Move Under Ground

by Nick Mamatas
Night Shade Books
$25 (trade hardcover)

"Where are Dean Moriarity and Carlos Marx? Rising from Underground . . . Doom, Gloom, Doom . . ."
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

What a perfect book for a Chizine review. I mean, Kerouac walked alone, right? The beats hit the road and never looked back, digging the bop in clubs across the nation, making love to who and what they met and marrying repeatedly, only to cross the country on a hitching jag and send long-distance for a divorce to marry the next girl. Except, what if those beats got older? What if they REALLY had some power in those over-stimulated minds? What if they had to save the world?

Followers of the "beat" authors, Kerouac, Kesey, and others, a generation of writers and poets, musicians and young people searching the highways and cities, the alleys and rural jungles of America for "it"—that cosmic something, Dharma, Zen, through motorcycle maintenance or the application of the thumb to the air and shoe-leather to asphalt—will recognize elements of Move Under Ground and claim them. Others, those who have the dark shelves full of every issue of Weird Tales since the early days, and Arkham House tomes in careful linear rows, slip-cased when possible and dripping shadows that they carefully hide behind their backs while talking to visitors through the cracks of barely opened doors will be equally at home in the lines of Mamatas' prose, possibly bringing about some sort of odd juxtaposition where the latter group postulates that Kerouac must have had a shelf of old horror novels in the back of his bedroom as a youth, and written in the pulps under a pseudonym, while the "beat" crowd nod and wonder how they could have failed to dig this prophet Lovecraft much sooner.

This is a fun book, but don't let that fool you. Just as with Kerouac, there is a story, and then, beneath that, there is a point, and possibly a second story, running under ground.

Author Mamatas has taken a two-forked road across America this time. Kerouac and Cassidy, both with their own dharma, their own cosmic answer to the questions they've never quite been able to form. We find them, in the beginning of this book, still writing endless letters and dreaming of the road they left behind. Kerouac is a cult figure, taking advantage when he can for free drinks, and digging the new generation of "beats" who don't really get it, but want to go home and tell their friends in mundania that they do. Cassidy is still bouncing from wife to girl to wife, raising kids and thinking about opening a filling station.

The places and events in Mamatas' prose leap to life with the same clarity as Kerouac offered us, but not in the world as we know it. Several layers of what we accept as reality have been shaved away, and a gun-toting William S. Burroughs joins our heroes on one final trip across country, sometimes driving, sometimes riding the rails, other times bending time and space to their needs in perfectly logical leaps of faith. They fight the end of the world as we know it by doing the absurd. There is poetry in this that is undeniable.

I don't believe this will become the "beat" novel of the new millennium. Its roots in Lovecraft and the starry wisdom sort of preclude that, but it can stand as a cautionary statement to any and all who read it, and it's a damned entertaining book. Kerouac didn't know what he was setting in motion when he wrote "On the Road," and I can picture Mamatas' Jack sitting on his porch and throwing things at new generation "beats" who drop by to pay tribute at his door—it rings very true.

Mamatas, on the other hand, knew full well what he was about when he set pen to paper, and had the experience of the world as it evolved beyond On the Road, and The Dharma Bums to build upon. The world saved from itself, and is it worth it? All answered, after a fashion.

For those who see only the surface story, this is a wonderful adventure novel. For those looking, they will find things as they Move Under Ground—and smile. The more things change, well, you know the rest. . . .

I give this a four out of five tombstone rating . . . one of the most entertaining things I've read in years. Not for everyone, but then, what is?