Today we’re entering exciting new worlds on our Power Q & A! Join us in welcoming Canadian sci-fi author David Neil Lee to talk about his latest Hamilton, Ontario-based YA novel, The Great Outer Dark (published by Wolsak & Wynn, 2023).
Q: Tell us more about how your trilogy responds to and builds on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, with a particular focus on how real-world places and spaces are transformed into the sites of “cosmic horror”?
A: Lovecraft believed deeply in modernity – the idea that overall, European culture and its accompanying technologies were a tremendous force for good in the world. He was also an old-fashioned United Empire Loyalist who admitted he felt English at heart. In reality, he never had the money to actually visit the UK, but he had read a lot and was steeped in English literature.
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His belief in modernity is a big part of his work’s powerful imagery: modernity as a system that is staving off enormous dark extraterrestrial forces, although it doesn’t always succeed, and those forces break through.
You can see a literary response to this trope in Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft’s fiction says, “the human race is actually suborned to an enormous malignant power that is willing to let humanity exist only provided that no one tries to step out of its shadow or bring themselves to its attention, or god forbid, resist – then it will reach out and squash them.”
And the Black American response to that – at least in the Misha Green TV series, I haven’t read the Matt Ruff novel – is “tell us something we don’t already know!”
In the Midnight Games books, that extraterrestrial force – the Great Old Ones – was mysteriously repelled from Earth many years ago, and they’re struggling to get back and reassert their dominance. When Nate gets in trouble with the cult who are trying to help the Great Old Ones, he finds all sorts of people, including a local Persian family, and in The Medusa Deep, west coast Salish – are aware of the Great Old Ones and have their own ways of dealing with them.
I like sci-fi and horror settings that are very close to everyday life. In the trilogy, Nate and his Dad live in the same house my wife and I live in, two blocks from the stadium in east Hamilton. The North End, just across Barton with its diminished industrial base, vacant parking lots, overgrown train tracks etc., is very much a presence. Friends have even asked to be taken on tours of the routes Nate takes in the books, though when David Prentice and I did that, we had to scramble up an embankment to get out of the way of a freight train.
What this does, I hope is give a certain perspective on the powers that shape our own lives. It’s no coincidence that the name Raphe Therpens, the leader of the cult in the first book, that came out in 2015, is an anagram of a prominent Canadian political leader of the time.
David Neil Lee.
More about David Neil Lee:
David Neil Lee is a writer and double bassist. Originally from BC, he spent years in the Toronto art scene and on BC’s Sunshine Coast, and currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario. He has just finished a PhD in English at the University of Guelph. In addition to the Midnight Games trilogy, he is the author of Commander Zero, Chainsaws: A History, and The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field.
More about The Great Outer Dark:
After his voyage across the galaxy, Nate Silva arrives home to find Hamilton in the grip of a monstrous triumvirate. The Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods has returned, with the human form of the shape-changing nightmare from the Medusa Deep as its leader. And closely guarded in a downtown tower a mind-devouring entity called Oracle lurks. The city is infested with invasive species that have slithered into our world during the Church’s occult ceremonies – many-legged dritches, bat-like thrals and the eerie, flying night-gaunts. Caught in the middle of this are Nate’s friends Megan and Mehri, who are leading the resistance with the Furies, along with a mysterious double agent, the enigmatic Dr. Eldritch and his Cosmic Wonder Circus. For the safety of everyone he loves, Nate and his friend H.P. Lovecraft hijack the antique airship Sorcerer for one last voyage, to free Earth from the Great Old Ones once and for all.