Please welcome to the world … James Champagne Harlem Smoke (Snuggly Books)

The Last Lovecraft Novel: a Harlem Smoke Primer

 

 

Hello, my name is James Champagne, though most of you on here most likely also know me by my handle of Sypha. Thanks to the kindness of our benefactor Dennis, I’m here today to tell you a bit about Harlem Smoke, which has recently been published by Snuggly Books and which serves as my second professional novel (the first being Confusion, which I self-published through iUniverse way back in 2006… some of you old-timers on here may even remember that one). Harlem Smoke is, at heart, a Lovecraftian horror novel, a psychological chiller (I use the word “chiller” rather than “thriller” because the book moves at a somewhat glacial pace and, well, it doesn’t have many thrills). But even that’s kind of a facetious description because, in my opinion, the book can be interpreted in many different ways. It could be seen as a Jungian treatise on the subject of Man grappling with his Shadow-side… or as a perverted parody of the Christian Passion Play… or as a metafictional postmodern hypersigil designed to create change in conformity with Will, a magic(k)al spell in textual form designed to rid me of my obsession with writing horror… or as a Marxist commentary on class struggle (okay, I’m just kidding about that last one). Really, one of my hopes is that the book could function as an eldritch Rorschach test, where every reader interprets the narrative in a different way… a triumph of Art over Logic, to quote words of praise directed towards The Manic Street Preachers’ album The Holy Bible… you know how so many books or movies or TV shows are classified by the media today as the “Book/Movie/TV show we need right now,” as if Art were nothing more than some kind of fucking Chicken Soup for the Soul? Well, Harlem Smoke is most assuredly not such a book, in fact it is a book that no one really needs right now… and yet, paradoxically, it exists. But then again, no one ever accused the world of making sense!

My reference in the title of today’s article of Harlem Smoke being “the last Lovecraft novel” is somewhat tongue-in-cheek: what I really mean by that is that it’s my last Lovecraft novel, though it’s also a reference to how, when William Gaddis was writing The Recognitions, he thought of it as being the last Christian novel. And because I saw Harlem Smoke as being my one and only horror novel, I tried to turn it into a sort of repository of horror, stuffing it with as many of the tropes of the genre as I could: haunted houses, nightmares, serial killers, demonic possession, black magic, séances gone wrong, body horror, weird cults, sinister grimoires, eldritch alien monsters from outside time and space, you name it.

Hellfire, when I proposed the idea for this Day to Dennis I told him I’d be more terse than usual and already the damn intro has gone on longer than I intended. Ah well… as the Scorpion said to the Frog, “Blame me not…”

Before I move on I suppose I should briefly mention what the book’s about, so here’s the blurb from the back cover:

“A gay, black antinatalist, Isaac Grimalkin isn’t your typical H.P. Lovecraft fan. Back in 1996 Isaac was the sole member of the Dunwich Posse, an experimental Lovecraftian horrorcore hip-hop act that released Harlem Smoke, a groundbreaking album chronicling the gruesome exploits of its titular monster. But when his album began to inspire real-life copycat crimes, Isaac abandoned his musical career at the height of his fame.

Flash-forward to 2015. Once again living in the city of Providence, Rhode Island, Isaac, now 38, has reinvented himself as a Pickman-esque painter of the morbid and the macabre. He wishes to forget his past; but his life gradually takes a hellish descent when an interview with a music magazine resurrects public interest in the Dunwich Posse. Meanwhile, local women are being murdered in a variety of grotesque scenarios that seem directly inspired by the lyrics of Isaac’s old, cursed album. As police suspicion mounts, Isaac begins investigating his family’s sinister history, in search of answers for just who (or what) the elusive Harlem Smoke actually is: an interior quest that could lead to his own annihilation.

Set in a social realist modern-day Providence where paradoxical dimensions of cosmic horror are only a stone’s throw away, Harlem Smoke is a creative re-imagining of the artistic potentialities of the Lovecraftian novel.”

Buy it here:

SNUGGLY (those looking for a hardcover copy can get one direct from the Snuggly site)
BARNES & NOBLE
AMAZON

 

Some Words on the Creation of Harlem Smoke

Like almost every book I’ve written, Harlem Smoke had a convoluted and torturous evolution. Initially it began as a simple short story idea: Around the summer/fall of 2014 I had begun listening to a lot of horrorcore hip-hop bands from the 1990’s and had become fascinated by those groups and their utilization of horror iconography. On November 8th of 2014 I posted the following status update on Facebook: “I wonder if anyone has ever done a weird fiction/Lovecraftian story revolving around the horrorcore hip-hop scene. I think the idea of a hip-hop group appropriating Lovecraftian imagery and making it their own has a kind of perverse appeal.” I used the word “perverse” there because of course Lovecraft was a notorious racist, and I began to go through Lovecraft’s stories and pondering what kind of characters in them that a hip-hop group might be drawn to. Naturally I began to focus on Lovecraft’s black characters, which didn’t take long as you can almost count them on one hand. I quickly thought of “Herbert West: Reanimator,” a Frankenstein parody written by H.P. Lovecraft between October 1921 to June 1922 (and serialized by the amateur publication Home Brew in 1922). That story featured an African-American boxer named Buck Robinson (nickname: “The Harlem Smoke”) who gets killed in a fight with a white boxer. Herbert West, a mad scientist/necromancer, takes Buck’s corpse and reanimates it, but it comes back to life as a grotesque monster that ravages a Polish community, eventually devouring a little white girl before West is forced to put him down. I could see the appeal such a character might have for a hip-hop artist: a black monster created by white society that ends up turning on its wicked masters. But it was the two words “Harlem Smoke” that really caught my eye… I realized it was the perfect title for the story.

I quickly threw together a plot: it would revolve around an older black man living in Detroit, a former rapper (MC Buck Robinson) who reformed and became a pastor (as many of these former hip-hop artists are prone to do). The big idea was that in his hip-hop days he had done an album named Harlem Smoke, one that revolved around a monster murdering people in a number of cruelly inventive ways. But when people start emulating the lyrics and the album begins inspiring copycat crimes (and thus gets a cursed reputation, like Esham’s Boomin’ Words from Hell album), the character would quit the music industry, clean up his act, get married, and begin preaching the good word. But then, years later, people would start to be murdered again, and the main character would be forced to face the possibility that maybe his misbegotten creation had actually become a flesh and blood monster, thus forcing him to deal with his past. I did begin writing this story, but didn’t get very far… the main character (and the setting) didn’t interest me, and I also came to the conclusion that Harlem Smoke was too good a title to waste on a short story… that maybe I should save it for a novel. Not making any serious headway on the story, I decided to resort to my usual course of action (which is to say, the path of least resistance: I quit it), and set it aside. Yet still, in the shadows of my mind, it remained on the backburner…

