| Titus Crow: The Clock of Dreams & Spawn of the Winds | |||||||||||||||
| Brian Lumley | |||||||||||||||
| Tor Books | |||||||||||||||
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A review by Stephen M. Davis
Mr. Lumley is attempting to recreate the writing style of the best of the pulp fiction
from sixty years ago. What he settles for, instead, is the writing style of the worst of H. Rider
Haggard, who wrote such thrillers as King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain, with
chapter titles like "A Slaughter Grim and Great," "War! Red War," and "Away!
Away!".
The publisher, Tor Books, believes the two novels presented in this omnibus edition to
be inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft. It is true that Lovecraft created the original
inhabitants of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as the Dreamland in which Mr.
Lumley's Clock of Dreams operates.
Lovecraft, though, was talented enough to transport his readers to the realm of
Dreamland, whereas Mr. Lumley merely takes them to the borders of unconsciousness.
In The Clock of Dreams, Henri-Laurent de Marigny must rescue his friend, Titus Crow,
and Crow's female companion (described as a girl-goddess by the unenlightened residents of
Dreamland) from torture and death at the hands of some menacing, turbaned, wholly evil
merchants, who are in league with the less savory Elder Gods.
Here is the initial description of Kthanid, a cousin--according to Mr.
Lumley--of Cthulhu, and a force for good in de Marigny's quest:
I don't want to belabor the point. I'll end my examination of The Clock of Dreams
with a piece of dialogue from page 68 of the novel. Titus Crow, Dreamer Extraordinaire, and
his lover, Tiania, a "beautiful girl-goddess," are tied spread-eagled, moments away from
torture and further humiliation:
Spawn of the Winds, the second novel, is slightly less bad than The
Clock of Dreams, but only because its initial setting is more realistic than Dreamland, where
the men are men, the women are "girl-goddesses" and the dialogue reads like shop floor
scraps left over from the manufacture of a Harlequin novel.
In Spawn of the Winds, Hank Silberhutte and his companions go out searching for
Ithaqua--the Thing that Walks on the Wind--and are immediately captured by this malevolent
creature, who takes the party and their airplane through the dimensions to the cold wastes of
Borea. Silberhutte's story is relayed by Juanita Alvarez who, through a remarkable plot device,
is only able to send and receive telepathic messages from Hank Silberhutte.
The method of narration is clumsy: Juanita Alvarez is supposedly relaying events as
Silberhutte fills her in after the fact, yet Mr. Lumley continues to write out long stretches of
trivial dialogue, which no normal person would remember or relay.
The only entertaining feature of the novel is the final three pages--"The Final
Transmission"--pages so bad that Mr. Lumley had to be laughing while he wrote them.
I would suggest that, for the twenty-five dollars Tor Books wants for this omnibus
edition, the reader could purchase the first three volumes of Mr. Lumley's Necroscope series,
which is far better reading.
Steve is faculty member in the English department at Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, S.C. He holds a master's in English Literature from Clemson University. He was voted by his high school class as Most Likely to Become a Young Curmudgeon. | ||||||||||||||
 
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