The Gaming Outpost

My wife recently commented upon seeing me with yet another of C. J. Henderson’s Teddy London books that they all have really good titles.  I, who have always struggled with titles, had to admit that she was right.  This is an excellent example.  The first of the Teddy London novels is called The Things That Are Not There, and not only is that a really intriguing title in itself, it is an excellent title for this particular story.

Henderson writes in many genres, but prior to the Teddy London stories he was best known for his hard-boiled detective Jack Hagee, the kind of guy we expect Humphrey Bogart to play.  Theodore “Teddy” London might have been a Hagee clone, but that his life took a sharp left turn one day when his office was completely destroyed by a freak storm and sweet young Lisa Hutchinson came into the midst of the soggy mess looking for someone who might help her.  She believed that she was being followed, but she was not certain whether she could answer the question of who was following her, because of that awkward pronoun who.  As London is trying to piece together what this twenty-something runaway from the Canadian border hiding in Manhattan is trying to tell him, suddenly something falls through the temporary plastic sheets loosely taped over the open smashed window frame of the office, and London is in a fight for his life against something that should not even exist, let alone be stalking outside the thirteenth floor window of an office in New York City.

After emptying his gun and losing his knife in the flesh of this monster, he is out of options when the building maintenance supervisor Paul Morcey comes to his rescue wielding a fire axe.  Once cut in two, the winged reptilian humanoid finally stops fighting, and London agrees to take the case, if only to find out what is really happening here.

What is really happening is that a Cthulu-like monster from another dimension has tricked Lisa’s father into sacrificing his daughter to open a path for this fake god to bring about the end of the world.  In the bargain, some of the man’s followers have been transformed into these potent creatures.  But London has to use some detective skills to get that far, finding people who know about supernatural mysteries such as Professor Goward of Columbia University and psychometrist Lai Wan.  Together with a few others London knows they work to stop the end of the all things.

Henderson has said that he tried writing Cthulu horror, but every time he did his characters surprised him by fighting back against the madness and the monsters.  That’s what London and his company do, using everything they have to save the universe.  It is hardly giving away much to say that they succeed–I have, after all, already posted a review of The Sleep that Rescues, so it’s obvious that both Teddy and the universe survive.  That survival is at great cost, as the world takes casualties in the battle, some of them close to London’s heart.

This is the book that hooked me on the London stories.  To my mind, it is still the best of those I have read.  Its hero is human, stumbling into a struggle that draws him into a supernatural world of dream planes and distant dimensions, human monsters and alien forces, all clawing at his sanity.  Its action reaches near apocalyptic levels at the climax.  It is the sort of adventure I’m itching to run in one of my games, but know we could never do it justice.  Henderson has quite a book here.

There is some vulgarity, although considerably less than in the hard-boiled detective genre generally.  Christianity takes some hard knocks.  The chief human villain is a deluded country preacher expecting the second coming of Christ, and the Roman Catholic cleric to whom London goes for help falls apart when faced with the notion that secrets he read in dark books might be happening.  The truth behind the universe turns out to be a New Age hash of multiple dimension physics and psionic abilities.  Professor Goward regards Christianity and Judaism as faiths that misunderstand the stories in their own scriptures, seeing Solomon as one of several past deliverers who used powers available to them to prevent this same invasion millennia before.  That does not detract from the power of the storytelling nor the feeling that the supernatural is real, even if the explanations and impressions of that supernatural owe more to Lovecraft than to history or reality.  It is worth reading, particularly if like me you find Lovecraft a bit dull and implausible and enjoy a good action film.

The older London books were originally published under the nom de plume Robert Morgan, because the original publisher thought readers would be confused by the strong differences between the Hagee stories and the London stories.  They are now being re-released under Henderson’s name, and are available through his web site.

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