Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Shambling Towards Hiroshima

by James Morrow
Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Shambling Towards Hiroshima

by James Morrow

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Overview

Sturgeon Award winner
Nebula and Hugo Award nominee

It is the early summer of 1945, and war reigns in the Pacific Rim with no end in sight. Back in the States, Hollywood B-movie star Syms Thorley lives in a very different world, starring as the Frankenstein-like Corpuscula and Kha-Ton-Ra, the living mummy. But the U.S. Navy has a new role waiting for Thorley, the role of a lifetime that he could never have imagined.

The top secret Knickerbocker Project is putting the finishing touches on the ultimate biological weapon: a breed of gigantic, fire-breathing, mutant iguanas engineered to stomp and burn cities on the Japanese mainland. The Navy calls upon Thorley to don a rubber suit and become the merciless Gorgantis and to star in a live drama that simulates the destruction of a miniature Japanese metropolis. If the demonstration succeeds, the Japanese will surrender, and many thousands of lives will be spared; if it fails, the horrible mutant lizards will be unleashed. One thing is certain: Syms Thorley must now give the most terrifyingly convincing performance of his life.

In the dual traditions of Godzilla as a playful monster and a symbol of the dawn of the nuclear era, Shambling Towards Hiroshima unexpectedly blends the destruction of World War II with the halcyon pleasure of monster movies.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781892391841
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Publication date: 02/01/2009
Pages: 170
Sales rank: 932,563
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

About The Author
James Morrow: James Morrow is the author of the World Fantasy Award-winning Towing Jehovah and the New York Times Notable Book Blameless in Abaddon. His recent novels include The Last Witchfinder, hailed by the Washington Post as “literary magic,” and The Philosopher’s Apprentice, which received a rave review from Entertainment Weekly. He is a master of the satiric and the surreal, a writer who has enjoyed comparison with Twain, Vonnegut, and Updike. Morrow lives in State College, Pennsylvania.

Read an Excerpt

Shambling Towards Hiroshima


By James Morrow

Tachyon Publications

Copyright © 2009 James Morrow
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-892391-84-1


CHAPTER 1

WHETHER THIS MEMOIR will turn out to be the world's longest suicide note, or instead the means by which I might elude the abyss, only time can tell: a precise interval of time, in fact, the twenty-five hours that stretch between the present moment, Sunday, October 28, 1984, 11:06 A.M., and my presumed departure tomorrow on the noon shuttle to the airport. Right now the other route by which I may exit this sterile Baltimore hotel — the balcony — is the more alluring. I need merely cross the room, slide back the glass door, step onto the terrace, and avail myself of the hundred-foot drop to the parking lot.

Appearances are deceiving. Just because you're reading my story, that doesn't mean I lost my nerve and took the shuttle bus. The proper inference may simply be that I slipped the manuscript into an envelope festooned with stamps and addressed to the Rachel Bishop Literary Agency in New York, then left the package outside my door along with a note asking the hotel management to pop it in the nearest mailbox. Are you reading this, Rachel? I love you, sweetheart. You're the greatest agent a has-been ever had. Assuming you find somebody who can decipher my handwriting, feel free to transcribe these pages, give them a title — The Day of the Lizard, perhaps, or Peasants with Torches, or Shambling Towards Hiroshima — and sell the thing to Doubleday for a big, fat advance, collecting your well-earned ten percent. The balance should go to Darlene. Yes, Rachel, I believe you've finally gotten a bestseller out of me, and it arrives bearing the ultimate seal of authenticity, the author's notorious leap into oblivion, at once swan dive and swan song. True, the NSA may attempt to block publication, but when they go to make their case, the judge will laugh them out of court, especially when he hears about the giant fire-breathing bipedal iguanas.

