"Stirred, and fed, and mocked the light..."
“Fat Face” (1987) by Michael Shea
Among his many fine stories and novels in the fantasy and SF veins, Shea wrote several unalloyed classics of cosmic horror. The reason for such status: his settings and characters are so perfectly realized.
It's hard to achieve transference of sympathy with narrators in fiction by Lovecraft and Ligotti – and I do not mean this as criticism in a negative sense. But the horrors endured by Shea characters all take place in a recognizable world context we still live in, facilitating the reader to conclude, to coin a phrase: "If I'm not careful, something like this could happen to me.”
....but the night was an odd one. Not much was happening in town, and everybody seemed to have action lined up in Oxnard or Encino or some other bizarre place. A few stayed to work the home grounds, but they caught a subdued air from the place’s emptiness at a still-young hour. Patti took a couple more Valium and tried to seem like she was peacefully resting in a lobby chair. To fight her stirrings of unease, she took up the paperback that was among the gifts given her—she hadn’t even noticed by whom. It had a horrible face on the cover and was entitled "At the Mountains of Madness."
If she had not felt the need for some potent distraction, some weighty ballast for her listing spirit, she would never have pieced out the Ciceronian rhythms of the narrative’s style. But when, with frightened tenacity, she had waded several pages into the tale, the riverine prose, suddenly limpid, snatched her and bore her upon its flowing clarity. The Valium seemed to perfect her uncanny concentration, and where her vocabulary failed her, she made smooth leaps of inference and always landed square on the necessary meaning.
And so for hours in the slowly emptying lobby that looked out upon the slowly emptying intersection, she wound through the icy territories of the impossible and down into the gelid nethermost cellars of all World and Time, where stupendous aeons lay in pictured shards, and massive sentient forms still stirred, and fed, and mocked the light....
“Fat Face” (1987) by Michael Shea
The Year's Best Horror Stories XVI (1988)
