Day Twelve

4/12

The Book: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

ISBN: 978-0-7432-8785-2

Suggested By: Robert Lopez

Where: Home

When: 8:45-9:30p

Music: None

Company: The Family

Pages: 59-115 (56)

The Lead In: This book is making me feel dumb. There is a character called the Flash, who I am relatively certain is L. Ron Hubbard, but he goes by the Flash. I feel dumb for being confused about it. Eh, oh well. On another note, I was confused on another point yesterday, I was complaining about a section on Hubbard struggling with madness. My bad, that was about Lovecraft. Hence my confusion, wrong person.

The 411 on the 55: Well, what happened today... Dent is having trouble with his marriage is rough because his wife has miscarried 4 times but when they visit a Chinese restaurant they stop in an old boarded up theatre to research an old story that Gibson and he both tell. Dent is sure he can figure out the ending of the story and scoop Gibson. Instead, his wife is attacked by a chain-wielding Chinese man but escapes.

Gibson takes Hubbard on a train with him to go to the funeral of Lovecraft who apparently has died of stomach cancer. Gibson is struggling with motivation, writing about the Shadow.

Line of the Day: “She didn’t want to cook. She wanted to see.” pg 97

The Fact on the Fiction: In a letter to James F. Morton in 1923, HP Lovecraft specifically points to Einstein's theory on relativity as throwing the world into chaos and making the cosmos a jest. And in a 1929 letter to Woodburn Harris, he speculates that technological comforts risk the collapse of science. Indeed, at a time when men viewed science as limitless and powerful, Lovecraft imagined alternative potential and fearful outcomes. Wikipedia