Around the same time that I was developing the idea for the short story I was also struggling with coming up with an idea for a novel that would be set in Providence, Rhode Island. Though I’ve lived not far from the city of Providence my entire life, and had been there numerous times prior to 2014, it was only in 2013 where I began going to the city on my own and exploring it. Initially I began going to Providence in 2013 to hang out with someone I had befriended online, but even after our friendship died out in early 2014 I continued visiting the city and the more I explored it, the more I realized that it would make a great setting for a novel. In truth, I had already written a novel set in Providence, way back in 1998, when, during my senior year of high school, at the age of 17, I had handwritten out a book named Arthouse, a slice-of-life novel about a suicidal artist whose life turns around when she discovers she’s a lesbian. That book had also been set in Providence, but because I hadn’t explored the city in great depth at that time in my life, to me it didn’t feel like a Providence novel. But my problem in 2014 was, I just couldn’t think of a narrative that would work well in the city. In any event, at some point in 2015 I had a brainstorm: why not set Harlem Smoke in Providence and have it serve as my Providence novel? It only made sense to set a Lovecraftian novel in Providence, that most Lovecraftian of cities (after all, it is where Lovecraft lived for most of his life, and much of his work is set there). Really, this “killing two birds with one stone” approach seems so natural an idea now that it depresses me that it took me so long to realize it…

And yet still, I didn’t totally commit to the project and kind of hemmed and hawed about it for awhile. But then in late May 2015 I was approached by a German publisher who asked if I would be interested in doing a six issue comic book mini-series for them. After kicking around a few ideas, I thought maybe Harlem Smoke might work as a comic book. On June 11, 2015, I wrote out a 5 page pitch for the project, detailing the main storyline, listing what would happen in each issue, providing a list of characters (many of whom would undergo name changes in the final product), things like that. And though it was all very vague (as I still didn’t even have an ending at that point), it did help me to finally nail some ideas down for the story. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Harlem Smoke wouldn’t work as a comic book, that it simply had to be a novel. So I bowed out of the project (something I regret doing now; with my love of comic books I really should have just pitched them another idea).

In July 2015 I purchased one of those generic college rule composition notebooks, intending it to serve as my main notebook for Harlem Smoke (I even wrote the words Harlem Smoke Notes on the front cover… though of course, in my scatterbrained and unorganized way, I also used this notebook for other things unrelated to the project). The first thing I began filling its pages with, oddly enough, were notes taken from a bunch of old Poppy Z. Brite interviews I was reading at that time, mainly dealing with how she went about writing her first novel Lost Souls. That same month, I also created a Word file document for the book. But it would not be until August 14th of 2015 that I actually began writing the book, in this case the Prologue, which I finished two days later. In my notebook I began keeping a “milestones” list. Figuring that the book would be 300 pages, and how that meant that with every 30 pages finished I’d be 10% closer to completion, every time I finished 30 pages I would make a note of the date and mark down what day of the project that I had reached it (for example, I reached page 150, the 50% done mark, on November 25th, 2015, Day 103 of the project). In this way was I able to chart the book’s progress.

 

The Harlem Smoke Notebook

The Harlem Smoke writing date records

 

Almost immediately after starting the project, however, I ran into two big problems. The first had to do with the main character, Isaac Grimalkin. Initially my intentions for Isaac were that he would be black, gay, and a Reform Jew (a sort of wink at the fact that Lovecraft was famously racist, an anti-Semite, and slightly homophobic). But as I started writing his character he seemed false to me… I just couldn’t get into his head. It wasn’t the gay aspect, obviously, and I didn’t think it was the racial aspect either (as I’ve written many black characters in my books over the years, though never as the lead). Eventually I decided it was the Jewish angle. Specifically, I know very little about Judaism aside from the common knowledge (to say nothing of being a Reform Jew), and couldn’t be arsed to do the research… also, my idea of Isaac being a trifecta of all the things Lovecraft despised seemed old-hat anyway, what with the release of the first issue of Alan Moore’s Providence series a few months earlier (a Lovecraftian comic book that starred a gay Jew as its lead). Then one day I was reflecting back on the first season of True Detective and remembering how much I had like Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle character (essentially, a highly pessimistic homicide detective), and then I began thinking of Grant Morrison’s then on-going comic book series Nameless (a Lovecraftian sci-fi horror story that explores extreme pessimist ideas), and then it hit me: Isaac wasn’t a Reform Jew, he was really a pessimistic, nihilistic, militantly atheistic antinatalist. And suddenly, just like that, he became alive to me. It was almost like I had found the key to unlock his character, if that makes sense. Of course, I was no stranger to pessimist ideas (being a longtime reader of Lovecraft and Ligotti, and writers like E.M. Cioran), but I realized that now I had a good excuse to finally delve a bit more into that kind of literature (for “research purposes”). I am a pretty spiritual person, and this is often reflected in my characters to some extent. So I was very excited about writing a character who was essentially the antithesis of all my spiritual ideals, and the opportunity to write a book that pissed all over my most cherished assumptions was a task I devoted myself to with an almost maniacal glee (I also loved the idea that Isaac would be a black atheist, as in pop culture black characters are often depicted/stereotyped as very religious or spiritual people).

The other big stumbling block involved the detectives investigating the Harlem Smoke murders, which I saw as being important secondary characters. But they were always very nebulous to me (even in the pitch for the comic idea, I hadn’t bothered to give them names yet, just said that one would be male, the other female). As it was I was having enough problems trying to figure out what made Isaac tick, so the idea of having to create another major character whole cloth was daunting. But then I thought back to Red Cherry, another handwritten novel that I had wrote back in the summer of 1999, when I was 19, before I began my second year of college. Red Cherry was a Thomas Harris-esque serial killer novel, set in Boston in 1999, involving a lesbian homicide detective named Marsha Garland and her quest to stop the Photographer, a necrophiliac serial killer who was murdering fashion models and taking pictures of their corpses. Then it hit me: why not make Marsha the detective investigating the Harlem Smoke murders? This way I wouldn’t have to create a whole new character: I already knew Marsha’s back story (though obviously I had to figure out what her life had been like in the 15 years that elapsed between the end of Red Cherry and the start of Harlem Smoke), and having her around was like an anchor or safety blanket at first… it’s kind of like how film directors sometimes like to use the same actors or actresses in each film they do, for that level of comfort. Isaac was still an unknown factor for me, but I knew Marsha like the back of my hand, knew what she would say or think in any given situation… that helped a lot in the early stages of working on the book. And even though Harlem Smoke is Isaac’s story, at the same time it’s Marsha’s as well (to a slightly lesser extent) and one could almost see it as a kind of sequel to Red Cherry (though I don’t think one needs to have read Red Cherry to appreciate this new book: as it is, I give a lot of background detail about that older book in this new one, to bring people up to speed).

In a further nod to self-referentialism, I even brought back Iris Brant, the main star of Arthouse, giving her a small but important role in the book.

So, aside from the initial idea, the three big “eureka” moments I had during the planning/writing of Harlem Smoke was to set the city in Providence, make Isaac a pessimist, and bring back Marsha Garland as a character.

