The Last Tale of the Haliverse

[ecosophia]

All good things must come to an end sooner or later, and the last of my epic fantasies with tentacles, The Seal of Yueh Lao, is now available for preorder. Here's the blurb: 

*********

A Legacy From The Eldritch Past...

 

Asenath Merrill, sixteen years old, spends her summers studying witchcraft in the village of Chorazin and her nights traveling the uncanny kingdoms of the Dreamlands. It's all perfectly ordinary if you happen to belong to one of the secretive cults that worship the Great Old Ones, your mother comes from Innsmouth and has tentacles for legs, and your grandmother is the Black Goat of the Woods herself.  When Asenath encounters a mysterious girl in the stone circle atop Elk Hill, however, her prosaic existence begins to stretch and blur into patterns she must struggle to master.

 

A century before, a family tragedy in the little Massachusetts town of Dunwich spun out of control and nearly plunged the world into chaos. Four centuries before that, armed men came to the Norse settlements on Greenland and slaughtered every person they could find, leaving a legacy that still troubles the family of Asenath's closest friend.  A secret from the ancient world connects those events with the girl named Cassie, and Asenath will need all her courage and her fledgling powers as a witch in training to unravel the mystery -- and open the way to her own unguessed destiny...

*********
When I started writing The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth six years ago, I had no idea that it was going to be the first eldritch, rugose installment of an eleven-novel series. Still, that's what happened, and to my taste, at least, this final volume -- set two years before the events in The Weird of Hali: Arkham, the final book in the original sequence -- does a good job of rounding it all off, tying up some loose ends while still leaving plenty of room for my readers' tentacular imaginations to slither freely. It's been a grand adventure and I'm grateful to everyone who's enjoyed the stories. In the meantime, yes, I have some other fiction projects under way...

By the way, if you haven't yet started on this sequence of eldritch adventures in a world where H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos has been turned on its head, where the Great Old Ones are the old gods of nature and their enemies are a cult of crazed rationalists who want to turn all that rhetoric about Man's Conquest of Nature into a bloodsoaked reality, the publisher's putting together some promotional deals on the earlier volumes; I'll be making an announcement about that sometime in the next few days. 

Comments

Iâ Iâ G’noth-ykkaga-ha

[open_space]

With Kingsport in hand tonight. I have never been as much a novel person as I should but I am savoring the series and my English vocabulary list kind of doubled since I started it. That is always good for a foreigner as myself so as to compensate for the inevitable accent and the quirky way of phrasing! I no longer pray under my breath either, no. Now while praying I mutter extempore. ;-)

I particularly liked, though after finishing Innsmouth had mixed feelings about, that they are all about the same size. One thing that has always put me off from many novel series though is the somewhat artificial size they grow into, adding just more and more of the same in the final volumes but the less flavor they seem to have. WoH oozes juiciness with every turn on the contrary!

Good to see the Sar Péladan featuring too. I became increasingly interested in his work after your mentioned his involvement with the Symbolist movement and his comment on drawing and Catholicism which was hilarious. I searched for some of the artwork and it is beautiful. La décadence latine sounds pretty interesting as well, but 21 volumes! Wow.

P.D I hope it is not too weird to say, but I swear sometimes I can listen your voice in my head while reading some of the passages!

Re: Iâ Iâ G’noth-ykkaga-ha

[ecosophia]

Thank you! One of the rules I set for myself when I began The Weird of Hali is that each novel of that series would be less than 75,000 words, and I stuck with it. I loathe the sort of prose inflation you see in so many series these days, where the writer gets lazy as the series proceeds and lets the volumes balloon to unmanageable size. I let the two shoggoth novels and Hyperborea expand a little further -- all three of those are just over 100,000 words -- but that was because they had too much story to fit into the smaller word count, and I trimmed as heavily as I could.

Peladan's novels are based on the trump cards of the Tarot, and you don't have to read them in order. The first of them, Le Vice Supreme, was far and away the most famous, and it's a good lush decadent story.

As for hearing my voice, a lot of people say that -- and for good reason. I write the way I talk. (That's a useful trick for writers -- imagine you're telling a story out loud, and then write it that way. It's a great way to speed up your prose.)

The End

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sad to see the series go! It's not every day that you're treated to a working mage's take on the Mythos. I think it's safe to say that you've done The Sleeper proud.

I can't wait to see what you're working on next!

-Dudley Dawson

Re: The End

[ecosophia]

Thank you! I've got two projects under way right now, one of which should be done within the year. The other -- something much larger and more challenging, the most difficult thing I've tried yet as a fiction writer -- is going to take several years at least, and I won't be publishing any of it until the whole trilogy is done.

Full Circle

[(Anonymous)]

Splendid news! A journey full circle. Blessings ~ Tanya

Re: Full Circle

[ecosophia]

Thank you!

