For fans of legendary pulp author H. P. Lovecraft, there is nothing bigger than the annual Providence-based convention the Summer Tentacular. Horror writer Colleen Danzig doesn’t know what to expect when she arrives, but is unsettled to find that among the hob-knobbing between scholars and literary critics are a group of real freaks: book collectors looking for volumes bound in human skin, and true believers claiming the power to summon the Elder God Cthulhu, one of their idol’s most horrific fictional creations, before the weekend is out.

Colleen’s trip spirals into a nightmare when her roommate for the weekend, an obnoxious novelist known as Panossian, turns up dead, his face neatly removed. What’s more unsettling is that, in the aftermath of the murder, there is little concern among the convention goers. The Summer Tentacular continues uninterrupted, except by a few bumbling police.

Everyone at the convention is a possible suspect, but only Colleen seems to show any interest in solving the murder. So she delves deep into the darkness, where occult truths have been lurking since the beginning of time. A darkness where Panossian is waiting, spending a lot of time thinking about Colleen, narrating a new Lovecraftian tale that could very well spell her doom.

I AM PROVIDENCE is a book that I feel would really appeal to Lovecraft fans. I can imagine that this book would be a bit confusing to people with not much knowledge about Lovecraft's books. You do get information about Lovecraft, the man, and his books in the story. Especially about the Elder God Cthulhu, who will bring the end to humanity when summoned. And, yes there are those in the book that wants that.

My original The Last Weekend audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

The Last Weekend, by Nick Mamatas, is billed as a novel of “zombies, booze, and power tools,” which may be the truthiest bit of truth in advertising that ever was. This sucker is chock full of all three, and each are at the core of Billy Kostopolos’s world and, to a degree, his identity.

The Last Weekend is told in first-person, so we get to know Billy pretty well (whether we like it or not). Billy is a haughty writer and alcoholic who hides his many insecurities behind choice phrases he has memorized from literature, lobbing out quotes from Shakespeare and Charles Bukowski in an effort to impress and/or alienate those around him. To put it simply, Billy’s pretty much a jackass. After being scorned by his girlfriend, he’s fled west to San Francisco without much in the way of advanced planning beyond drinking himself to death. He just so happens to wake up hungover one morning in the midst of the zombie apocalypse and decides to become a particular brand of city employee known as a driller. With supplies short, drillers are equipped with, naturally enough, power drills to destroy the brains of the infected. Even though he’s mostly waiting to die, Billy is still a writer first-and-foremost, and he chases experiences in order to give his words weight, and there’s not much weightier in the world anymore than running a drill bit through some old lady’s brain pan.

Like all really good zombie stories, this book is not about the zombies per se. True, the zombies provide plenty of impetus for action and reaction, but they’re largely set dressing to gussy up the plot. The real story here is Billy and the society he lives in, as people are forced to reconnect and survive in a post-apocalyptic world of sorts (America, we learn early on, is the only country affected by this plague of the undead). Mamatas has lots to say about the nature and struggles of being a writer, as well as alcoholism and depression. This all gets wrapped up in a dark sheen of cynical, black humor, occasional bouts of wicked violence, and an interesting detour through the history of the 49ers gold rush, SanFran cemeteries and burial rites.

Narrator Kevin T. Collins delivers a terrific performance with his narration, hitting all the right alternating beats of insecure and sanctimonious to bring Billy to life. Billy may not always be the ideal protagonist to spend eight hours with, but Collins makes this an easily enjoyable listen and serves Mamatas’s material quite well. The production quality is top-notch, and the audio is clean.

The Last Weekend is an easy book to recommend for horror fans looking for a more literary ride through zombie-town, or maybe just for those who thought Leaving Las Vegas needed a good dose of the undead and power tools. I suspect, though, that if there are any other authors giving this a listen, some of the material may hit uncomfortably close. Now, if you’ll excuse me, after having spent a few days in the company of one Billy Kostopolos, I think I need a drink.

[Audiobook provided for review by the audiobookreviewer.com]

It all starts with a wasps' nest in Raymond's mother's basement. The wasps are Hymenoepimescis sp., which usually reproduces by attacking the Plesiometa argyra spider and laying its eggs within the spider's abdomen. As the larvae feed off the spider, they change its behavior, compelling it to create a web that can allow them to finish their development. When the spider is done with its work, the larvae kill it. (The spider and wasp species are real – nature is freaky and horrifying.)