Of course, it took me awhile to find my writing groove. I like to joke that my books die a thousand deaths before I finish them, and lord knows I kept quitting Harlem Smoke the first two months or so of its existence… lost track of how many times I told my friend George that that was it, I was quitting the book once and for all, and this time I really meant it (to which George would just reply with some variation of “yeah right, you’ll be back to working on it a few days from now.” And, well, he was right, ha ha). One thing that really gave me a lot of inspiration to finish the project was when the World Fantasy Awards caved to political correctness and made the decision to stop using Lovecraft’s visage for their award busts in early November 2015. The disgusting triumphalism displayed by those who lobbied to get the bust changed (whose parents obviously never taught them the lesson of how to win with grace and honor), in combination with the spectacle of other writers (whom I knew to be lifelong Lovecraft fans and who had made a career of ripping him off shamelessly) suddenly trying to downplay Lovecraft’s influence on their work (despite having no qualms about attending Lovecraft conventions, or having their wares sold at Lovecraft-themed emporiums), really gave me the motivation to complete Harlem Smoke. Contempt, anger, despite… these can be powerful muses when utilized correctly. I liked the idea of doing a book that, on its surface, seemed like something that would be embraced by the anti-Lovecraft SJW faction (that is, a Lovecraftian novel featuring a gay black man as the lead character), but which they’d be unable to embrace due to its problematic content. At the same time, I also wanted to write a book that would piss off the meathead Fascist types who embraced Lovecraft not so much for his fiction but for his reactionary views (you could say that the former group hates Lovecraft for the wrong reasons while the latter group loves Lovecraft for the wrong reasons). Thomas Ligotti classified his short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done as a book that would alienate mainstream readers (as it was too strange) but also his hardcore fans (as it was more mainstream in style than his other books). There is a strange and perverse thrill in writing a book that you know will please very few people…

I also knew, as I was writing the book, that, being a white writer writing a black lead character (who is a fan of Lovecraft no less!) that I was potentially playing with fire, but rather than be tentative or pussyfooted about it I just went “what the hell” and threw all caution to the wind. I know of one writer in the Weird Fiction community a few years back who, on Facebook, announced his intention to only write POC lesbian characters in the near future, and how whenever he wrote a lesbian character he would show the story to his circle of lesbian friends and, if they found fault with even one aspect of his portrayal, he’d scrap the story. But I don’t know… if I had a friend come to me with a story wanting to be sure that their portrayal of a bisexual was “accurate” (and what does that even mean anyway? Human beings are wildly inaccurate if anything), I’d probably shoot the poor fool a pitying look; whilst resisting the impulse to slap them silly while laughing scornfully! As I’ve said before, when it comes to my art, I’d much rather catastrophically fail on my own spectacular terms rather than succeed blandly by committee.

As previously noted, I hit the project’s halfway point around Thanksgiving Day of 2015. It was around this time that I began to seriously sit down and think about the novel’s end game, which was still very nebulous. By January 1st, 2016, when I was only 19 days away from finishing the first draft, I still hadn’t settled on a definitive ending, though I had several options. Finally, on January 5th, while browsing in the magazine aisle at the local Stop & Shop supermarket, the idea for the perfect ending of the book came to me. Well, better late than never, as they say.

 

A page from my 2016 diary of the day on which I finished the 1st draft of the novel

 

The first draft of Harlem Smoke was completed at 7:24 PM on January 20th, 2016 (Day 159 of the actual writing). It came to around 290 pages and 126,036 words: around 10 pages shorter than expected. After that I put the MS aside for a few weeks, before beginning work on the second draft in late February of that year. By March 24th, I had finished the second draft of Harlem Smoke, which now came to 312 pages (so, essentially, 22 pages were added). In the autumnal months of 2016 I worked on the 3rd draft of Harlem Smoke, completing it on November 17th. This version came to close to 330 pages and just over 140,000 words (this is a good example of the Champagne method of editing: adding rather than subtracting). Around the same time I was finishing the 3rd draft I also began shopping the MS around to various publishers, a quest that began in November 2016. A year later, in October 2017, the book had been turned down by at least 13 publishers and I was beginning to despair of it ever seeing the light of day. Luckily, in late October 2017, Snuggly Books expressed interest in putting it out. Before I submitted it to them I did one final edit and cut off a whopping 6 pages or so, which to me was torture! In January 2018 Snuggly made a public declaration that they’d be releasing the book in January 2019, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

Harlem Smoke: the Inspirations

Essentially, Harlem Smoke is my attempt to do a Frankenstein-type story, which is to say, a tale in which a man is haunted by his misbegotten creation. Naturally, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was one of the book’s big influences. H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West: Reanimator” story (itself a parody of Frankenstein, as has been previously noted) was also a key text: while it’s one of Lovecraft’s weaker works, it did, after all, give me the book’s title. And it would be remiss not to mention Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, another great story of a man haunted by his past creation: while working on the first draft of Harlem Smoke I became aware of some similarities between what I was writing and Ellis’ novel, so I reread Lunar Park (for the first time in a decade) shortly after I finished the first draft, and it had a profound impact on subsequent drafts of my own novel. Also, though I don’t make this clear in the book itself, the fact that System Shock 2 is Isaac’s favorite computer game is another link to Frankenstein, as that game revolves around the struggle between an evil Artificial Intelligence and the mutated progeny that “she” created.

Aside from the Frankenstein theme, the writings by H.P. Lovecraft were also very important, especially his Providence-situated stories such as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shunned House” and “The Haunter of the Dark” as well as his short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (which I still think is the best novel about Providence ever written). Though not set in Providence, “Pickman’s Model” and “The Festival” were also inspirational. I also turned to such non-fictional books about Lovecraft’s life and work, such as S.T. Joshi’s monumental 2-volume Lovecraft biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft, Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Daniel Harms’ The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia, and Michel Houellebecq’s long essay H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. As I say towards the end of my novel, “It is my hope that this novel might encourage readers who have never before read Lovecraft to maybe pick up one of his books, and to such Lovecraft neophytes, I would recommend any of the following collections: The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (you can find this one in the bargain section of any Barnes & Noble bookstore), and The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (that latter one being a sentimental favorite on my part, what with it being the first Lovecraft collection I ever purchased, back on September 12th, 1999).”

 

 

As noted earlier, I also consulted various philosophical works while writing Harlem Smoke. There was Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, various books by E.M. Cioran (including A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, and The Trouble With Being Born), numerous books by Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra in particular being important), the Penguin Classics edition of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms, Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, Georges Bataille’s The Tears of Eros, and certain writings put forth by Nick Land and the Ccru. I also went over certain mystical and spiritual books, mainly select Gnostic and Buddhist texts, but also Crowley’s The Book of Thoth and Linda Falorio’s The Shadow Tarot). For research purposes I also reread much of Kenneth Grant’s 9-volume Typhonian Trilogies.

 

 

Other equally important influences would be a few of de Sade’s novels, Reza Negarestani’s novel Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, the first season of True Detective, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Low Red Moon and The Drowning Girl novels, Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse, the Hannibal Lector novels of Thomas Harris (along with the Hannibal TV show they inspired), two (unpublished) novels I wrote in my youth (1998’s Arthouse and 1999’s Red Cherry), Colin Wilson’s The Glass Cage, the Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines computer game, Alan Moore’s Providence and Neonomicon comics, Grant Morrison’s Nameless comic (which, like Alan Moore’s Providence, was ongoing at that time and which, I won’t lie, I was obsessed with and rip-off somewhat shamelessly), Insane Poetry’s Grim Reality album (which gave birth to the idea for this book in the first place, as I talk about a bit in the soundtrack section below), 90’s horrorcore albums in general, the art of William Blake and Austin Osman Spare, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia film, and Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper film.

Having said all that, the biggest inspiration for the book was still the city of Providence itself!