To tell you the truth, Rachel, I've been dropping hints about the Knickerbocker Project behemoths for over four years now, mostly to my devotees — that is, to admirers of KhaTon-Ra the living mummy, Corpuscula the alchemical creature, and Gorgantis, King of the Lizards. The kids aren't interested. Instead they want to know how many yards of rotting gauze I wore in Curse of Kha-Ton-Ra. (One hundred fifty, as a matter of fact.) Did I play both roles in Corpuscula Meets the Doppelgänger? (Of course I did, O ye of little fanaticism.) Did I really write the script for Gorgantis the Invincible under the pseudonym Akira Fukiji? (Not only that, I wrote Gorgantis Unchained as Kihachi Ifukabe and Gorgantis vs. Octopocalypse as Minoru Natsuke.) By now the fans realize that, sooner or later, I'll manage to bring up my obsession with Überweapons — biological, atomic, and otherwise. They tolerate this tic of mine, but barely. History holds no fascination for them. The politics of atrocity bores them silly.

A Martian would be within his rights to ask why I'm in such low spirits this morning. After all, last night the Wonderama Fantasy Film Convention presented me with a major award, the Raydo, a name meant to evoke not only the rhedosaurus, that ersatz dinosaur featured in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but also the two Rays without whom the movie wouldn't exist — Bradbury, author of the original story, and Harryhausen, stopmotion animator extraordinaire. Were my hypothetical Martian to drop by Room 2014 right now, I would explain that on our planet winning a pewter trophy doesn't feel nearly as good as bottomless despair feels bad.

In my view it's boorish to complain about banquet food, so let me go on record as saying that the chicken croquettes and bean salad at the Wonderama Awards dinner were scrumptious. Predictably enough, everybody squirmed during my acceptance speech — as usual, I railed against the thermonuclear arsenals into whose maw our civilization may soon disappear — and the applause was understandably tepid. Feeling at once piqued and chagrined, I slipped away before the next event, a raffle for a credible facsimile of my Gorgantis suit, which the Wonderama staff evidently got for a steal after the National Science Fiction Museum in Denver went bust.

My Raydo statuette is a rather handsome artifact, featuring not only a skillful reproduction of the rhedosaurus in all his dorsal-plated glory, but also the Maine lighthouse he destroys halfway through the picture. The inscription is eloquent and contains only one error. Syms K. Thorley, Lifetime Achievement Award, Baltimore Imagi-Movies Society, 1984. My made-up middle initial is J. Where did they get that K? I hope they weren't thinking of my eternal nemesis, the egregious Siegfried K. Dagover. That would be the unkindest typo of all.

Today my Raydo will function as a paperweight, securing each successive page after I've torn it, littered with my scribblings, from the legal pad. I'm equipped with thirty such virgin tablets, and I've laid in other essentials, too. A box of Bic pens, a carton of filter-tipped Camels, a jar of Maxwell House instant coffee with a submersible heating coil, two pastrami sandwiches from room service, a liter of amontillado in a novelty cut-glass decanter. This is Edgar Allan Poe's city, after all, and I've decided to pay him homage. Pardon me while I take a few sips of sherry — yes, it's decadent to drink before noon, but Poe's hovering shade expects me to follow protocol — and then I'll begin my tale.


At the moment I'm writing from the slough of despond, but my mood was exultant and my career in full flower when the two FBI agents showed up on the Monogram Pictures sound stage to assess the caliber of my patriotism. We'd just finished a productive morning's shoot on Revenge of Corpuscula for dear old Sam Katzman and his noble little studio, William Beaudine directing, Mack Stengler lensing, Dave Milton providing his usual bricks-without-straw décor. The screenplay credit would go to Darlene, though I contributed six good lines and two nifty plot twists during a furious forty-eight-hour rewrite session in our Santa Monica bungalow. Darlene and I had been shacking up ever since falling head-over-heels on the set of the original Corpuscula, which she wrote on a dare from her best friend, Brenda Weisberg, the only woman in Hollywood routinely churning out horror movie scripts. (Brenda's masterpiece is probably The Mad Ghoul of '43, though many fans swear by The Mummy's Ghost of two years later.) Oddly enough, Darlene's script was exactly what Sam had been looking for, and when the picture performed better than expected, he signed her to a six-year exclusive contract, an interval during which she was obligated to rewrite every crappy Bob Steele western and East Side Kids vehicle that landed on her desk, plus a gaggle of Corpuscula sequels.