Hymenoepimescis sp. doesn't usually build a nest or use humans as its hosts, but in this case it was affected by the unusually high radon levels in Raymond's mother's basement. Julia, Raymond's wife, is attacked by one of these wasps and unknowingly has its eggs injected into her. Over the course of the next few months, the larvae gradually affect her behavior in various ways, until one day she decides to leave Raymond. From that point on, she proceeds to become famous, carrying out an assassination and inspiring a nameless political movement which has no apparent goal. What neither she nor Raymond realizes is that they are both pawns in an ancient war between Hymenoepimescis sp. and Plesiometa argyra.

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. Part of the problem was that “war” was maybe too strong of a word for what was going on between the spiders and the wasps. Although the spiders were an intelligent collective and were, in fact, the book's narrator, the wasps were just doing their thing. When their hosts were spiders, “their thing” meant inspiring behaviors that would allow their larvae to survive and become adult wasps. They weren't intelligent and hadn't evolved to grow inside and control human hosts, so their effect on humans was more aimless and chaotic. The end result left me wondering what the point was supposed to be, and the story became more tedious than interesting.

I did enjoy the bulk of this book, though. I was drawn in by Julia's erratic behavior. I wanted to know what she'd do next and what sorts of actions she'd inspire (although she was the only one being directly affected by the wasps, she seemed to inspire changes in everyone around her, apparently without even meaning to). Raymond watched her antics on the news and desperately tried to make some sense of it all, unable to truly move on.

The main reason why I decided to read this book was because of the intelligent spiders. I liked that the story was told from their collective point of view, both as individual spiders trying to keep track of the movements of the various characters and as spider-controlled masses of webbing designed to look like “men of indeterminate ethnicity.” There were moments when I felt that the author occasionally slipped up, including details that Raymond would have known (about his own experiences and feelings, for example) that the spiders probably wouldn't have. Still, it was interesting, and I liked their very alien perspective on how they should behave and what sorts of things humans might feel comfortable with and enjoy. I wish there had been more of that.

The world-building didn't really work for me. I could deal with the way the wasps mutated to be able to inject their eggs into Julia (honestly, it wasn't much different than accepting that radiation could create superheroes), and the author did eventually (a bit later than I'd have liked) provide some of the history of the spiders' influence on humans. However, there were lots of things I wanted to know more about, and instead I got vagueness or absolutely nothing. I'm still wondering how a giant mass of spiders could create a believably human-looking being, especially since the spiders didn't always seem to be confident about their ability to successfully communicate like humans or create natural human facial expressions. And why weren't they more confident about their mimicry, considering how long they'd existed alongside humans?

I also had issues with the characters. Just about every female character in the book behaved, at one time or another, like she was Julia under the influence of wasps. It didn't seem like they were consistently themselves. And the thing was, I'd probably have been able to put up with that, and my issues with the world-building, if it had all amounted to something.

I really liked the premise and the unusual POV. I just wish the finale had been as good as the buildup.

Additional Comments:

I counted at least six typos or instances of missing words. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it was more than I expected in a work this short, and the errors were really noticeable.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Finished!

Given a choice between secret spider overlords, who reprogram troublesome human beings and regularly control the course of human history, and anarchist parasitic wasps, I'd probably choose the spiders.

"He wasn't a person," Raymond said, "He was a wax dummy. God knows what."

 

"He was a sentient being," Julia said. "What's the definition of human: 'Not full of intelligent spiders'?"

 

Raymond nodded emphatically. "Yes, well. Yeah. Pretty much by the definition of the word human, spiders in a man suit are disqualified. Christ, Julia. What the hell? What the holy blue fuck is coming out of your mouth?"

Raymond's not being very understanding, but I suppose he's had a very stressful past few hours.

Assuming I'm not too exhausted by the end of the workday, I might be able to finish this today. It's been an interesting read, but I have some issues with the world-building. For one thing, if the wasps are only in Julia, how is it that they're seemingly able to influence other peoples' behaviors?