 

Red Cherry (1999) and Arthouse (1998), two of my old handwritten books that played a big role in inspiring certain aspects of Harlem Smoke.

 

Harlem Smoke: the Characters

My novels tend to have fairly large casts, which makes Harlem Smoke something of an anomaly, in that there are really only three major POV characters (Isaac, Marsha, and Leon), and a small handful of minor characters. Anyway, here’s the principal cast of the novel.

 

Isaac Grimalkin

Isaac Grimalkin, as previously mentioned, is the main protagonist of Harlem Smoke. A 38 year-old African-American male, he’s also a gay atheist and antinatalist and an obsessive fan of certain pessimistic Weird Fiction writers, such as H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he was the only son of the notoriously odd horror writer Dagon Grimalkin. Though showing an early aptitude for music and painting, upon reaching the age of 18 in 1997 Isaac moves to Los Angeles and gets a scholarship to play basketball for a university out there. But when an injury derails Isaac’s career early on, he drops out of college and gets involved in the horrorcore hip-hop scene of that era. Assuming the name The Dunwich Posse, he records one album, Harlem Smoke, which is a hit with the critics and sells very well: but when the album seems to begin to inspire copycat crimes, Isaac washes his hands of the album and quits the music industry. In the year 2000, following the death of his father, he moves back to Providence and begins a successful new career, that of a Lovecraftian painter. And this is where we find him at the start of the novel, in spring of 2015.

If I were casting a movie of Harlem Smoke, I could picture Mehcad Brooks playing Isaac, and that’s how I saw him looking in my head as I was writing the character. The right age, the right height, and the sex appeal (as Isaac is very good-looking). Granted the gay rumors kind of help…

 

Marsha Garland

Marsha Garland, as has been mentioned earlier, is the secondary main character of Harlem Smoke. In her early 50’s, she’s a lesbian homicide detective employed by the Providence Police Department, one known for her skill at catching serial killers. She’s also somewhat gloomy by nature, having never gotten over the death of her first girlfriend, an FBI agent named Hazel Shelby (who passed away from breast cancer in 2003, 4 years after the events of Red Cherry). In this book she’s assigned the task of investigating the Harlem Smoke murders, a mission that soon sets her on a collision course with Isaac’s own quest to unravel the identity of the mysterious killer.

When I wrote Red Cherry back in 1999 I cast Lili Taylor as Marsha Garland. So naturally I cast her again for the same role in Harlem Smoke.

 

Leon Eigengrau

Leon Eigengrau is 19 years old, a philosophy student/stoner at Rhode Island College, and a writer for a trendy music magazine. He comes into Isaac’s life when the magazine he works for assigns him to interview Isaac (for an issue they’re doing devoted to the Horrorcore genre). Leon serves two real purposes in the book: not only is he Isaac’s love interest, but also his foil, for while Isaac is vehemently atheist, Leon is (as a lapsed Catholic with an interest in Eastern Religions and Gnosticism), at the very least, somewhat spiritual. One of my disappointments with the book was that I wish Leon had made his own spiritual arguments a little more forceful, in contrast to Isaac’s atheism and pessimism, which (I hope!) comes off as being far more articulate and well-expressed. But when a Gnostic Christian writes the Devil, I think his or her sense of honor demands that they make sure they give the Devil the best lines…

As Leon is something of a composite figure inspired by numerous people I’ve known in my life (while, like all my characters, also using elements of myself: in this case I see him as standing in for my spiritual/religious side), he was a bit tougher to cast, but I imagine that he looks like a slightly more Gothic Jack Kilmer. In the Harlem Smoke comic pitch his working name was Finn de Siècle, but I thought that was too cutesy so when I began work on the book for real I changed it to Leon Eigengrau (“eigengrau” being a German word for “The dark grey colour seen by the eyes in perfect darkness as a result of signals from the optic nerves”).

 

Dr. Okbish Waspshadow

Dr. Okbish Waspshadow is Isaac’s therapist. He’s a master of hypnosis, and plays a crucial role in the book, helping Isaac to explore his blocked traumatic childhood memories. In the Harlem Smoke comic book pitch he was identified as Balthazar Tryphon, and that was his name in the MS the first few months I was writing it, before I changed it to Okbish Waspshadow in October 2015 (Okbish, for the curious, is another name for the so-called ‘Book of the Spider,’ a grimiore transmitted to Kenneth Grant and the fellow cultists of his New Isis Lodge by alien forces back in the 1950’s). I imagined Dr. Okbish to look like the creepy nameless psychiatrist who plays a small role in Grant Morrison’s Nameless comic book.

 

Satoshi Tatsuno

Satoshi Tatsuno is a homicide detective employed by the Providence Police Department; he’s also Marsha Garland’s new partner. Around the same age as Marsha, he’s very much like her: introverted, somewhat aloof, mild-mannered (though he does lack her melancholy nature). Satoshi was originally going to play a bigger role in the book, and even have a few POV scenes of his own, but it sadly never happened (in the book’s second half in particular he kind of vanishes)… his main point of existence is to give Marsha someone to talk to and also to further the plot (see the “Mr. Exposition” trope), though I did try to give little nods that he has a life and interests of his own outside of work.

When I was writing the character of Satoshi I imagined him to look like Mr. Hideo Kojima.

 

Samantha Neugroschel

Samantha Neugroschel is Isaac’s manager, agent, and best friend… at the age of 38, she’s also the same age as him. She’s a Reform Jew as well (like Isaac was originally supposed to have been, before I turned him into an atheist). A fairly minor character, the main reason why I put her in there was to give a part to Carice Van Houten, who plays Melisandre, my favorite character on A Game of Thrones. Oddly enough, I came up with her last name before her first name: in the comics pitch I identify her simply as “Neugroschel” in the cast list because I still hadn’t thought up a first name for her yet).

 

Colonel Rafael Zamora

Colonel Rafael Zamora serves as the Chief of Police for the Providence Police Department. A middle-aged Hispanic man, he is a bland and somewhat mild-mannered fellow whose great respect for the detective skills of Marsha and Satoshi leads him to assign them the Harlem Smoke murder case. Though frequently harried and perhaps overly worried about the public image of his police force, he’s fundamentally a decent chap, and though (like poor Satoshi) we never see him outside of the workplace I tried to give little hints at what his private life was like outside of the force.

When writing Col. Zamora I pictured him to look like the (sadly deceased) actor James Victor, as he looked back in the early 1990’s, when he co-starred in the Family Channel’s Zorro TV show as the comedic and loveable Sgt. Jaime Mendoza, which is how I remember him from my childhood.

 

Iris Brant

Iris Brant was the main star of my 1998 novel Arthouse, which, as I mentioned earlier, was set in Providence. As this new novel was also set in Providence, I thought it would be fun to bring her back, in a small yet important role, as I’ve always had a soft spot for her… she’s always been one of my favorite characters. In Arthouse she had been a 26 year-old suicidal drug addict and artist whose life had changed for the positive when she came to terms with her lesbian sexual orientation. Now in her mid-40’s, she’s a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, while giving art classes on the side at her studio (known simply as “Arthouse,” which also makes a cameo in Harlem Smoke: I won’t lie, writing a scene set in the Arthouse made me very nostalgic). She’s also good friends with Isaac.