Like the first three films in the cycle, all conspicuously profitable despite the constraints imposed by Monogram's accountants and the Second World War, Revenge of Corpuscula paired me with Siegfried K. Dagover, the latter playing Dr. Woltan Werdistratus to my hulking but articulate brute, Corpuscula. Darlene's ingenious variation on the Frankenstein myth had Werdistratus eschewing a mad scientist's normal method of creating artificial life: zapping a rag-doll assemblage of pilfered body parts with electricity. Instead, her insane doctor unearthed a human skeleton, using it as the matrix around which various organs, muscles, ligaments, vessels, and ducts coalesced by means of — and here Darlene was exploiting a motif from Mary Shelley's original novel — alchemical procedures pioneered by Paracelsus and his fellow adepts. About five years ago the master's theses started appearing, bearing titles like "Hollywood's Challenge to Empiricism's Hegemony: Magic and Medicine in the Corpuscula Cycle." You think I'm kidding.

We'd gotten it in the can, by God, the three most difficult pages in Darlene's script, Corpuscula threatening to hand Dr. Werdistratus over to the authorities unless the two of them reach an understanding. If you've seen the picture, you remember the routine, the alchemical monster strapping his creator to a torture rack in the dungeon laboratory, then confronting him with a cavalcade of pickled brains, each belonging to a recently deceased genius, the monster's aim being for Werdistratus to fuse them into a supercerebrum and graft it onto Corpuscula's cortex, thereby transforming him from outcast to intellectual giant. As usual, Dagover tried to hijack the scene, and as usual I didn't let him. He wasn't a terrible actor, but he had only two personae: neurasthenic connoisseur of the dark arts, and deranged desecrator of God's designs. I could act him under the table with a paper bag over my head and a clothespin on my tongue.

Beyond our successful rendering of the torture rack scene, I had other reasons to be jubilant. The previous morning, Darlene's pregnancy test had come back negative. Two days earlier, Germany had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. And to top it off, at the beginning of the week I'd finished my first serious attempt at screenwriting. In my opinion Lycanthropus was so scary it made Siodmak's script for The Wolf Man seem like a bedtime story for depressive children, though I wouldn't be truly pleased with my achievement until Darlene told me it was swell.

With Beaudine's blessing Dudley the AD decreed a lunch break, saying he wanted everybody back at 1:30 P.M. sharp on stage two for the big cemetery scene — Werdistratus and his warpie assistant, Klorg, skulking among the graves with spades, prospecting for carrion — and then the pair of G-Men came striding across the laboratory set, hopscotching among the cables and gobo stands, outfitted in genuine Lamont Cranston slouch hats and misterioso sunglasses. At first I thought they were actors themselves, headed for the nearest exit after appearing in some dopey spy thriller on stage three, but when they brushed up against me, tugged on my sheepskin doublet, and hustled me into a fretwork of film noir shadows, I realized they had something else in mind. They introduced themselves as Agent Jones and Agent Brown — their real names, I later learned, though at the time I didn't believe them. The grilling began instantly, before I could remove a shred of makeup. Corpuscula gave them no pause, despite the third eye embedded in his cheek and the herniated brain emerging from his fractured skull. I figured such sang-froid was habitual for guys in their line. The rest of the day would probably find them coolly quizzing a bank robber as he lay expiring of gunshot wounds or calmly questioning a naked whore who'd just disemboweled a john in self-defense. A tattered ambulatory cadaver was nothing.

Agent Brown, a lardish man with a pencil-thin moustache, asked me if I was in fact "a Jew named Isaac Margolis who now calls himself Syms Thorley."

"Isaac was the name of a great uncle who died before I was born," I said, chattering nervously. I was convinced they'd come to arrest me as a draft dodger, even though I had a legitimate medical deferment. "It's a Jewish custom. You want to know anything else about my people, talk to Louis B. Mayer.

Being a Jew is not my area of expertise."

"Ah, so you're assimilated," said Agent Jones with an anti-Semitic curl of his lip. He had tiny eyes, bad teeth, and the negligible nose of an altar-boy Pinocchio.

"My bubbe keeps trying to make me observant," I said, "but all I really care about is the movies."

"That fits with the data we've collected so far," Agent Brown said.

"Did my draft board send you here?" I asked. "I'm classified 1-M."

