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Donald A. Wandrei : Dead Titans, Waken! and Invisible Sun: Two Complete Novels by Donald A. Wandrei before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised Dead Titans, Waken! and Invisible Sun: Two Complete Novels by Donald A. Wandrei:

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful. Stay dead, o you dead titans.By Nguyecirc;nI'm a bit ashamed to admit: I had neither read The Webs of Easter Island, nor, indeed, even heard of Donald Wandrei prior to Centipede Press's characteristically flamboyant promotion of their publication of the man's two works, Dead Titans, Waken! and Invisible Sun. What's more, as of now I still haven't read Webs; thus understandably, I cannot possibly tell how it compares to Titans, it purportedly being an extensive revision of the latter, in a similar fashion to how Conan The Phoenix on the Sword is a revision of Kull By this Axe I Rule!In any case, the novels' titles, Centipede's laudations, and the mention of artworks by Rodger Geberding the late Zdzislaw Beksinski were more than sufficient to warrant a blind purchase, and a few weeks later I charged head-first into what I suspected was a Lovecraftian cosmic horror knock-off, silly but nonetheless fun, followed by a very silly, but again still fun, sci-fi... thing. Now for what it's worth, here's my assessment:DEAD TITANS, WAKEN!My suspicion that Titans was a Lovecraftian knock-off struck a bit too close to home. In a nutshell, the novel concerns, albeit does not limit itself to, the following:- Incalculably ancient entities with ruptured septic tanks and nefarious designs on mankind's collective prostate - this being deduced via some pseudo-scientific hogwash- Savage non-white dudes around the world worshipping said entities and praying for their imminent return, by way of human sacrifices frat parties whatever- Artistic /or lunatic white dudes wetting themselves in bed, creating awesome but nonetheless utterly repellent artistic endeavours, then killing themselves- Specific, apparently important people getting killed in inexplicable manners somewhere down the lineIf the above reads like a synopsis of Lovecraft's , it would be because that's exactly what Titans is: a Cthulhu rip-off, of such calibre/degree that more than once I got the distinct sense of deacute;ja-vugrave; while reading this book. Such an impression garnered from reading a title for the first time is never a good thing, and neither does it help that the knock-off is less interesting than the original inspiration. To illustrate, the bad guy in Cthulhu - the man(?) himself, with a space octopus for a face, dead/dreaming/procrastinating under the sea - is replaced in Titans by a bunch of Easter Island stone dudes just sitting there looking stupid, waiting for their master-creators' return. Tell me how this is better.But then: towards the last chapters X to XIII, things took a turn for the much, much better. With the exception of chapter XII, Wandrei gave the protagonist a first-person treatment by way of diary entries, and boy do I wish I could write about my o-so-tedious everyday life like that guy. Occasionally but not excessively, it would flow on and on in a beautiful, prose-poetic manner, waxing absolutely rhapsodic at the end (specifically entry "August 23"), and managing to pull off what Lovecraft's Cthulhu-cycles have always tried and unfailingly failed to achieve: making the protagonist a sympathetic character that I as the reader can actually relate to, rather than just some random self- righteous academic bell-end whose sole purpose is to serve as a plot device to explore the nature of the cosmic evil, and then perhaps to stop said evil for the good of all mankind, screaming YOU! SHALL NOT! PASS! in due process (Dunwich Horror Charles Dexter Ward, anyone?)So in conclusion, for me the first-person chapters of Dead Titans, Waken! are where it's at. Without them, the novel would just be yet another generic Lovecraftian cosmic horror story lodged in a miasma of such stuff, with little reasonable justification for its very existence, in which case I would rather that the dead titans (I suppose I should mention that Wandrei really, really likes to overuse the word "titan" and its corresponding adjectives adverbs) had stayed dead, buried and just forgotten.Three stars.INVISIBLE SUNThis, on the other hand, is quite a pleasant surprise. As mentioned above, I was expecting a mediocre-at-best early sci-fi work, to be read only as a form of grey, faceless entertainment to while away some grey moments in this life's fleeting misery etc. etc. Instead, what I got was a chronicle detailing the birth, early life, adolescent life, adult life and finally, death, of some dude called Drew Gordon. I suspect that the book is at least partially autobiographical (a suspicion later confirmed in the Afterwords section by S.T. Joshi) because even though I don't like Drew the man that much, it must still be said that he is extremely well characterised and filled to the brim with tiny little intimate details as intensely personal as it gets without the author actually flat-out admitting that the story is about an exaggerated version of himself. Nowhere is this more evident than in chapter LXX, a stream-of-consciousness passage detailing what was going on inside Drew's head before [SPOILER ALERT] committing murder/suicide. Incidentally, this chapter reminds me of that other stream-of-consciousness chapter in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast: completely devoid of punctuation (or even apostrophes), and nearly as deliciously schizophrenic, with a healthier dose of Linkin Park.The writing is generally very good and flows quite smoothly from one event to another, organically expounding on how and why, for example, Drew came to hate the fairer sex; and on that note, neither does it shy away from depicting sexual activities - something rather rare for the era when the novel was written (1930s). But it is not quite great. There are of course exceptions, such as this passage towards the end of the book which positively ticked me:"All the burden and heavy ways of living disappeared. Only the eternal and unquenchable spirit remained; and in that sole instant of his life, his countenance exceeded beauty, with a commemorative prelude to immortality, the implacable strength of being, and the dispassionate appraisal of deity."And then the guy killed himself. Alas, that such beautiful passages are the exception rather than the norm throughout the book. Nevertheless, an interesting if unexpected read.Four stars.

Dead Titans, Waken! was an early draft of The Web of Easter Island, but also a significantly different version. Here published for the first time with an afterword by S.T. Joshi, this also includes Donald A. Wandrei's dazzling novel Invisible Sun, also published here for the first time. Includes color and black and white artwork.

About the AuthorDonald A. Wandrei: Donald A. Wandrei (1908-1987) was an American , and writer, poet and editor. He had fourteen stories in , along with many other pulp magazines. In 1939, Wandrei and co-founded the publishing house House.S.T. Joshi: S.T. Joshi is America's most well-respected scholar of horror and weird fiction. He has edited books for Penguin, the Library of America, and other prestigious publishers.S.T. Joshi: S.T. Joshi is America's most well-respected scholar of horror and weird fiction. He has edited books for Penguin, the Library of America, and other prestigious publishers.Rodger Gerberding: Rodger Gerberding is a freelance Illustrator in Iowa. He has long been associated with the horror and fantasy small press.Jon Arfstrom: Jon Arfstrom is an artist working in oils. He lives in .

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