Back in the day I cast Winona Ryder as Iris, so I brought her back to play the same part for Harlem Smoke. Well, Winona Ryder is one of my favorite actresses, after all! However, in my book she has pink hair, so just visualize Winona Ryder with pink hair.

 

Dagon Grimalkin

Isaac’s deceased bisexual father (real first name: John), who in his lifetime had been a celebrated writer of Lovecraftian Weird Fiction and also an obsessive occultist. Isaac inherited his lifelong interest in Lovecraft and Weird Fiction from Dagon Grimalkin (who, indeed, was an even bigger fan than Isaac was). At the novel’s opening, Dagon has been dead for around 15 years (having passed away from a heart attack in the year 2000), and thus only makes small peripheral appearances in the narrative, in flashbacks and dreams… and yet he casts a long shadow on the book’s story. To say that Isaac and his father had a strained relationship is something of an understatement: whereas Isaac believes in nothing, his father believed in everything, and in some ways this strained relationship is central to the novel (that is, the theme of a son trying to reconcile the sins of their father). I actually found Dagon so interesting that in my (still unpublished) 3rd short story collection I wrote a new story where he plays a central part.

I imagine Dagon Grimalkin to look like Hunt for Red October-era James Earl Jones, just less cuddly. In life Dagon was a very cold and distant man, and Isaac jokingly compares him to being like a “black Tywin Lannister” (Game of Thrones fans will know what I’m talking about there).

 

Harlem Smoke: an Excerpt

The following excerpt is taken from chapter 9 of the novel, in which (after visiting the RISD Art Museum) Isaac and Leon visit a coffee house and end up discussing pessimism, Nietzsche, theological matters, and Kim Kardashian, amongst other things.

* * * *

“Why not just reject everything? Consider the vast amount of planets and galaxies out there . . . what if each and every one of them were free from the taint of sentient life? The universe as a symphony of non-existence, the music of the spheres ruined by one false note: our planet. Wouldn’t that make us a sort of cosmic teratoma, a planet-sized polyp despoiling the purity of an otherwise immaculate vacuum? It’s something to consider,” Isaac mused. Apparently the retro lunch period was over as now modern pop was playing over the cafe’s speakers, Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space.” “The Ancient Greeks were wrong when they classified Echidna the She-Viper as the progenitor of all horrors: human consciousness is the true Mother of Monsters. And Lovecraft may have been wrong about a lot of things, but in his adoption of a mechanistic materialism, his stance of cosmic indifference, I think he was spot on. But seeing as you have a fondness for Nietzsche, perhaps I should end this impromptu discourse with one of his better quotations, extracted from one of his 1873 notebooks: ‘Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.’”

“You sure are good at quoting other people,” Leon observed.

“I’ve always been gifted with a very good memory. It’s both a blessing and a curse.”

“I am familiar with that Nietzsche quote, however. It even opens up chapter 7 in Ray Brassier’s book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction: ‘The Truth of Extinction.’ In that same book Brassier writes how human existence is bounded by extinction, and how the universe is founded on nothing.”

“I actually read that Brassier book recently, on your recommendation. I don’t read all that much in the way of philosophy (aside from being something of a Cioran fetishist), so perhaps it’s not surprising that probably 90% of the book went completely over my head. I was able to follow the first three chapters pretty well, along with the final chapter, but all of part two (and the first chapter of part three) are a blur to me. My main interest in the book are mainly its connections to the theme of horror, like the Ligotti quote that serves as an epigraph to the book, the footnote that references David Cronenberg’s film The Fly, a nod to the ‘blind idiot god’ of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and so forth. Sometimes I found the writing poetic, as when Brassier mentions, ‘the awakening of an intelligence which is in the process of sloughing off its human mask,’ but more often than not I found it dry and abstract. All the while, it did make me curious to investigate Nietzsche again, and it certainly expanded my vocabulary: prior to reading that book I had never seen words such as ipseity, rebarbative, propaedutic, sublation, qualiaphilia, and perplication. By the time I turned the final page I found it all so mentally exhausting that after I was done reading it I read Kim Kardashian’s Selfish next.”

“Her collection of selfies?” Leon asked. “How was that, anyway?”

Isaac almost did a double take. “Forgive me, Leon, but I wouldn’t have taken you to be a Kardashian fan,” he said.

“Well, I’m not . . . exactly. The only reason I have any interest in her is simply because she’s Kayne’s wife. I’m something of a Kanye West fan, as you may (or may not) recall my telling you that day we first met.”

“I’m not a fan of her myself. The one and only reason I read the book was because I knew how silly it would look when I would tally my list of books read in 2015 at the end of the year, and how my friends on Facebook would get a chuckle when they saw that right after I had read one of the most difficult of modern philosophy books that I had next read a trashy celebrity book with no literary or intellectual value whatsoever,” Isaac said. “As for Selfish: I have to give her some credit, with her book Kim Kardashian West provides us with an existential black hole that the transcendental nihilism of a Ray Brassier can only dream of evoking (I find it interesting that on pages 256-257, somewhere a little past the book’s halfway point, we are provided with two pages that have no words or pictures at all, pages that are completely black: it is as if this is symbolic of the black hole at the center of Western society/civilization, with the selfies orbiting it like husks of dead galaxies). The narcissism and self-obsession on display in her book is almost sublime, and makes this product seem like something dredged up from the darkest recesses of Bret Easton Ellis’ imagination: Kardashian is the female Victor Ward. The book collects 477 selfies (including the obligatory celebrity cameos: J-Lo, Snookie, Donatella, Madonna, Ellen, and, of course, Kanye), along with some perfunctory commentary that’s so vapid it makes Justin Bieber’s First Step to Forever look like Being and Time (an example: a trip to Spain is summarized as “Spain was a wild trip.”) Running the gamut from the years 2006-2014 (meaning there are no selfies of Kim rocking the Draco Malfoy look, though I do have to admit that the ushanka that she sported on pages 206-207 suits her), in some ways I think the book peaked after the Paris Hilton cameos on pages 10-13. Seeing Paris circa 2006 made me kind of nostalgic: she was the Ur-mother of the modern reality TV celebrity (someone famous for being famous). The argument could be made that Kim Kardashian is a modern-day avatar of the Goddess of Meontology, as symbolic of the Void as any of the lacquer works executed by the criminally unknown artist Hiroyuki Fukuda.”

“Nice capsule review . . . you should post that on Goodreads,” Leon said.

“Maybe I will,” Isaac said.

