CASEFILES OF THE ROYAL OCCULTIST: MONMOUTH'S GIANTS BY JOSH REYNOLDS

Horror is the literature of anxiety, which might explain its resurgence over the past two decades.  These are anxious times.  The old ideological differences that in years past lay muffled beneath layers of common courtesy and other social graces now scream at family gatherings, on social media, and during dinner parties.  In horror parlance, something is bursting forth, and the epicenter of the disaster is the home, the intimate gathering.  Ari Aster’s films Hereditary and Midsommar or Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us reached large audiences by peeling back those layers of strained politeness and showing us the monsters that lurk behind familiar faces and places.  Recent literary fiction, such as Simon Jacobs’s Palaces and Jayaprakash Satyamurthy’s Strength of Water, tactfully deploy horror tropes in service to narratives of political dissolution, expanding the scope of the genre beyond the merely personal.  Our moment of social fissure demands such new artistic expressions.  In short, we all have that sinking feeling, and horror writers have risen to the occasion.  Perhaps this is why Joshua Reynolds’s new collection, Casefiles of the Royal Occultist: Volume 1, Monmouth’s Giants, feels a little quaint. 
 
Casefiles is foremost an account of one character, the titular royal occultist Charles St. Cyprian, in thirteen stories that span a variety of places and times.  There are a great many monsters, dispatched neatly, and a number of secondary characters that come and go like the guest stars of a television series.  Reynolds is at his best when he abandons his attempts at stylistic mimicry, notably of Wodehouse and Lovecraft, and inhabits his own voice and vision.  While I enjoyed the book for the brief diversion it afforded, it did little to change my mind about the basic conceptual problem I see with the occult detective genre.
 
In the opening story, “Monmouth’s Giants”, we meet St. Cyprian as a young playboy called Sippy.  He shares the spotlight with Thomas Carnacki, from whom he will eventually inherit the title of Royal Occultist.  Their relationship isn’t quite established here, except to hint at the mentorship to come.  The monsters they drive back into the shadows are Gog and Magog, variously described as “formless, voiceless, but massive”, “a vast, indistinct shape”, a couple of “hand-shapes”, and a shape with hell-lanterns for eyes.  I don’t mean to isolate these descriptors in order to criticize Reynolds, because the ambiguous, the amorphous, and the obscure can indeed be terrifying.  But most of us, whether consciously or subconsciously, find ambiguity horrifying not when it appears in the descriptions of things but rather when it arises in their intentions.  This is the trick Edgar Allan Poe used to excellent effect in his better stories, such as “Ligeia” and “Berenice.”  In Reynolds’s story, Gog and Magog are fairly cut and dry monsters, inhuman things that want to harm a pair of decent humans.  In what was probably a narrative miscalculation, all of the bystanders are cleared away from the scene before the action starts, leaving only the two characters we know will survive the encounter.  From the reader’s standpoint, this removes any real stakes from the ensuing confrontation. 
 
By contrast, “The Charnel Hounds” showcases Reynolds’s skillfulness as a writer.  St. Cyprian and Carnacki work the trenches of World War I, but it isn’t long before Reynolds lets on that the war isn’t the main characters’ immediate concern.  The setting is nicely established with attention to particular architectural details, and this in turn heightens the sense of a packed and pent space.  Even when briefly showing us the world beyond the trenches, his diction is exquisitely oppressive.
 
There had been a village where the trench now lay.  Now it was as dead as every other village between Mons and the Somme, blasted, burned and bayonetted into the mud by two opposing juggernauts (29).
 
By the time the ghouls arrive to feast on a pile of dead soldiers stacked cleverly if disrespectfully where the trench dead-ends, the tension is sufficiently established to carry the reader’s attention.  Secondary characters are maimed, dismembered, and killed.  Carnacki and St. Cyprian struggle and suffer emotionally, if not physically.  If there is a misstep here it has to be the pace of the action.  The killing eases only in the final three or four paragraphs, when we see Carnacki execute a ghoul in what feels like a slow motion cinematic sequence.  Only in that scene do we glimpse a character’s actions together with his subjective experience of killing, and whilst the situation certainly doesn’t call for psychological depth it is nonetheless helpful to finally witness the humanity of a character amid the hurly-burly.
 
