The Dark Kentucky Horror That Almost Was

Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky, a military dropship has just landed. Weird, since the Federals have ignored the countryside since the war. Marcia (no last name), war veteran, county agent, and the closest her area has to a government, doesn’t want these soldiers infiltrating her genetically engineered, overmanaged hills; she’s built an uneasy peace here, thanks. But apparently an unfinished battle from the war remains in the countryside.

This novella postulates a world transformed by violent technology, where the dead don’t stay buried, because they’re never really dead. Author Christopher Rowe, a highly esteemed but little-known short story specialist always on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, has crafted a masterpiece of dark foreboding and grim atmospherics. Unfortunately, in the final pages, it appears he’s written checks he doesn’t quite know how to cash.

The nameless Federal captain conscripts Marcia for a rescue mission into the hills. Problem is, the hills are lifeless and desolate, following the war’s nanoware devastation, and the government’s ill-considered attempts to reseed with genetically engineered sludge. But there are lives at stake, and possible unexploded ordnance in vital areas. So Marcia walks with them into the mouth of the holler, knowing they’ll never leave the hills alive.

Much of Rowe’s storytelling will feel familiar to veteran genre audiences, though with a twist. The invasive mosses, the vast deathless enemies, even the culminating cosmic horror of communion with an amoral higher intelligence, all mirror patterns HP Lovecraft perfected nearly a century ago. Human pride, which in this case means military precision, must ultimately bow before a meaningless, uncaring universe.

In Rowe’s telling, however, these horrors don’t arise from the primordial sludge; they’re the aftereffects of a high-tech war between a government with no conscience, and the artificial intelligence they couldn’t control. For Rowe, the horror arises, not from humanity’s meaningless place in the universe, but from our tendency to create systems intended to serve us, but which we ultimately wind up having to serve. Lovecraft as Marxism, perhaps.

Christopher Rowe

As Marcia leads the military through a rural landscape transformed by war’s aftereffects, her viewpoint alternates with the war. Flashbacks to forced marches through similar hills, formerly beautiful landscapes forever blighted with bombs and nanoware pollution. We witness Marcia fighting the old war as a young woman, and revisiting its scars in her age. The war exerts an eternal pull on her consciousness, and Marcia knows what she’ll do to survive.

One suspects, reading this novella, that Rowe wanted to write something longer. He introduces a grand sweep of social forces which drive nations into violence, and the different narratives people use to justify taking sides during war. But Rowe never delves deeply into anything. Like William Goldman, who used an intrusive narrator to scrub the parts he didn’t feel like telling in The Princess Bride, Rowe uses nonsequential storytelling to minimize backstory and exposition.

Worse, though he introduces darkly complex atmospherics, he does almost nothing with them. He introduces nanoware-driven invasive foliage, for instance, that human soldiers must constantly expunge, lest they take over everything; or airborne nanoware that causes hallucinations and permanent psychological trauma. But, having mentioned them, he walks away again, never expanding on the consequences for his characters. Once introduced, he loses interest.

Then, in the final scenes, Rowe drops the ball entirely. Rowe spends so much time describing massive, almost indestructible, Cthulhu-like technological terrors, that when we finally see one, it isn’t as shocking for us as it is for the characters. We know Marcia will have a moment of transcendent communion with the cosmic monstrosity that’s haunted her dreams for thirty years. But Rowe does nothing with it; the story just ends.

Rowe clearly wants to retell a Lovecraft-like story, but for our modern era. Like Cthulhu, Rowe’s cosmic terror lies buried, awaiting human intervention to be reborn. Where Lovecraft’s monsters were sweaty, fish-like, and organic, Rowe’s stainless-steel monster emerges from technology so vast and powerful that it consumes its builders. But fundamentally, both monsters emerge from the same primal fear that, deep down, nothing humans do can ever matter.

Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that Rowe hasn’t finished thinking through his monster. Instead of primal cosmic horror, Rowe offers us the first shreds of discomfort, then flinches. I wanted a deeper taste of whatever bitter brew his characters are drinking. I got fleeting whiffs of something profound and unsettling, but never enough to truly feel much. This should’ve been longer, slower, more detailed than the abridgement we got.

(Acknowledgements to Darrell Scott)