Day Thirteen

4/13

The Book: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

ISBN: 978-0-7432-8785-2

Suggested By: Robert Lopez

Where: Home

When: 8:15-8:50p

Music: None

Company: The Family

Pages: 116 -176 (60)

The Lead In: Been watching season 3 of Lost before reading tonight, so the air of suspense and danger is all over the house. The dog keeps messing with me, but I am still reading on the couch. I hope this book is going somewhere, I feel the plot is meandering a bit.

The 411 on the 55: Gibson and Hubbard arrive for the funeral and meet an out of work grave-digger, Otis Driftwood. He is intelligent and gets along well with them, as well as attends the funeral. Afterwards they visit Lovecraft’s aunt who informs them that he was murdered and hadn’t died of cancer. While Driftwood and Hubbard decide to go drink, Gibson decides to go to the medical lab where Lovecraft worked to poke around.

In a bar next to the lab he is warned to watch out for the watchman. On the dock, he is assaulted by two sailors but is rescued by a Chinese man who he mistakes for the Shadow. After this assault, he stumbles into the lab and finds 7 dead bodies, 6 dead from some gas recently unsealed from WWI. The 7th has been killed with a sword. At this point, Gibson is attacked by a ghoulish watchman, who is dripping flesh and calling one of the dead bodies daddy. Gibson ends up killing him with the sword. He relates all this to Driftwood and Hubbard on the train later on, though they question whether of not it’s pulp.

There is a side story sprinkled between the chapters of political intrigue in China. I haven’t figured out the connection to the story just yet.

There is a brief interlude to Dent and his wife eating Chinese food and arguing with a cop about taking money out of the “Defend Beijing” donation pot. Dent 1, Cop 0.

Line of the Day: “The night watchman stank like a tidal pool at low tide, like rotting crustaceans and seaweed.” pg 175

The Fact on the Fiction: Beyond creating the Shadow for pulp writing, Walter Gibson wrote more than 100 books on magic, psychic phenomena, true crime, mysteries, rope knots, yoga, hypnotism and games. He served as ghost-writer for books on magic and/or spiritualism by Harry Houdini, Howard Thurston, Harry Blackstone, and Joseph Dunninger. Wikipedia