October’s a difficult month to quantify. When it rolls around I get in the mood for certain books and movies, but I like to see and read new things. I check lists to see what others recommend for what I hope is a similar mood. A book that kept coming up was Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October. Published thirty years ago, it’s not exactly new, but it was new to me. It’s a humorous story, told by Snuff, a dog. But not just any dog—he’s a player in a game that takes place when the full moon lines up with Halloween. There’ll be spoilers hereafter. The game involves two sides deciding the fate of the world, and each has the usual monsters lined up. Dracula, the wolf man, Frankenstein’s monster and others are involved. One side tries to awaken Lovecraft’s Old Gods and destroy the world while the other side tries to stop them.
Each chapter is a day in October and what the game is is only slowly revealed. The antagonist for all of this is really the parson. It turns out that he’s a minister for the Old Gods’ true believers. Various monsters or players are killed and Sherlock Holmes is hanging about, trying to solve the mystery. The story’s really a mash-up of several characters from yesteryear. It’s not scary, nor is it particularly moody. It’s a good example, however, of how religion and horror, even if it’s comedy horror, work together. The Old Gods are an existential threat and require clergy to perform the correct rituals. Roger Zelazny was fond of using characters from existing mythologies in telling sci-fi-ish stories, and this fits that writing mode.
This is an enjoyable story, but my October mood isn’t only a monster one. Set in England, A Night in the Lonesome October doesn’t really have the leaves, pumpkins, and ghosts of my melancholy season. Also, the humorous aspect is fine, but acts as a distraction from what I generally seek. This is a magical time in northern climes. Of course, I read a good deal of this while traveling to and from South Carolina, so getting the right mood was tricky when it’s beach weather and the flowers are still in bloom. October means different things to different people, I know. I’m still looking for the novel that manages to encapsulate my experience of it. There’s something difficult to quantify about it, and that’s perhaps what I need to define.
