A Step Ahead of Myself

An interesting (I use that word a lot, because many things are interesting to me) thing happened twice while I was reading a book recently. The book was Peter Levenda's Dunwich. It's the second book in his Lovecraft Code trilogy. Would I recommend it to fans of the Mythos? That's...hmm. I don't think I have a simple answer for that.

I've been casually aware of Levenda's work for a long time, but hadn't read any of it until just a few years ago. Well...not anything he published under his own name. There was that one special book that pulled me into Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Eastern mysticism, and a lot of other topics I knew nearly nothing about before someone suggested it to me. That was over twenty years ago, which feels longer than it sounds. I'm at a point in my life where "twenty years ago" sounds like just a few minutes and feels like an eternity. Because of that book, I'm going to have a very personal favorable bias about anything that connects Levenda and the Mythos. But opinions about storytelling are all about personal biases and opinions, so that's not really an issue.

I've just starting the third book of the trilogy, so I can only speak about the first two.  The first book was great storytelling, and I would have said between that one and the second that I would absolutely recommend it to Mythos fans. I think I still would. Reading the whole trilogy gives the whole story, but the first book ties enough things together while leaving others open in just the right way that it could stand on its own. Especially in weird fiction. 

The second book...that's where things get tricky. I don't know if I just started catching on and there were things I didn't pay deeper attention to in the first book, or if he really started weaving more things in. It was this sort of "meta" experience. Homages to homages, parodies of parodies, and so many things woven into the story that make perfect sense within the narrative even if you don't know it's coming from something in the physical world. But if you've been deeply in some occult communities and even just on the edges of others for a few decades? It's suddenly like having multiple stories told simultaneously!

I loved Dunwich! It was like a total stranger somehow wrote a book just for me. But would I recommend it? I take into account who I'm recommending a book to. I'm not comfortable doing general reviews of things because experiences are personal. I don't personally know many people I think would really understand the book. All I could possibly do is make a checklist for "You Might Like This Book If:".

There were a couple of weird things that happened while I was reading the book. Or maybe the same weird thing happened a couple of times. I'm going to do my best to be vague enough to not spoil things, but this is your warning that talking about the experience will include touching lightly on a couple of things that are important in the book.

I'm pretty good at knowing how a story will end. General fiction, detective fiction, fantasy fiction, etc. Not just books, but also TV shows, movies, video games with deep storytelling, people telling me about something that happened when they went to the post office yesterday. I wouldn't know how to stop my brain from following the logical order of how stories are told, and it runs through the possibilities faster than the story can actually be told. Good storytelling makes it worth it. The tension building is magnified for me, so I enjoy a really good reward. I think part of what pulls me toward weird fiction is that the genre greatly decreases the chances of me seeing what's coming. And that makes what happened while I was reading Dunwich even weirder.

Shortly before I started the first book, I acquired a piece of amber from a specific part of the world. It's not a part of the world I know much about, and I suspect that's true for a majority of white Americans. A large part of what interests me about having a piece of amber from this part of the world is the age of it. The number is significant to me. After I had the piece for a few days, I felt a gentle urge to put it in a special place where I keep some items related to my Yog-Sothothery practice. I figured it had something to do with it being amber. There's a lot of history in amber, on multiple levels. 

Once I got into the second book, that part of the world became immensely important in the story, and for reasons that have a lot to do with ocean entities and ancient history. There were direct connections that I had not foreseen. It was an unlikely, and therefore surprising, coincidence. Enough so that I kept asking myself if it was really just a coincidence.

At some point along the way - for reasons I would have said had nothing to do with the book, but only with other things currently going on - I started thinking about how maps of the world are designed, and how limiting that is for our understanding of things. I started telling other members of my home how inaccurate maps really are, and how making flat pictures of a round planet warps things. As the conversation went on, I started reflecting on how point of focus also changes things. That led me to making the point that maps would look completely different if they weren't made by humans, and even more different if they weren't made by land-dwelling beings.

There was nothing I had read in the book that I can recognize as being related to this at the time we had that conversation. A few days and five or six chapters later, characters in the book had pretty much the same conversation. A few very specific things I had said were said in nearly the same words, and had importance in how the story proceeded. 

Where the amber came from was an unlikely coincidence, but still easily brushed aside as a surprising coincidence. Easily for most people. I said I had doubts. That's because it's my nature to analyze things, and even more with coincidences. I want to make sure I'm not missing details, or processing something as being a coincidence when it's not or vice versa. The whole thing about maps, though, isn't something I can convince myself was a coincidence. I don't have a simple explanation for it. I've looked back through the book to see if there were little things leading up to it. Things that could have influenced my unconscious mind and drawn my conscious mind toward thinking about these things before it was obvious in the book. I haven't found any moment of, "Oh! This makes sense now!" And the details were too many, and too precise.

I'm curious about whether or not this will continue to happen with the third book, or possibly in other areas of life. I'm not a stranger to knowing things ahead of time. Knowing how stories will end is different. That's just a matter of recognizing the elements and the storytelling formula. Knowing things ahead of time, with no tangible explanation for how I know, has been a regular occurrence in my life. There are jokes in our house because of how often it happens. This experience was different, though. To learn more, I need to experience it again. It's not something I have any way of setting control for. If that can be done, I can't do it yet. So I can't force it. Unfortunately, as much as I detest hearing this from other people, I accept that I will "just have to wait and see".