[ecosophia]

You're not wrong at all. As Nyarlathotep says in Innsmouth, speaking of one of the many witches who appear in the novels: "If you ever want to see the sharp side of Abby Price's tongue, ask her what she thinks of Wicca." The witches in the Haliverse are based squarely on the cunning folk of early modern Britain and America -- the same people I wrote about in this blog post. Jim Baker's excellent book The Cunning Man's Handbook is a solid introduction to that form of occult practice.

Of course, since this is the Haliverse, they also hang out with Nyarlathotep -- in my fictive world, he's the Black Man* who featured so heavily in narratives from British witchcraft trials -- and most of them also revere one or more of the Great Old Ones, but they're the people that you turn to if you need to treat an illness, get ill-wishing taken off your cows, want a card reading to help you make a decision, or the like.

*Lovecraft describes Nyarlathotep as looking like an Egyptian pharaoh, so I modeled him on Ramses II, complete with the great beak of a nose. The medium brown skin of North African people counted as "black" in early modern Britain; remember that Othello was a Moor, i.e., a native of Morocco, not a sub-Saharan African.

[(Anonymous)]

John—

I just wanted to say thank you for this entire series. The world needed those stories.

—David BTL

[ecosophia]

You're welcome and thank you.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm going to hope that this series does so well that the publisher will put pressure on the author to either a) write more material or b) allow other authors to write in his world.

If not more fiction how about a "Guide to the... Weirdverse?" Does this series have a name yet? Or maybe it needs a history of the setting book like the "Silmarillion?"

AV

[ecosophia]

I've discussed the options for fanfic here; since the Cthulhu mythos is one of modern fantasy fiction's great shared worlds, it would hardly be reasonable for me not to let others play in the corner of it that I've remodeled to my own taste. As for me, though, I've said everything using that set of images and ideas that I know how to say; I spent a while thinking about a trilogy involving someone who becomes a member of the Fellowship of the Yellow Sign, and try as I might, I couldn't get it to become anything but a rehash of one or more of the earlier stories. So it's on to other things.

There are, however, three nonfiction projects relating to the Haliverse. The first is the Weird of Hali roleplaying game, which has been delayed by the coronavirus hoopla but will be coming out later this year or early next year. The second is The Weird of Hali Companion, a kind of Encyclopedia Tentacula that includes the people, places, and things mentioned in the books, including those that exist in that weird dimension of space and time we call "real life;" that's currently in process.

The third is a Weird of Hali cookbook -- food ended up playing a much bigger role in the stories than I expected, notably as a way to talk about the difference between the abstract world of the Radiance and the concrete realities of existence represented by the Great Old Ones, and I've had people ask me for recipes! So I'm writing that in Brecken Kendall's voice. It's all her favorite recipes, the ones she learned growing up and those she picked up from friends in Arkham after the events of The Nyogtha Variations, all the way from rice and beans to complicated provincial French soups. Yes, it has her recipe for cheese polenta...

[(Anonymous)]

Congratulations on carrying out this project to completion! Truly a masterful application of will, imagination and memory ;)

[ecosophia]

Thank you.

Part of me is Sad

[degringolade]

But all good things have an end.

JMG: I enjoyed all of these immensely, almost went the whole nine-yards and bought the physical books for the delightfully tacky and fun artwork to complement my collection of forties and fifties era pulp.

Rest assured that you will have at least one buyer. I'll keep you the loop if I can ever manage to finish the rest of the fanfic.

See you in the funny papers

John (Degringolade)

Re: Part of me is Sad

[ecosophia]

Many thanks -- and I'll look forward to the fanfic!

[robertmathiesen]

I'm eager to read it! The only downside is that then series will be finished ... What a wonderful long journey it has been!

[ecosophia]

It's always a bit of a wrench to say goodbye to a fictive world, but yeah, it's been a long strange trip since the opening pages of Innsmouth! I'm just glad that I was able to find a suitable publisher, and plenty of enthusiastic readers.

Great!

[(Anonymous)]

And many, many thanks that this announcement came after one of my two paydays. Pre-ordered now.

Re: Great!

[ecosophia]

Thank you. The timing wasn't my idea, but I'm glad it worked out.

[jpc2]

John,

Order is in...

After finishing 'Voyage to Hyperborea' I was wondering about the thinking of of the Radiance in 'The Nyogatha Variations'. Did they see their actions as a payback for what happened in Greenland, Africa and Leng?

Will miss that world. It was well done.

[ecosophia]

Thank you. As I imagined it, the Radiance activities in The Nyogtha Variations were simply one of their attempts to seize control of that end of Massachusetts from the people of the Great Old Ones, so they could prevent anybody from doing what Jenny and Owen in fact did. Still, I don't doubt that at least among the negation squads, payback was on the agenda.

[(Anonymous)]

Now I have something to look forward to about the 26th or so! Plus I have Christmas and Birthday presents for my niece for several years to come.

[ecosophia]

Glad to hear it!