"We know all about your flat feet," Agent Jones said. "A mighty fortunate handicap, if you ask me."

"We also know about last summer's appendectomy and your girlfriend's pregnancy test," Agent Brown said.

"Here's the deal, Thorley," Agent Jones said. "Your Uncle Isaac might be dead, but your Uncle Sam is alive and kicking, and he's got a special assignment for you, something any red-blooded, stouthearted, flat-footed American would be keen to take on."

Just then Dagover strolled by, still in character, the wild-eyed Werdistratus, obviously hoping I'd gotten in trouble and eager to overhear the details.

"We need to take this conversation elsewhere," Agent Brown said, casting a suspicious eye on the mad scientist.

"I'm afraid Monogram doesn't have a commissary, but there's a swell little Mexican place on the corner of Sunset and Talmadge," I said.

"The Neon Cactus," Agent Jones said, nodding.

"We've reserved a booth," Agent Brown said.

"Hey, Dudley," I called to the AD, "Eliot Ness and his transvestite sister are taking me out to lunch. I'm done for the day, right?" Dudley flipped open his brass-handled board. "No more Corpuscula scenes this afternoon, but we need you in your makeup for an 8:00 A.M. take one. Do me a favor and be at the studio by six."

"Here's an idea," I told Dudley. "Have Carl come out to my house at dawn tomorrow and put the makeup on me while I'm still asleep."

"I hate this job," Dudley said.

"A bewildered Syms Thorley and his new friends set off for the Neon Cactus, in quest of whatever's on tap," I said, flashing the AD a florid Corpuscula grin. "Fade-out."


What they had on tap was Dos Equis, which the G-Men and I supplemented with outsized orders of tacos and gazpacho. Actors and soldiers jammed the place to the walls. A lively lass with a pretty face and a considerable figure brought us our food. The cliché is true now, and it was true then: L.A. has the most nubile waitresses in the world, hopeful starlets anticipating the proper cosmic conjunction of a cruising producer and a flattering sunbeam.

My makeup was itching, so I tugged at the latex appliance, pulling a huge swatch from my forehead along with my fright wig, then set the hairy puddle beside me on the bench. I removed my third eye and the dentures, resting them atop the napkin dispenser. My behavior attracted no attention. This was Hollywood. In the next booth over, the Abominable Snowman drank a vanilla milkshake through a straw. Napoleon sat at the counter, munching on a doughnut. Beside the swinging doors to the kitchen, Julius Caesar was propositioning our waitress.

"Uncle Sam doesn't want you in uniform, but he does want you in a suit," Agent Jones told me.

"A clown suit?" I said. "I'm supposed to tour the Pacific with the USO, cheering up the troops? I don't do clowns, only monsters."

"That's exactly the idea," Agent Brown said. "Uncle Sam wants you in a monster suit. Nick and I have to decide if you're a security risk. We're also supposed to soften you up."

"With your fists?"

"With the news that the assignment pays ten thousand dollars."

"Ten thousand? Jeez."

"Personally, I think you should do it out of sheer bare-assed patriotism," Agent Jones said, "especially since you're so assimilated and everything."

"To tell you the truth, we were thinking of recommending your co-star Dagover, but the Navy seems to think you're the better actor," Agent Brown said.

"The Navy knows what they're talking about," I said.

Let me take this opportunity to set the record straight. There was no rivalry between Siggy Dagover and myself. There was, rather, an unimaginably vicious vendetta that stopped short of homicide only because in Hollywood there are more imaginative ways to settle scores. Think of Joan Crawford versus Bette Davis, and you'll have some idea of the scale involved.

The only thing I admired about Dagover was his ambition. Hired by Göttingen University as a linguistics professor way back in '34, he became the first Gentile intellectual on his block to flee Hitler. Landing in Manhattan as the Great Depression was reaching its nadir, he briefly supported himself by washing windows and scrubbing floors for the few remaining plutocrats in New York, then hopped a series of freight trains for the coast, determined to bluster his way into the movies.

"Any Japs up your family tree?" Agent Jones asked me abruptly.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow. Copyright © 2009 James Morrow. Excerpted by permission of Tachyon Publications.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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