, the one Bill had sent me from Tangiers along with a cryptic note of his own about the little adding machine spring his family fortune was based on. It only has one end(ing) he wrote in his junky scrawl and drew me a swirl that I couldn’t look at for long without blacking out. So I wrote to Neal, and to Bill too, but through my novel, not ever in letter form. I wrote ’til the letters on the keys were stamped in my