Objects of Worship

• Introduction by James Morrow
  
• The Object of Worship
  
• The Ethical Treatment of Meat
  
• Hochelaga and Sons
  
• The Sea, at Bari
  
• The Darkness at the Heart of the World
  
• Spiderkid
  
• Njàbò
  
• A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens
  
• A Visit to the Optometrist
  
• Roman Predator’s Chimeric Odyssey
  
• Destroyer of Worlds
  
• This Is The Ice Age
  
• Afterword: Behind the Scenes with Claude Lalumière
  
• Acknowledgements
  
• About the Author
  

Surely we can all agree that the universe would be a better
place if Claude Lalumière had been put in charge of its
clustered suns and interstellar gases, whereas, alas, the
job instead went to the anthropocentric, xenophobic,
sexophobic, misogynist, bloody-minded, egomaniacal, and
generally unimaginative Supreme Being of the Western
religious
tradition.
But
despite
Lalumière’s
lamentable
lack of godhead, speculative fiction aficionados have many
reasons to acquire and read
Objects of Worship
. Minimalist
in style, plenary in scope, elliptical in sensibility, and abrim
with sardonic humour, the present collection affords its
readers far more food for thought than any quantitatively
equivalent swatch of Holy Writ.

Conventional wisdom holds that, while literary fiction is
concerned primarily with plumbing the human psyche, genre
fiction derives its appeal from narrative twists and turns. It
seems to me that
Objects of Worship
occupies a third domain.
These
twelve
stories
are
not
so
much
character-driven
or
plot-driven
as
drive-driven.
Lalumière’s
protagonists
exhibit the sorts of yearnings and proclivities that our most
respected social institutions teach us to mistrust: erotic
energy, artistic mania, idiosyncratic mysticism, impassioned
empathy with the natural world. These characters constitute
a rogues gallery of sexual, political, and culinary outsiders.
On page after page we profit from the appealing company
of misfits, bohemians, eccentrics, visionaries, loners, losers,
gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and zombies, all determined to
prevail in a world that has no particular use for them.

Forces both rational and irrational contrive to keep
Lalumière’s oddballs and dissenters from getting what they
want. Whereas the protagonists of much speculative fiction,
including the characters in my own satiric epics, turn to the
official epistemology of the secular West — experimental
science — for
insight
and
empowerment,
we
find
little
enthusiasm for that worldview in
Objects of Worship
. In
one of those pranks so beloved by the laws of caprice, our
author was born with a name that evokes the 18th-Century
Enlightenment, “le siécle des Lumiéres,” the joke being that
Claude Lalumière has cultivated a decided chariness toward
that heritage and its technological stepchildren. A major
character in “Hochelaga and Sons,” the narrator’s hapless
father, was once “a disposable guinea pig” subjected to
atrocious Nazi medical experiments performed in the name
of science. “Roman Predator’s Chimeric Odyssey” unfolds
in the aftermath of a “BioWar” that sterilized much of the
planet, leaving it to the descendents of “laboratory-created
hybrids.” “This Is the Ice Age” thrusts the reader into a
frozen dystopia inadvertently wrought by “the rogue R&D
department of some corporate weapons manufacturer.”

If Lalumière regards the empirical with suspicion, he
brings an equally wary eye to the empyrean. In the universe
of
Objects of Worship
, all deities are guilty until proven
innocent. The nebulous gods of the title story cheerily suck
up oblations from humans and give them nothing in return
but grief. The plot of “Hochelaga and Sons” turns on the
Hebrew God’s preoccupation with
treyf
, unclean things, a
proscription that tragically prevents the hero’s fantastically
gifted brother from confounding a terrorist threat called
the Hegemony of Hate. “The Sea, at Bari” dramatizes an
encounter between a troubled young man and a nightmarish
beast that can be exorcised only through a grisly variation
on the eucharist. “The Darkness at the Heart of the World”
and “A Visit to the Optometrist” both feature Yamesh-Lot,
the kind of foul Lovecraftian lord who reminds us of the
recurrent disconnect between embracing the supernatural
and doing the right thing.

For all Lalumière’s religious skepticism, it’s clear that he
would sooner cast his lot with an imaginative metaphysics
than with any sort of Skinnerian utopianism or Newtonian
instrumentalism. Not all of the transcendent beings in
Objects of Worship
are malign. “Spiderkid” gives its readers
a moving celebration of the world’s arachnid deities, “all
degraded memories of God . . . the primordial Spider who
wove the universe into being.” “The Darkness at the Heart
of the World” presents the mythos of the Shifpan-Shap,
avatars of a Gaia-like “Green Blue and Brown God” locked in
perpetual conflict with the demonic Yamesh-Lot. In “Njàbò”
we meet a sympathetic female elephant-god who refuses
to forget how ruthlessly the human species arranged the
extermination of her kind.

Beyond the more obvious sorts of deities, we find herein
an abundance of those cape-flaunting, long-underwear-clad,
quasi-divine
protagonists
known
as
superheroes.
While
I personally harbour a profound indifference toward this
particular aspect of popular culture, I must admit that certain
writers of a postmodern bent have spun their childhood
affection for Superman and his descendents into beguiling
works of fiction, among them Michael Bishop’s
Count Geiger’s
Blues
, Michael Chabon’s
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier
& Clay
, and Jonathan Lethem’s
The Fortress of Solitude
,
achievements to which we must now add three stories from
the present volume, “Hochelaga and Sons,” “Spiderkid,” and
“Destroyer of Worlds.”

It’s clear that Lalumière has thought through the most
severe critique of the superhero ethos, namely, that the sort
of justice it seems to recommend partakes of vigilantism
at best and fascism at worst. At his earliest convenience,
around
the
midpoint
of
“Hochelaga
and
Sons,”
the
author presents a taxonomy of superheroes in which the
troublesome “crimefighters” are accorded the shortest entry,
for his heart clearly lies with the cosmic “protectors” and the
romantic “adventurers.” Lalumière knows perfectly well that
the promiscuous violence and casual apocalypses of Marvel
Comics are, to use Susan Sontag’s memorable phrase, “in
complicity with the abhorrent.” “But perhaps it was time
for all this to end,” muses the unnamed protagonist of
“Destroyer of Worlds.” “For another world, perhaps a better
world, to be born from this one’s destruction . . . Perhaps I
was full of shit — justifying a monstrous offer I could not
bring myself to refuse.”

And so it happened that Lalumière’s enthusiasm for
Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and other such graphic storytellers
ultimately won me over. Indeed, before I’d finished
Objects of
Worship
, Lalumière had himself emerged in my eyes as a kind
of offbeat superhero — several, in fact. In the following pages
you will meet an authorial persona we might call Lord Libido,
that is, Lalumière the paladin of eroticism, as well as Doctor
Vegan, that is, Lalumière the crusader for animal rights, not
to mention Irony Man, the Lalumière who understands the
ubiquity of thwarted human intentions, plus The Eclectic
Ranger, the Lalumière who has synthesized many narrative
traditions into a dozen entrancing tales — tales from which I
shall keep you no longer.

The god settles on the table. Rose tears a piece from her toast,
slathers a heap of cream cheese on the ear-sized morsel,
and lays it next to the god. It consumes the tribute.

Rose smiles as the god’s warmth permeates her body,
enfolds her heart. She squeezes Sara’s hand. “Your turn.”

With an irritated sigh, Sara cuts a thin — too thin, Rose
thinks — sliver from a slightly unripe banana. Sara’s hand
moves toward the god, but Rose grabs her wrist.

“That’s not enough. At least put some peanut butter on it.”