Thursday, September 03, 2015

Providence issue 4 - a review


Robert Black has a lovely chat with the Wheatley's (Waitleys) and learns though he does not understand how their son (and his brother) was conceived.  In the process we learn a lot more about geometry, the universe, and the redeemer...and Robert takes one country road too many.

The tenderness with which Warlock Wheatley (Wizard Waitley) interacts with his daughter, perhaps redeems their incestuous union, especially when he doesn't remember it - and was acting as a syringe for the cow - with Yog Sothoth as the globes/worlds of the tree of the Kalaballa (the universe itself) forming a halo around his head as he sires his grandchildren/children.

We learn that the redeemer narrative always has 'the crazy grandfather, the white faced mother and the ugly boy'  here Willard (Wilbur) is speaking of himself, but we recall that H P Lovecraft was always told by his mother that he was ugly, and we notice that the Stella Sapienta's 'redeemer' has been a plan in motion for just about as long as H P Lovecraft has been alive in 1919.

So, I think we are going to see, as discussed in my review of #3, the middle ground between the evil cultic 'others', and the evil racist 'normative humanity' in a child born to be a cult force, raised as a racist, who yet harms no one (as Lovecraft did not). If I'm right this is an incredibly hopeful, yet difficult  path for the story - but it's so much *better* than my feared third rater's version (Robert Black meets Lovecraft who rips off his stories and adds racism) that, even though I'm only imagining the through line I'm giving this 9/10.

It deserves 9/10 in its own right for the account in the commonplace book material at the back of how Lovecraft's/Leticia's 'vision' (new horror) is a masterful creation of art, and for the section where the hideous yet always compelling figure of Willard (Wilbur) demonstrates how easily he can manipulate hypergeometry as a child plays with bricks, and Black mishears his age.

[Added if the core of the Colour Out Of Space didn't 'really' evaporate, maybe this is the source of the 'shining trapezium' at the centre of the Starry Wisdom sect in the story 'The Haunter Of The Dark' in which Robert 'Blake' - dies.  Dies I now recall, *after* the death of the Lovecraft analogy in Robert Bloch's story, 'The Feaster From The Stars'. This potential thread perhaps contradicts my thoughts above, but then - redeemers have to die...don't they?]

As I say 9/10.

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