 

Harlem Smoke: the Soundtrack

Harlem Smoke soundtrack draft notes

 

As any of my readers know, I take the “soundtracks” of my books very seriously indeed. Like (one of my literary heroes) Bret Easton Ellis I always namedrop songs in the text itself, and helpfully even provide a soundtrack at the end of each book, so that the interested reader can, if he or she so chooses, assemble their own version of it to listen to on their own time. A lot of this was inspired by a book I read on Quentin Tarantino many years ago, where I found out that he would often listen to a ton of music before starting to work on a screenplay, to find songs that he might use in the film, or which might inspire certain scenes. I kind of work the same way. Seeing as how Harlem Smoke revolves around a former hip-hop star, I knew that the music in this case would be especially important to the book. Naturally, I knew there would have to be a number of horrorcore hip-hop tracks, mostly from the 90’s, but I didn’t want the soundtrack to be too one note, so I focused on a lot of other genres as well. I think it’s one of my most diverse soundtracks, one that features a lot of different musical styles: hip-hop, gay pop, classic rock, 80’s Goth, jazz, and some more leftfield experimental stuff; it’s probably the first horror novel to feature a graphic gay sex scene set to the music of Magma (it also pleases me that I finally found a fitting book to employ my favorite Siouxsie & the Banshees song, “Melt!”). To me, there are two key songs that capture the soul of the book. One is “The House That Dripped Blood” by Insane Poetry, off their phenomenal 1992 album Grim Reality. I first heard that song around the summer of 2014 and it’s what led to my interest in the horrorcore genre (it also ended up inspiring a chapter name in Harlem Smoke). The other super-inspirational track was “Gimme Hell” by The Jesus and Mary Chain: as soon as I heard the nasty and abrasive guitar riff that kicks off that song (and the vocals sneering to “gimme Hell”) I knew that it just had to serve as the “title song” for Harlem Smoke. Another important find was “Azathoth,” a 1969 song by a British psychedelic rock band named Arzachel. Seeing as how the song was named after one of Lovecraft’s monstrous creations, I thought it would work great as one of the “end credits” songs. In any event, here are the 51 songs that make up the soundtrack to Harlem Smoke:

 

“Gimme Hell” (The Jesus and Mary Chain) title song

“Monster” (Kanye West)
“Haunted” (Evanescence)
“Cruelty Has A Human Heart” (Ian Partridge/Janet Craxton)
“Skin of the Night” (M83)
“Wild” (Troye Sivan)
“Water Music: Air” (Wendy Carlos)
“Sinister Purpose” (CCR)
“Forty Six & 2” (Tool)
“Machine Gun” (Portishead)
“Satellite Call” (Sara Bareilles)
“Under the Blacklight” (Rilo Kiley)
“Ribs” (Lorde)
“Come into My World” (Kylie Minogue)
“The Crystal World” (Locrian)
“Archives of Pain” (Manic Street Preachers)

“Lost Rivers of London” (Coil)
“Diary of a Madman” (Gravediggaz)

“Devil Inside” (INXS)
“Policy of Truth” (Depeche Mode)
“Blank Space” (Taylor Swift)
“Ghosttown” (Madonna)

“Afraid” (Nico)
“Me And My Shadow” (Judy Garland)
“What Reason Could I Give?” (Ornette Coleman)
“With You In Mind” (Don Ross)
“Straight Into Darkness” (Tom Petty)
“Melt!” (Siouxsie & the Banshees)

“Joan of Arc” (Madonna)
“Kali Yuga” (Georgia Anne Muldrow)

“Spiritual (Negro Song)” (Magma)

“Murder Avenue” (Geto Boys)
“No More Toymakers to the King” (Paul Frees)
“Footsteps In The Dark (Part 1 & 2)” (The Isley Brothers)
“Symptoms of Insanity” (Esham)
“City of Refuge” (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
“Enter the Hall of Ice” (Aghast)
“Cold Cell” (Coil)
“The Persistence of Loss” (Nine Inch Nails)
“Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on my Knee” (Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band)
“Tristan Corbiere” (Cold Cave)
“Mauve Suspense” (The French Ensemble)
“The Creature From The Black Lagoon” (Dave Edmunds)

“Satanic Verses” (Flatlinerz)
“Graveyard” (Public Image Ltd.)
“The House That Dripped Blood” (Insane Poetry)

“They’re Going To Get You” (Bobby Prince)

“Parataxic Distortion” (Cut Hands)
“Everything Merges with the Night” (Brian Eno)
“Azathoth” (Arzachel) end credits 1

“Harlem Nocturne” (The Viscounts) end credits 2

Then there were some songs that were intended to be in the book but which were cut for various reasons:

“Ghost Town” (The Specials) was replaced with CCR’s “Sinister Purpose”
“Born to Die” (Lana Del Rey) was replaced with Lorde’s “Ribs”
“Hyena” (R.E.M.) was replaced by Locrian’s “The Crystal World”
“Transylvania” (Tyler the Creator)
“T.F.W.O.” (Skinny Puppy)
“Idumæa: Marc Almond Version” (Current 93)

Finally, here are some songs that, while not officially appearing on the soundtrack, were also important to the book:

“Sympathy for the Devil” (The Rolling Stones)

“All Apologies” (Nirvana)

“Blackstar” (David Bowie)

 

Harlem Smoke: Photographic Evidence

One of the things that most excited me about working on Harlem Smoke was that it was very much set in (what was then) the present day and grounded in the real world. I wanted to really focus on the mundane aspects of day-to-day existence, to make the (relatively few) horror scenes stand out more dramatically. With the exception of one chapter that’s set in the fictional city of Thundermist (itself inspired by my hometown of Woonsocket, and the main setting for my Autopsy of an Eldritch City collection), the entirety of the book is set in Providence. Every street name mentioned in the book corresponds to a real-life street, and all of the buildings mentioned in the book exist in real-life (with one or two exceptions: there’s a donut store that appears in the book’s second half that is fictional, for example). When I was planning (and during the writing) of the book, I would spend hours just walking around Providence, taking hundreds of pictures and looking out for interesting buildings; in a way it almost felt as if I were a location manager on a film, scouting out locations to use for a movie. Below are pictures illustrating certain aspects of the novel, be they buildings, streets, artwork, you name it. Many of these pictures were taken by myself, and in such cases are appropriately identified. I have arranged them roughly in the sequence that they appear in the book.

I like the idea that maybe a hundred years from now you might be able to spot future horror fans walking around Providence with Harlem Smoke e-books on their e-readers or whatever, investigating the real-life locations mentioned in the book and retracing the paths of some of the characters. Assuming the city hasn’t changed too much by then!

 

Creepy Buddhist artwork that hangs on one of the walls of Dr. Okbish’s office.

This is the office for the therapist of Tony Shaloub’s Adrian Monk character from the TV show Monk. It’s also how I imagine Dr. Okbish’s office to look.

architectural detail that inspired the name of the so-called ‘Turk’s Head’ Building. Lovecraft mentioned it in one of his stories and it appears in my book as well. Photograph by the author.

A typical RIPTA bus, a common sight in Providence. As I almost always take the bus to go back and forth from Woonsocket to Providence, I’ve ridden in such buses many a time.

The Coffee Exchange, one of Providence’s many funky/hip coffee houses. I hung out here a few times during my trips to the city in 2013, and the coffee house appears in the novel a few times, being a favorite hangout of Isaac and Leon. Photograph by the author.

The Providence Public Safety Complex, which serves as the official headquarters of the Providence Police Department. This is where Marsha Garland works.

Waterplace 1, Isaac’s apartment building. He lives in one of the penthouses on the top floor. Photograph by the author.

This is what the living room/kitchen of Isaac’s penthouse atop Waterplace 1 looks like.

Another view of Isaac’s living room/kitchen.

This is the view from the terrace of Isaac’s penthouse at night.

Austin Osman Spare’s Were-Lynx illustration. Isaac has a copy of it hanging up in his penthouse.

This monstrous-looking cat serves as Isaac’s Facebook profile picture. I believe the artist is a woman from the UK known simply as Tea.

