Move Under Ground [Hardcover]

Nick Mamatas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2004

The year is nineteen-sixty-something, and after endless millennia of watery sleep, the stars are finally right. Old R'lyeh rises out of the Pacific, ready to cast its damned shadow over the primitive human world. The first to see its peaks: an alcoholic, paranoid, and frightened Jack Kerouac, who had been drinking off a nervous breakdown up in Big Sur. Now Jack must get back on the road to find Neal Cassady, the holy fool whose rambling letters hint of a world brought to its knees in worship of the Elder God Cthulhu. Together with pistol-packin' junkie William S. Burroughs, Jack and Neal make their way across the continent to face down the murderous Lovecraftian cult that has spread its darkness to the heart of the American Dream. But is Neal along for the ride to help save the world, or does he want to destroy it just so that he'll have an ending for his book?

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The American dream reveals itself to be a Lovecraftian nightmare in Mamatas's audacious first novel, set in the early 1960s, which goes on the road with Kerouac, Cassaday and Cthulhu. Jack Kerouac is in California when he receives cryptic letters from soulmate and muse Neal Cassaday, whose hallucinatory ramblings evoke "the Dark Dreamer" (aka Cthulhu), the Lovecraftian deity of cosmic entropy whom Jack blames for the era's stultifying forces of conformity, commercialism and complacency. After Jack rescues Neal from his new life as a gas station owner in Nevada, the two reverse the steps of their earlier westward trek, fighting skirmishes with "the Cult of Utter Normalcy" that serves the god, en route to a climactic showdown in New York City. The book has no more plot than Kerouac's On the Road, but the author makes Jack and Neal's surreal adventures in middle America seem the perfect expression of Lovecraft's mind-blasting horrors. He gives quaint cameos to Allen Ginsburg as a sewer-trolling prophet and William S. Burroughs as a god-swatting exterminator extraordinaire. He also manages a credible pastiche of Kerouac's visionary prose, as in this description of Manhattan: "The heart of the world, concrete and fleshy, green money pouring in and out from every corner of earth through arteries of commerce and culture, all choked up and poisoned with the madness of dead gods' dreams." Though Lovecraft reduxes are common in horror, few show the wit and energy of this original effort.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In this tour de force, which is Mamatas' first novel, the Beats meet the elder gods of H. P. Lovecraft, and a harrowing time is had by all. It's the early sixties, and Jack Kerouac is hiding from his public in Big Sur, enjoying the company of a Hindu deity in the form of a redhead he calls Marie and waiting for word from Neal Cassady, his and many another Beat's charismatic hero. Word he gets, including some babbling on about the Old Ones rising out of the Pacific and sweeping across America. That sets Jack off in search of Neal and, with Neal and eventually Bill Burroughs, on a cross-country jaunt just ahead, or behind, the advancing dark tide of the Old Ones. Destination: Mannahatta, where the since-separated Jack and Neal have a showdown--with each other! Mamatas virtuosically parodies Kerouac's pell-mell On the Road style, but Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Exterminator, minus the outre sex, are more obvious templates for this wild, weird, woolly romp. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Night Shade Books (May 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1892389924
• ISBN-13: 978-1892389923
• Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Nick Mamatas. Author of two novels; Move Under Ground (Night Shade 2004, Prime 2006) and Under My Roof (Soft Skull Press, 2007), two collections; 3000MPH In Every Direction At Once (Prime 2003) and You Might Sleep... (Prime 2009), and the novella Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001).

He is also the editor of the anthologies The Urban Bizarre (Prime 2003), Phantom #0 (Prime 2005), Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Jay Lake, Lethe 2008), and Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow, Tor 2010).

Nick also co-edited the magazine Clarkesworld for two years, which was nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. Stories from Clarkesworld have been collected in a pair of anthologies: Realms and Realms 2 (Wyrm Publishing 2008 and 2009).

Nick's own short stories have appeared in literary journals such as Mississippi Review online, subTERRAIN, and Per Contra, slicks including Razor and Spex, and fantasy and horror magazines and anthologies including New Dark Voices 2, Poe's Lighthouse, ChiZine, and Lovecraft Unbound.