The Power of Story

[(Anonymous)]

JMG,

As I have just finished preordering, I want to add my own note of thanks for the entire WoH series and to share a story.

For various reasons I had a 17 year-old young man staying with me this past week. He has a form of dyslexia that he has worked very hard to overcome, but still had a mental block against reading since it held such painful associations in his mind. But being extremely intelligent, very curious about the world, and wanting to figure out how to make a difference in the slowly declining circumstances he sees around him, part of him knew that reading would become increasingly important as he looks forward to finishing high school and going on to whatever lies beyond.

I had an intuition that the WoH series would speak to him, so I gave him a copy of Innsmouth to read while I was working on other things. It seemed a bit of a strange choice since it starts a bit slowly if you are looking for a way to catch the attention of a teenager who plays video games and uses social media. But for some reason it just seemed right.

By 20 pages in he was fully engaged with the story and asking questions. He finished the whole book in three days, pulling out all kinds of details and wanted to talk about what they implied about the world and how it really worked.

I sent him home earlier today with a copy of Kingsport under his arm, and I suspect he will have conquered that fairly soon as well. (He guessed that Jenny would be the main character before I told him)

He had a lot of other questions about the decline of industrial civilization, and had to spend some time processing the discussions we had surrounding the likely direction of the near future. Since he was already resonating with your writing, I pulled out the Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush post from ADR at one point, and that became an excellent jumping-off point for further thoughts and explorations on the theme.

So another big thanks for helping a 17 year-old young man start to get past his fear of reading and for allowing him to feel proud of himself for the accomplishment of finishing his first novel.

If you have a word or two you would like me to forward to him, I would be happy to do so. He is one of the upcoming generation who are looking in the face of what is coming and asking how to make a difference, even if a small one.

--Ailin

Re: The Power of Story

[ecosophia]

I'm delighted to hear this -- and delighted to hear that the young man was able to overcome the painful experiences of his past and enjoy the novel. In a very real sense, these stories were written for people like him. So much fantasy these days is about people who are special and super-talented, and leap from one improbable feat to another; that bores me. I wanted to write about ordinary people who've been through the kind of rough experiences that so many of us have had -- Owen's being orphaned, his time in foster families, and his tour of duty in the Army are examples -- and who discover that the world is bigger and older and far more magical than they believed...and then go on to discover that with hard work they can become bigger and older and far more magical, too.

That's an experience open to all of us; I chose the genre of fantasy as a way to talk about it, but such things also happen in the real world. (They happened to me, for example -- I certainly never thought, when I was growing up in suburban Seattle and dealing with undiagnosed Aspergers syndrome, that I would end up as the Grand Archdruid of a Druid order!) To my mind, what the world needs most of all right now is people who are willing to rise to that kind of challenge and discover the potentials for greatness that each of us has inside ourselves.

[(Anonymous)]

Good to hear about the promotional deal! I still need to finish the main series.
-Cliff

[ecosophia]

I'll be posting something about it in a few days.

[grandswamperman]

So we’ve had seven fantasies with tentacles, two with pseudopods, one will gill slits...I don’t suppose this one will be subtitled “A Fantasy with Scales”?

[ecosophia]

Nope. It's "A Fantasy with Shifting Shapes." Still, good guess!

[jeffinwa]

Wonderful! Icing on the cake. This series has been the greatest fun. One of the few tales that only get better upon re-reading; rather than "oh yeah, I remember this part" it's "where did that come from?"; like an onion that gets larger as you peel it.

Thanks for sharing your indulgence in creating an entire universe!

[ecosophia]

You're welcome and thank you! I'm delighted that my readers are finding the books as fun to read as they were to write.

Final thoughts

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sorry to see the Haliverse close down; it was rich and strange and yet so real the temptation to worship the Great Old Ones is appealing, though, no, no fictional deities, thanks. I will certainly order both the compendium and the cookbook.

I will also order the Cunning Man's Handbook if it's reasonably priced (semi-fixed income.)

Your statements about and strictures on Wicca have given me a lot of problems to chew over, many of them unpleasant. To begin with, that "..a goddess that was cobbled together from bits & pieces..." but that can wait for Magic Monday. So - what were these witches really doing, and their British predecessors, that I needed to know. Nobody ever said, if they even knew. So - back to another book.

[mo_drui_mac_de]

I can’t wait! I finally got around to reading Innsmouth* and am looking forward to continuing the tentacular adventure. A large portion of my pleasure reading gets done via audiobook while performing menial chores, so the new audio release of Innsmouth was my cue to begin.

*As it happens, I had also just finished my first reading of That Hideous Strength, shortly beforehand, and so I was bouncing in my seat with excitement by Chapter 2 at the tribute.

[ecosophia]

Delighted to hear it -- and yes, the nod to Lewis was of course very deliberate. You'll have to wait until the seventh book to find out how deliberate... ;-)