George Tooker’s 1950 painting The Subway, which Isaac reused as the cover art for his Harlem Smoke album in 1998.

This is Wave Traveler, a large abstract art sculpture created by Gillian Christy in 2009. It can be found next to Isaac’s apartment building. Photograph by the author.

The house on the end of Elton Street in Providence that I used as Marsha Garland’s house in Harlem Smoke. Photograph by the author.

This is Andy Warhol’s 1962 work Big Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Vegetable Beef). Marsha has a print of it hanging up on her office wall at her home: it’s one of her all-time favorite works of art. I also mentioned this same Warhol painting in Red Cherry.

The Kennedy Plaza bus terminal in Downtown Providence. As I almost always take the bus to get to Providence, I’m quite familiar with this area of the city, and it appears numerous times in my book. The building in the center background is City Hall, with the Biltmore Hotel to the right. Photograph by the author.

111 Westminster Street, the tallest building in not only Providence but also all of Rhode Island. Locals refer to it as the ‘Superman Building’ but I’ve always thought it looks way more like the haunted building from the first Ghostbusters movie, and for this reason it’s long been one of my favorite buildings in Providence. Photograph by the author.

Providence’s iconic skyline, as seen from the Kennedy Plaza bus terminal. Photograph by the author.

Chapter 5 of Harlem Smoke is entitled “The Long Walk,” and in this chapter Isaac is interviewed by Leon, which involves the two going on a walking tour of the East Side of Providence and visiting numerous Lovecraft-related sites. This map shows the exact route they take, with the red line showing their path: essentially, their route begins at Kennedy Plaza and ends at Angell Street. I myself have walked this same route many times.

The Providence Athenaeum, one of Providence’s oldest libraries. Lovecraft was a frequent visitor here during his life, along with a certain Mr. Poe. Photograph by the author.

This 2013 bust of H.P. Lovecraft may be found inside the Athenaeum. Photograph by the author.

This is Carrie Tower, a clock tower located on the Front Campus of Brown University. Photograph by the author.

A 1990 memorial plaque dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft, located near the John Hay Library, across the street from the Carrie Tower. The poem quoted on it is one of Lovecraft’s own poems, “Background,” otherwise known as Sonnet XXX of his Fungi From Yuggoth sequence. Photograph by the author.

One of the gargoyles located outside of Brown University’s Robinson Hall, across the street from Carrie Tower. Photograph by the author.

The H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Square sign. Photograph by the author.

one of a number of horse-headed posts located outside the front of the First Church of Christ the Scientist. I assume that in the old days people would hitch their horses to such things. Photograph by the author.

135 Benefit Street, also known as the Stephen Harris House. This house served as the model for the titular house of Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” story. It also appears frequently in the works of Caitlín R. Kiernan, where it is usually referred to as the “Yellow House.” Photograph by the author.

The so-called Fleur-de-Lys house. This building makes an appearance in Lovecraft’s celebrated “The Call of Cthulhu” story. Photograph by the author.

The sinister hamburger illustrations on the front windows of Geoff’s sandwich place. Photograph by the author.

At one point in Harlem Smoke Isaac walks down this staircase to reach the Waterplace Park region of Providence. In my interest in documenting reality, I counted out the exact number of steps, and mention that number in the book. In the background one can see the Biltmore Hotel looming. Photograph by the author.

During the time I was writing Harlem Smoke, there was, behind the Rhode Island Foundation Building (and near the bottom of the staircase picture I previously posted) a Capital Grille Restaurant, and near the main entrance of this restaurant were two regal-looking lion statues. Sadly, around 2015 or so the restaurant changed locations and the lion statues went with them, so don’t bother looking for them there anymore. Still, I liked the idea of immortalizing them in my novel. Photograph by the author.

This is the Wall of Hope, a tunnel that leads one to Waterplace Park. It was created after 9/11, and its walls and columns consist of hundreds of tiles handpainted by children. Photograph by the author.

One of the many tiles found within the Wall of Hope monument, and one of Isaac’s favorites. I specifically mention this tile in the book itself, in chapter 5. Photograph by the author.

Waterplace Park, one of the nicer areas of Downtown Providence. Isaac’s apartment building can be found here. Photograph by the author.

The Rhode Island State House, located in Providence, not far from Isaac’s apartment building and right near Providence Place Mall. The dome is the 4th-largest self-supporting dome in the world. Photograph by the author.

Providence Place Mall, Downtown Providence. Photograph by the author.

Enormous horse statue located near the P.J. Chang’s entrance of Providence Place Mall. Photograph by the author.

The Brown University Library, otherwise known as SciLi. One of the victims of the Harlem Smoke Killer worked here, and Marsha briefly visits it in the book while working the case. Photograph by the author.

After Marsha finishes up at SciLi, she spends a few minutes resting on this bench, which is situated in front of a nearby building facing the SCiLi. Photograph by the author.

One of Rhode Island’s most famous landmarks, the Big Blue Bug (real name: Nibbles Woodaway), the beloved termite mascot of Big Blue Bug Solutions, and also the world’s largest artificial bug.

This is the Providence River, which divides the city into two sides. Photograph by the author.

Abstract art sculpture known as Textual Gear, that can be found near the Providence River. In Harlem Smoke, the killer drapes one of the murdered corpses over the lower half of the sculpture, to make it look as if the sculpture is devouring her. Photograph by the author.

another view of the Textual Gear, this time looking towards the Providence River. Photograph by the author.

Someone or other managed to deface the Textual Gear sculpture with the cryptic phrase RIP JARER. I have no idea who Jarer is, but saw fit to mention this fact in Harlem Smoke. Photograph by the author.

the word “Aliens” spray-painted on the back of a Stop sign across the street from Textual Gear. Photograph by the author.

some of the grim-looking industrial buildings that line the opposite shore of the Providence River. Photograph by the author.

Somebody scrawled the word LONELY atop one of those aforementioned industrial buildings in white letters, letters so large they could be clearly read across the river. I found something striking about that, so naturally mentioned it in the book. Photograph by the author.

The Lovecraft Arts & Sciences emporium located at the Arcade in Providence. Isaac pays it a visit in one scene in Harlem Smoke.

This is Blind Love, one of the pieces of artwork hanging up at the Lovecraft store.

Grotesque drawing by Theodor de Bry, an artist best known for his gruesome depictions of Spanish atrocities in the New World. I first saw this drawing in a text book I had to buy for a history course I took my freshmen year in college, and it freaked me out. At one point in Harlem Smoke, Isaac reflects on it.

This is the main entrance to the RISD Art Museum, which Isaac visits at one point in the book. Photograph by the author.

One of Isaac’s (and mine) favorite pieces of artwork at the RISD Museum of Art, the enormous statue of the Buddha. Supposedly it’s the largest wooden Japanese sculpture in the USA. Photograph by the author.

This is Blue State Coffee, another coffee house located in Providence. It appears in one of the chapters of Harlem Smoke.

This old house in Providence serves as the model for Threshold House, the childhood home of Isaac Grimalkin and a key location in the novel. Interestingly enough, despite my many excursions to Providence, I have never seen the exterior of this house in person.

The famous building with the fake “peeling” façade in Providence. Photograph by the author.

Chinese dragon statue located atop the Providence Children’s Museum.

H.P. Lovecraft’s grave at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence. Photograph by the author.

