As she stood behind me on a stepladder, cradling the great head against her chest, I inserted my feet in the soft vulcanized leggings and my hands in the neoprene claws. After activating the glowing eyeballs, Darlene descended to ground level, seized the pull-tab above my tail, and climbed the ladder again, thus bringing the teeth of the dorsal zipper into alignment. So there I was, encased once again in my scales and talons, a Cretaceous visitation bent on teaching Admiral Nagumo how right he’d been to imagine that his attack on Pearl Harbor had awakened a sleeping dragon.
In his new novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima, State College scribbler James Morrow focuses more on weaving together gags, one-liners and B-movie lore than on hacking away at the props supporting our modern military-industrial technocracy – and that’s fine by me. Not the trenchant satire I’d been led to expect, but a fun alternate history story, highly recommended if you’re into the Hollywood horror of the ’30s and ’40s or the kaiju eiga of the ’50s and ’60s.
4/5 stars
Shambling Towards Hiroshima purports to be the suicide note/memoir of SF and horror convention favorite Syms Thorley, penned in a Baltimore Holiday Inn just before Halloween, 1984. Having receiving the Wonderama Award the previous evening, Thorley looks back on his Halcyon days bringing characters like Kha-Ton-Ra and Corpuscula to life as the “Monogram Shambler”, working on the Navy’s Operation Fortune Cookie in 1945, portraying the mutant iguana Gorgantis in a series of Japanese flicks, and trying to educate monster movie aficionados about nuclear proliferation at conventions like Wonderama. Thorley lingers on Operation Fortune Cookie, his one chance to use his talent for something that mattered: to prevent the Bomb, or the rampaging fire-breathing behemoths of the Navy’s parallel weapons program (“The Knickerbocker Project”), from being deployed against Japanese civilians. With direction by James Whale, a score by Franz Waxman and Thorley in the starring role, the Navy’s production of What Rough Beast is conceived as a psy-op to intimidate the Japanese into surrender – but of course, things don’t quite work out that way.
Morrow can turn a clever phrase, and that’s mostly what kept me turning the pages, although there are two surprisingly moving scenes (one leveraging the emotional cachet of Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn”, the other… well, you can guess) in which Thorley receives visitors who quickly gauge the situation and try to persuade him to, you know, choose life.
I have to give Morrow props for running with such a silly idea, and it was nice to read Shambling Towards Hiroshima over the Halloween weekend; but, though often quite amusing, it isn’t really what I’d consider satire, so I can’t tell if his rep as a great satirist is deserved. Once I read some of his longer, presumably more ferocious stuff, I’ll let you know.
Happy reading and cuídate.