“The Unwrapping Party” stands out as the first story in the collection written fully in Reynolds’s own voice.  Gone is the less-than-successful experiment in Wodehousian dialogue, and his story is better off for it.  St. Cyprian now holds the title of Royal Occultist and has his own apprentice, the young, wisecracking Ebe Gallowglass.  In crafting Gallowglass, Reynolds has leaned a bit too much on cliché, but by singing a familiar tune or two the relationship between master and apprentice is quickly and effectively established early on.  We get hints throughout of previous adventures featuring the pair, and this suggestiveness adds to the sense of a larger story.  The setting is the London upper crust of the 1920s, replete with esoteric orders of the idle rich.  In setting the scene, Reynolds indulges the romance of the British upper class, which doesn’t travel well across the pond.  This doesn’t rule out an American readership for the story, but it may indicate that British readers will be on firmer ground here.  If readers of whatever stripe find themselves in a Sherlockian mood, this could make for a fun read.  The monster of the piece is Nephren-Ka, the “Black Pharaoh.”  The descriptions of monstrosity are effective, and Reynolds slows the action enough to bring the Black Pharaoh across as genuinely menacing.  There is a fair bit of Lovecraftian floridness to either blink at or be impressed by, depending on the disposition of the reader.  For example: “Where the pharaoh’s soul had once been there was now only a coruscating typhoon of cosmic blasphemy.”  I would like to give fair warning to the author that I fully intend on using “a coruscating typhoon of cosmic blasphemy” to describe the current American President at some point on Twitter.
 
I should confess that I’m new to Joshua Reynolds’s work.  This is only to say that I encountered his collection Casefiles of the Royal Occultist: Volume 1, Monmouth’s Giants with fresh eyes and more than a little eagerness to see how his writing stacked up to other occult detective stories.  The short answer is: well enough, indeed.  The charge of quaintness is not meant as an indictment of the writing, but it is perhaps the fate of the occult detective genre as a whole.  Fictional detectives are modern priests, as critics wiser than I have already pointed out.  They use special knowledge and a special skill set to seek out and rid the world of evil, and in so doing purge the community of what ails it.  They bare the guilt of what they witness so that the rest of us can go on in a state of grace.  I’m not sure this understanding of monstrosity, or the whole fictive apparatus of external evils fought by special men, has much to say to us today.  We in the West currently inhabit an introspective moment, looking to ourselves, our families, and our friends for complicity in a variety of evils that haunt the structure of our social lives. 
 
If a reader is looking for a quick diversion into a world-that-was, then they could do no better than to spend an hour or two perusing Reynolds’s competently written tales of the Royal Occultist.  Perhaps, when all is said and done, a fun diversion is the best we can hope for.  I hope it isn’t.

​4 OUT OF 5 

CASEFILES OF THE ROYAL OCCULTIST: MONMOUTH'S GIANTS BY JOSH REYNOLDS  

Investigating, Organizing, and Occasionally Suppressing that Which Man Was Not Meant to Know!

Jazz Age Britain is rife with the impossible.

Fashionable unwrapping parties awaken the dead. Ghouls stalk the Underground. Krampus steals the sinful. Famous magicians are kidnapped by shadows.

Only the Royal Occultist can set these right.

Charles St. Cyprian and his assistant, Ebe Gallowglass, defend the British Empire against sinister secret societies, eldritch occurrences, and foul creatures of myth and legend. If there are satyrs running amok in Somerset, or werewolves prowling Wolverhampton, the daring due will be there to see them off.

Casefiles of the Royal Occultist: Monmouth's Giants is the first of several volumes collecting all of Josh Reynolds' Royal Occultist stories, including an all-new, never before published novelette, "Fane of the Black Queen."

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