The author posing next to Lovecraft’s grave in 2012. My mother took this picture.

Some of the many gifts that people leave in front of Lovecraft’s grave. Photograph by the author.

The Biltmore Hotel, the most famous hotel in Providence. In Harlem Smoke, it hosts a 3 day Lovecraft convention known as The Festival. Photograph by the author.

18 Imperial Place in Providence. This is somewhat what I imagine the exterior of the building that houses the Arthouse to look like, only with 4 floors instead of 6.

Prospect Terrace Park in Providence. The epilogue of Harlem Smoke takes place here. Photograph by the author.

The view from the terrace of Prospect Terrace Park in the fall, with the Providence skyline beyond. Photograph by the author.

A bench at Prospect Terrace Park in Providence. It plays an important role in the novel’s epilogue. Photographed by the author.

A swan swimming in the Providence River. It inspired the ending for the book. Photograph by the author.

A map of Downtown Providence, plus the western portion of its East Side. The red star indicates where Isaac’s apartment building is located. The blue star marks the headquarters of the Providence Police Department. The green star near the bottom indicates the location of the Arthouse, Prof. Iris Brant’s studio.

Lovecraft and I. Photograph by the author.

The author as ghost. Photograph by the author.

 

Critical Praise for Harlem Smoke

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Champagne’s previous works include the novel Confusion (self-published, 2006) and two Weird Fiction short story collections, 2012’s Grimoire: A Compendium of Neo-Goth Narratives and 2015’s Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange & Unproductive Thinking (both published by Rebel Satori Press). His work has also appeared in the anthologies Userlands: New Fiction Writers From the Blogging Underground, Mighty in Sorrow: a Tribute to Current 93 & David Tibet, Marked To Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels and Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology. He was born in 1980 and lives in Rhode Island. He has never washed dishes professionally.

 

 

Links of Interest

http://www.snugglybooks.co.uk/
The official website of Snuggly Books

http://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/
My humble writer’s blog

http://www.hplovecraft.com/
The H.P. Lovecraft Archive

http://www.providenceri.gov/
Providence’s official website

https://risdmuseum.org/
RISD Art Museum web site

http://www.ligotti.net/
Thomas Ligotti Online

http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
EXIT MUNDI

https://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/
Dwindling in Unbelief

 

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog is given over to the birth of James ‘Sypha’ Champagne’s long, long awaited second novel ‘Harlem Smoke’, and he has put together one of his characteristic magisterial and deep diving posts to entertain and hopefully hook you. Thus, you have a big local weekend ahead of you, and please indulge thoroughly then, of course, please express related things of any nature to Sypha/James ing the commenting arena. Thank you and you’re welcome, everybody, and giant thanks to our legendary author and host. ** JM, Hi, man. I’m in obvious agreement with your ‘supreme’ designation. Yes, I know about that water ride catastrophe. I’m a big keeper-upper on all things theme park related. Yikes, and, well, very cool that you rode that murderer safely just before it lost its shit. Heady for sure. ** David Ehrenstein, It’s true, they are in many cases. Luckily my blood pressure is a languid thing. So far. ** h, Hi. Oh, yes, i love roller coasters and ride them whenever I’m in proximity to them. Except for the ones that spin around because I have big motion sickness issues connected to being revolved. The Japanese one is sublime, right? Riding and gazing upon it is at the top of Zac’s my list for our next Tokyo visit. Oh, and everything with the thing went smoothly yesterday. Have a wonderful weekend. ** Sypha, The man of the 48 hours! Thank you, James. The blog and I are chuffed and in your debt. Definitely not oddly as I conceptually can not imagine you would be a coaster nut. I hope the weekend here and everywhere else treats you royally. ** Robert Siek, Howdy, Robert! Me too. Every single one. And that indoor one is definitely one the most alluring. Oh, wow, interesting about your proximity and tales from amongst the former inhabitants. Yeah, American Dream is a truly miserable name, unlike Xanadu, which would have only pulled in more giant crowds. Why do people err so frequently one the side of the boring? Rhetorical question. Lower East Side, good choice. The last time I was in NYC for an extended time I stayed in the lower East Village, and it was first time in ages that I unreservedly enjoyed being in NYC. Purging things is good. Always a little scary from the near view, but nearly always a cathartic move, I think. ** Dominik, Hi, D! I’m good, and you? On the script, we’re thinking/hoping that they’ll be ready to meet in the latter part of February. But, yeah, it’s very nice not have any reason to even think about that project for a while. I’m happy my book suggestions hit your mark. Cool, awesome. My weekend … Today will partly depend on how big and serious the weekly protests are because, if they’re big, transportation will be shut down. Zac and I need to finish designing a proposed ‘PGL’ poster for the upcoming French release because the distributors want a new, more catchy looking one. And a new trailer, which we’ll need to work on. Stuff like that. Preparing for the London trip next week. Your weekend full of SCAB constructing is a very admirable and exciting use of this or any weekend. Let me know it went, and have a great one ** Joey, Hi, welcome. I think you’re referring to the pull quote in the ICA’s announcement for the ‘PGL’ London showing? Well, I meant that, in my experience or most, it’s extremely rare for a current film to treat the language in a film as though it’s as important as the other aspects: visuals, story, style, etc. I don’t see close attention being paid to what the language is and what it can do. It’s almost always just written to ‘sound real’ and to advance the movie and solve its issues. I don’t see many filmmakers thinking about how complexly language use can work in a film, and how its exact placement and form of delivery by the performers is full of possibilities and nuances and things that can make a huge difference to how a film effects a viewer. It just seems like language being used as a mere signpost is a very wasted opportunity to me. I guess that’s a way of saying language in films could be more poetic, but I don’t think dialogue needs to sound like a poem. In our film, we very carefully tuned and shaped the dialogue based on how it related to the faces of the performers speaking it, the quality and habits of their voices, etc. And we tried to think about how listening works — what would focus attention, what would pass by without examination, etc, and try to make interesting and important things happen in both of those cases. We thought a great deal about how the language worked or could work. My impression is that the vast majority of filmmakers aren’t as attentive to what’s possible with dialogue and speech in film. I guess that’s a wandery explanation? Does that help? ** Steve Erickson, Well, if we set up a ‘fake’ PGL Etsy shop, you’ll be the first to know. I heard a bit of the Sharon van Etten. It interested me. I’m not a James Blake fan, but maybe I’ll try again. Ben Niles is on the ball. Whew. Interesting: ‘Serenity’. I’ll definitely watch out for it. ** Misanthrope, Daydreaming can be like 3/4 of it, or of what’s important about it. Man, that is a huge decision. Whoa. So, if you gave up guardianship, that would mean that you would naturally support him if you could due to emotional ties and responsibilities, but if, oh, he started a forest fire that caused lots of damage, you wouldn’t be legally responsible for paying for the damages? Things like that? Mm, if so, it does seem like giving up guardianship is the wisest move? Is it possible that him suddenly becoming fully and solely responsible for his actions could wise him up about the consequences of his bad behavior? I don’t know. That’s a complicated decision. Ugh indeed. Hope you get a boatload of villainous chillin’ done this weekend. ** Okay. You know what to do, or you know what’s available to do around here this weekend. I hope you’ll max out on the occasion. Thanks. See you on Monday.