I've read and enjoyed Michael Shea before, though not for a while. It's very possible that the last one I read may have been 'The Color Out of Time', a Lovecraftian pastiche published in 1984. This is a new publication from Hippocampus Press but the novel it contains dates back almost as far. Shea started it in 1986 and completed it a few years later as his thesis work for a masters degree at the University of San Francisco. It's remained unpublished ever since, until this new edition, which also features a novelette version that was published in 'Weird Tales' as late as 2012, two years before his death.

It's not a wildly early novel because DAW published 'A Quest for Simbilis' in 1974 as an authorised contribution to Jack Vance's 'Dying Earth' series. However, it feels like it, full of glorious moments and wonderful phrases but struggling to flow, buried in its ridiculously large cast of characters. It's likely that, had Shea ever pulled it back out of the drawer himself, he would have given it a serious revision. It read to me like a work of promise that urgently needed an editor's guidance and a firm-handed rewrite.

It plays like a combination of the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft, shoehorned into Californian eco-horror, and the grotesquely crude comics of Robert Crumb. The sweep of the story involves a mine somewhere on the Santa Marta plain outside San Francisco that's being used for illlegal dumping of trash and very possibly including toxic waste. It's the Quicksilver Mine and it's ironically run by a company called KleenCo, who are as environmentally friendly as an underground nuclear test. In fact, some of the resulting weirdness, like a large black slime monster that manifests the faces of those it's eaten, is the sort of thing we'd get in a sci-fi B movie that begins with a nuclear test.

The best part of the book is the weirdness, followed soon after by the occasional inspired phrasing. There's a wonderful section halfway through the book that features Willy Yakima, one of the few even vaguely sympathetic characters, escaping Mamie Durtt, the Earth Mother of the title, with a mad hallucinogenic chase back to town. That's immediately followed by another surreal gem of a scene featuring a huge biker chick burning down the Rusty Nail by peeing fire down from the bar. Not all the women here are huge, but the ones that are, who are all probably the same one in an array of guises, are literal forces of nature as conscious of social etiquette as an earthquake.

We start out with a much smaller young lady, Kim, who, with her boyfriend Alex, is driving a tanker for KleenCo and already regretting it as early as page one. She's an odd choice of avatar for Shea but he clearly loves the countryside and shows it through her. Here's her opinion of the Richmond San Rafael Bridge. "She loved this bridge, a crazy, crooked cage of high-flung beams and girders, a vapor-lit zigzag of high speed traffic flung across the black bay like a lightning bolt." Never mind Lovecraft, Shea was clearly channelling some William Gibson here too. Then again it was 1986. So was everybody else.

Anyway, they work for Frankie DaValli and he works for Sol Lazarian, who apparently knows how to open a portal in spacetime inside the Quicksilver and throw people into it. There's a huge power structure here that's constantly being readjusted as this bad guy betrays that bad guy while the other bad guy kills those bad guys and still more bad guys plot against yet others. I gave up trying to keep track of all the cons on cons, let alone whose side I might be on, because I wasn't on any of them. If there are good guys here at all, which is debatable and quite the statement in itself, they haven't shown up yet.

When they do, they all turn out to be related to Kim and Alex in some fashion. I didn't attempt to keep track of all the relationships either, because they get seriously tortuous and none of it has a purpose. Every one of these characters could have been unrelated, even complete strangers, and the story would have played out the same. I never understood why Shea bothered to populate this family tree. The closest connection in the book is that between Kim and her boyfriend's old aunt, Aurora Hurtado, because the latter has spiritual awareness, enough to see and know things, and Kim has a nascent version of the same, even though they're not blood relatives.

The worst part of the book is how busy it is with people. The story keeps on jumping from character to character until we're dizzy trying to keep up. Shea goes as far as to almost bury us in names too. There's a single sentence on page 220 that includes twelve names of people and three of places, a count that doesn't include duplicates. The sentence after it adds five and four more respectively. We don't need that sort of thing. What's more, I struggled to figure out who was important. This character would seem important only to be killed on the next page. That character wouldn't, only to keep coming back until we realise they must be.

And, rather crucially, few of them are sympathetic. The good guy here is the planet Earth, which is being raped by greedy men for nothing but financial gain. Well, and the interdimensional portal, unless Lazarian is just batshit insane. The only remotely sympathetic characters I found are Willy Yakima, an independent contractor who's brought in to build a shed, only to lose his hair in what I presume is some sort of toxic poisoning, and Aurora Hurtado, who's of advanced enough age that she can't change anything, even with her mystic powers. Who do we want to survive? Maybe them. Maybe that's all.

If Shea flouted our expectations with his cast of characters, he continued to do that with his story. Wherever we think this is going to go, it doesn't. As an eco-disaster novel, nobody figures out how to save the day. The sea of sludge growing so quickly that dams can't keep it contained is probably still growing right now. If we were looking for hope, we don't find any. The biggest reason that the book wasn't published isn't its quality but its likely reception from readers depressed by how it all wraps up.

As for quality, I found that mostly in certain scenes, certain moments and certain turns of phrase. The one that got me grinning at two in the morning was a description of the police and Sheriff's deputies dragging a lake while "wearing rubber gloves and disgusted expressions". That's clever use of language and it's far from alone here. Shea was happily playing with language, though it's sometimes in ways I didn't appreciate, like ditching apostrophes for fun.

At the end of the day, this has its moments but it's mostly for die-hard fans of Michael Shea with a shelf of his books well-worn from re-reading who are aching for new material from an author who has been dead for over a decade. Here's a "new" novel to add to that shelf. It wasn't for me, but it does remind me that I really ought to dive into his World Fantasy Award-winning 'Nifft the Lean'. ~~ Hal C F Astell