Extraños eones
Year:
2014
Author:
Emilio Bueso
Contry:
Spain
Language:
Spanish
Publisher:
Valdemar
Genre:
Cosmic horror, Fantasy
Other websites:
Summary
"The city of the dead" in Cairo is not just any neighborhood, but the largest cemetery on the planet, a colossal ocean of bones in which live hundreds of abandoned children and in which the emissary of forces older than man has just settled, the sands of the desert and the capricious orbits that trace the stars in their cycles of madness.
This is the story of a plan to raze the world, of a silver key hidden in a tomb in Barcelona, of a trip by car towards the limits of sanity... and of five wretches who will try to frustrate the designs of the first engine of chaos, of the antithesis of creation, of the foolish sultan of demons, of the one who gnaws, groans and drools in the center of the final void.
Extraños eones is a bold twist on the core of "Cthulhu Myths". With the hard language and vibrant pulse to which we are accustomed, Emilio Bueso is overcome in a perverse story that shows why he has become the author called to revolutionize the Spanish horror literature. (Goodreads)
Egyptomania narratives or motifs
Emilio Bueso's novel is mainly set in the so-called ‘City of the Dead’, the Al Arafa cemetery in Cairo, a place of enormous peculiarity. This cemetery is, fortunately, off the tourist trail, but I would even advise you to stay away from these necropolises that are inhabited by more than 50,000 people, if you want to avoid trouble. If you want to get a glimpse of what Al Arafa is like, I recommend the Spanish documentary ‘Los hijos de los muertos’ (Luay Albasha, 2021).
Returning to the novel, it is striking, and in my opinion commendable, that the author makes hardly any references to Egypt's pharaonic past in this novel. Rather, Egyptian culture appears simply through a Lovecraftian filter. In its wanderings through Cairo, the novel hardly resorts to clichés: the pyramids are not mentioned, the sphinx is of little importance, and there is little hint of the mass tourism in the country. Instead, it narrates the life of a gang of children, who live in one of the abandoned mausoleums of El Arafa, and try to survive the misery and hardships of large sectors of the population in Egypt.
Within H.P. Lovecraft's so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’—a designation that is clearly imprecise and foreign to Lovecraft himself—Nyarlathotep is the entity/deity that takes centre stage in the novel. Among Nyarlathotep’s multitude of possible forms, he takes that of the black pharaoh, emissary of the aberrant and stupid Azathoth. With the mission of conducting a massive sacrificial ritual on earth, the black pharaoh arrives in El Arafa, where he and his henchmen kidnap multiple children. These children are taken to Nubia, where an ancient city lies hidden beneath the sands. In fact, rather than purely Egyptian elements, it is Meroitic elements that take precedence in this fantasy of cosmic horror. While there are hieroglyphics, pyramids, and ruins, all of this is filtered through Lovecraftian influences, as I noted above. Thus, the desert city is a delirium of cyclopean forms with no known architectural logic, revealing the clearly celestial nature of its constructions.
Returning to the novel, it is striking, and in my opinion commendable, that the author makes hardly any references to Egypt's pharaonic past in this novel. Rather, Egyptian culture appears simply through a Lovecraftian filter. In its wanderings through Cairo, the novel hardly resorts to clichés: the pyramids are not mentioned, the sphinx is of little importance, and there is little hint of the mass tourism in the country. Instead, it narrates the life of a gang of children, who live in one of the abandoned mausoleums of El Arafa, and try to survive the misery and hardships of large sectors of the population in Egypt.
Within H.P. Lovecraft's so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’—a designation that is clearly imprecise and foreign to Lovecraft himself—Nyarlathotep is the entity/deity that takes centre stage in the novel. Among Nyarlathotep’s multitude of possible forms, he takes that of the black pharaoh, emissary of the aberrant and stupid Azathoth. With the mission of conducting a massive sacrificial ritual on earth, the black pharaoh arrives in El Arafa, where he and his henchmen kidnap multiple children. These children are taken to Nubia, where an ancient city lies hidden beneath the sands. In fact, rather than purely Egyptian elements, it is Meroitic elements that take precedence in this fantasy of cosmic horror. While there are hieroglyphics, pyramids, and ruins, all of this is filtered through Lovecraftian influences, as I noted above. Thus, the desert city is a delirium of cyclopean forms with no known architectural logic, revealing the clearly celestial nature of its constructions.
Author: Abraham I. Fernández Pichel
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