Kerouac vs Cthulhu. A beatnik pastiche with lots of lovecraft thrown in. Its really well done, of course the gap between the beatniks and lovecraft isn't as wide as you might think. Anyone who's read Kerouacs 'Dr.Sax' or Ginsbergs poem 'Howl' will see distinct touches of eldritch horror.
Surprisingly for a pastiche this isn't played for laughs, its a proper beat novel with all the humour, sleaze and darkness that one would expect. Because it stars Kerouac as opposed to Sal Paradyse there is a biographical element to it and i wonder how true to Kerouacs personality and opinions this portrayal is.
Some might find it a little vague in places especially towards the end but overall this is a great impression of the beats but with a little better focus and story than Kerouac usually managed. ( )

"What if [a:H.P. Lovecraft|9494|H.P. Lovecraft|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1196193667p2/9494.jpg]'s cosmic demons showed up in a [a:Jack Kerouac|1742|Jack Kerouac|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1185997896p2/1742.jpg] novel": this could be a gimmicky lark like the Sherlock-Holmes-versus-Dracula kind of thing various people have done, or it could be the kind of dense historical fantasy that [a:Tim Powers|947|William Shakespeare|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1179017891p2/947.jpg] is good at, but Mamatas is on to something different. For one thing, he writes the whole thing as Kerouac, not just mimicking his style but with a real feeling for his character and for the things he cared about. But he's also got a good reason for this particular mash-up, a very ambitious reason - and he lets you know this right off by breaking the first promise such stories normally make, which is to leave something unscathed. It's not just our heroes in a secret skirmish with monsters in the sewer; no, Cthulhu has pretty much taken over the world, America is now a dreamlike hell and we are all screwed. Raise your hand if you sometimes feel like that.

Lovecraft wrote a lot about ultimate evil waiting to destroy our bodies and souls - and he wrote like someone who knew nothing about life except what he'd read in Victorian pulp or in Poe, but he still managed to express, in his verbose and nerdy way, the postwar feeling that the established order had cracked and revealed something rotten at the core. What exactly it would mean for it to crack all the way wasn't something he cared to go into, but, thirty years and another world war later, the Beat writers were part of a shift in attention toward those fractures and what might come out of them. What's destruction, what's insanity, is it good or bad; what's humanity, what's freedom, what's worth keeping?

So, following Kerouac's own tendency to assign mythic roles to his friends, Mamatas uses the Beats for different responses to the question: "What do you do when the status quo seems very very wrong?" [a:William Burroughs|5025|William S. Burroughs|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1222708167p2/5025.jpg] is the best equipped to deal with Cthulhian America: slimy appendages, half-human authority figures and gratuitous cruelty were how he already saw the world, and now he gets to shoot monsters. [a:Allen Ginsberg|4261|Allen Ginsberg|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1206649831p2/4261.jpg] laughs and retreats into private playtime. Jack can't go either way - he's too interested in people, and he's trying to practice Buddhist compassionate detachment, a point of view that doesn't grant any special status to the apocalypse. Mamatas writes very convincingly from that point of view, and it's a startling effect, undercutting the nihilistic horror of Lovecraft and Burroughs with humane bemusement at the ways people fall into illusion and violence. The Cthulhu cultists aren't the slavering savages Lovecraft was afraid of; they're conformist citizens in a late-stage fascist delirium, dancing to entertain children that they forgot they killed. (The oddly warm-hearted tone, within the carnival of atrocities, also lets Mamatas be very funny. In one of several little travelogue scenes that would've fit perfectly in [b:On the Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21E8H3D1JSL._SL75_.jpg|3355573], a small-town waitress snickers at the pretensions of local demon-worshippers, who've "never seen a tentacle" because they're landlocked in the Midwest.)

The plot, if it's a plot, is provided by Jack's unstable friend Neal Cassady, whose descent into even worse behavior gives Jack something to focus on. Neal thinks the breakdown of reality is long overdue, and he's advanced from con-man to sorcerer without getting any smarter. Pursuing him into the ruins of New York allows Mamatas to bring the epic horror story back in touch with the personal one. It's no surprise that Jack's final effort to connect with this damaged guy is directly related to the last hope of the world, but the last scene is still a surprise. The ending, though it seems just right and is written with love, is hard to take for the same reasons that real life is hard to take. ( )

When I first finished this book I felt obligated to not like it. Almost as if I wanted to avoid admitting to the talent and dedication to researched that went in to the amazing combination of Lovecraft and Kerouac. At first glance the prose and story seems a bit forced, yes. But after getting through the whole thing and realizing exactly what the author has done, it's very impressive. It's half parody and half tribute. Mamatas set out to write a book of the eldritch with a beatnik rhythm and he was very successful. Recommended, but not for everyone. ( )

When I first finished this book I felt obligated to not like it. Almost as if I wanted to avoid admitting to the talent and dedication to researched that went in to the amazing combination of Lovecraft and Kerouac. At first glance the prose and story seems a bit forced, yes. But after getting through the whole thing and realizing exactly what the author has done, it's very impressive. It's half parody and half tribute. Mamatas set out to write a book of the eldritch with a beatnik rhythm and he was very successful. Recommended, but not for everyone. ( )

Jack Kerouac is in Big Sur when R´lyeh rises from the deep. The Great Old Ones are coming back, so Kerouac thinking the planet may need whatever dharmic firepower he can spare, sets out to stop them. This quest will take him to San Francisco, Denver, New York, and many points in between, during which he'll join forces with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. He's going to need the help, as the path to salvation is filled with those who have heard the call, beetlemen and mugwumps. (In an interesting inversion of Lovecraft, it's the average Joe's and workday stiffs who are most susceptible to Cthulhu's influence.)
The Beats vs. The Great Old Ones seems like the kind of literary mashup that shouldn't work or would at least lose its charm in anything longer than a short story, so it's a pleasant surprise to see how well it works. The crazy energy of Kerouac's writing feels right at home with the end of the world, while capturing both Kerouac's spiritual hunger and his growing world-weariness. Nick Mamatas pulls off a fun, pulpy story with quite a bit of soul.