His fiction has been nominated for the Bram Stoker awards three times, the International Horror Guild Award, and Germany's Kurd-Laßwitz Preis. His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, The Smart Set, H+, Clamor, In These Times, various anthologies. With Kap Su Seol he translated and edited the first English edition of a firsthand account of South Korea's Kwangju massacre--Kwangju Diary (UCLA Asian Pacific, 1999).

Nick now lives in the California Bay Area, where he is editor of tradebooks for VIZ Media and edits both Japanese science fiction novels in translation and books associated with Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ftagn!, July 10, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Move Under Ground (Hardcover)

I have several complaints about this book.

First, its dimensions are entirely Euclidean. The thing doesn't fit on any of my bookshelves. I've ordered my gibbering servants to get me one from Ikea, but I'm having a heck of a time putting it together.

Second, I don't like the fact that I'm made into a kind of allegory for conformity and the alienating effects of late capitalism on the middle class. I've always thought of myself as either an old hippie or, perhaps, an ancien regime man of leisure. Think about it -- all I do is sleep and dream.

That said, Mamatas effortlessly nails Kerouac's style without limiting himself -- which is great fun. There's eldritch kung-fu a-plenty, and horrible, unforgettable passages that will blast you out of complacency with their blasphemous, marxist terror.

I wish I could write a book but my giant hands crush typewriters.

-Cth.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars lol premise., January 13, 2008

By 

R. Seagraves "Das Kainenchen" (Durham, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Move Under Ground (Paperback)

Normally, this is the sort of book I would avoid with a "you gotta be kidding me," snort. The premise-- Jack Kerouac meeting the Lovecraftian Deep Beasties-- sounds like a bad joke, a juvenile wankfest in the land of the lame. And that would have been the end of it.

It's rare for me to find myself slapped in the face with "don't judge a book by it's cover," but this is profoundly one of those times. "Move Under Ground" makes what could seriously have been a goofy, mawkish premise and makes it gorgeous, rich and interesting. The writing is delightful and just plain fun to read. And then if you want to get even more high-falutin', the language is exquisite and works, and makes the whole idea about as awesome in age as one would have thought it could be in high school. And it is truly and utterly awesome. Mamatas is to be commended not only for creating a madly enjoyable read, but for compelling me to actually write a review for it as well. If the idea turns you off at first, take a moment, think again, and seriously, give it a go. You won't be disappointed.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wow., April 12, 2005

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Move Under Ground (Hardcover)

Nick Mamatas, Move under Ground (Night Shade Books, 2004)

Nick Mamatas does more than fulfill the promise of his first novella, Northern Gothic, in his debut novel. In fact, he's more than fulfilled the promise of any five young new writers. No matter how you end up feeling about the book itself, you just have to admire the guy's hubris at attempting to take two subgenres of fiction that passed the cliché stage decades ago and add in the exceptionally risky practice of incorporating historical characters into fiction. That the result is at all readable would have been a triumph. That it's actually good is nothing short of miraculous.

Jack Kerouac is recovering from a nervous breakdown in Big Sur when he gets a strong urge to go find Neal Cassady, who (if you'll remember from the end of On the Road) ditched him in Mexico. Knowing Cassady will likely be in San Francisco, Kerouac sets out, and soon stumbles upon a sight neither he, nor anyone reading the opening pages of this book who's somehow managed to miss all the synopses, expected to see: R'lyeh, no longer sleeping, rising from the waves. Yes, folks, the Great Old Ones are back, and Jack Kerouac and his longtime travelling companion have to save the world. However, along the way Kerouac realizes that not only is Neal acting strangely-- does he want to save the world, or is he just looking for the ending of his next novel?-- but that the Earth is only a minuscule part of the bigger stakes of a war between Cthulhu and Azathoth...

I mean, come on. You can't read that synopsis and not tell me it's not a recipe for absolute disaster. But Mamatas does things of beauty with both Beat and Lovecraftian literature, spicing the tale with subtle (and not-so-subtle) references to works in both, but keeping it on such a level that the reader doesn't need to have read extensively in either genre to get something out of this book. You probably don't even have to know who Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady are; they're just two guys driving across the country trying to save the universe from descending into utter chaos.

Come to think of it, that sounds rather like the plot for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, but believe it-- Nick Mamatas can write rings around Kevin Smith. ****