Balak: A Cthulhu Mythos Tale

by Stephen Mark Rainey

From dreams filled with strange, beautiful images and haunting music, Claire Challis woke to the repulsive sound of a nasal, falsetto voice scratching its way through her closed bedroom window; the kind of voice adults reserve for speaking to pets or very small children. A particularly annoying case of the latter, she decided, for the voice was crooning, "My, don't we look fine in our Sunday best! Are you going to church, young man?"

From her second floor apartment, she could hear only an indistinct, mumbled response, but she thought it came from little Paul Hernandez, who lived next door. A momentary silence ensued, and then she heard, "Are you going with your parents?"

Claire couldn't help but shudder at the dry, coarse quality of the voice. The speaker sounded like an elderly man, but the intentional distortion of his speech impressed her as vaguely sinister. Little Paul must have answered in the affirmative, for the speaker continued, "You look so cute. How would you like to go with me to myyy church?"

From the author, Mark

"BALAK, like much of my fiction, is a part of a multi-layered, interconnected universe that draws heavily from the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, while using the most modern of settings and characters. Many of the settings for BALAK are very real places in Chicago, which I attempted to capture and cast in a somewhat different light than they--at least probably--appear in real life."

Genres: Horror

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

Stephen Mark Rainey is the author of numerous novels, including BALAK, THE LEBO COVEN, DARK SHADOWS: DREAMS OF THE DARK (with Elizabeth Massie), BLUE DEVIL ISLAND, THE HOUSE AT BLACK TOOTH POND, and others, including several in Elizabeth Massie's Ameri-Scares Series for Young Readers. In addition, Mark's work includes six short story collections; over 200 published works of short fiction; and the scripts for several DARK SHADOWS audio productions, which feature members of the original ABC-TV series cast. For ten years, he edited the multi-award-winning DEATHREALM magazine and, most recently, the best-selling anthology, DEATHREALM: SPIRITS (Shortwave Publishing). He has also edited anthologies for Delirium Press, Chaosium, and Arkham House. Mark lives in Martinsville, VA, with his wife, Kimberly, and a passel of precocious house cats. He is a regular panelist on the weekly Lovecraft eZine Podcast and an active member of the Horror Writers Association.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Study Guide for Balak

1. The novel Balak features a cthonic diety whose servant is Balak, former king of Moab. The Land of Moab was featured in The Holy Bible as a sinister place often in conflict with the rowdy Israelites. The novel purports to be "Lovecraftian" and includes several of Lovecraft's creations, including the deity Azathoth. Is there a connection between Lovecraft and The Holy Bible? Is Lovecraft the Wandering Jew?

2. A key villain speaks in sinister baby-talk. Discuss.

3. The novel features cubes that are icy cold, contain hallucinogenic swirls of vivid color, and emit the sounds of babies crying and screaming.
Does this imply:
(a) Cthulhic, cthonic deities enjoy icy cold beverages, on the rocks
(b) Cthulhic, cthonic deities enjoy dropping acid
(c) Cthulhic, cthonic deities enjoy dropping babies

4. A minor supporting character is disappeared by the servants of said cthulhic, cthonic deities. The motivation behind this disappearance is given as a way to further isolate the book's two lead characters from the rest of society. How does a disappearance that involves the authorities, a demonic figurine, spilt spaghetti sauce, a fiery car accident, many horrified witnesses, various family members, billowing clouds of demonic black smoke, magicked voice mail messages, a trip to the morgue, and a widening of a police investigation specifically serve to further isolate the protagonists?

5. The author has decided to include a host of surprising details that seem to have nothing to do with furthering the plot, deepening characterization, or creating atmosphere. These details include the shoulder width and hair color of a minor character in a brief flashback, the exact items ordered during a meal at a Japanese restaurant, the facial structure of various police officers, whether coffee has or has not been made by the protagonists in the early morning hours, the eating habits and hair styles of co-workers, etc.
Does this imply:
(a) Life is full of meaningless, pointless details
(b) The novel is full of meaningless, pointless details
(c) The author is being paid by the word

6. At a certain point in the novel, the female protagonist is captured and told she will be cleaned "inside and out". She is then given a graphically described enema, followed by a scrubbing and toweling off by a cthulhic, cthonic entity. Discuss.

7. The novel has several sequences where the torture, murder, and consumption of children are explictly and extensively detailed. Conversely, the novel features dating protagonists who are oddly asexual and are unable to do anything more than kiss. There is a high comfort level in depicting intense graphic violence yet there is a clear discomfort in depicting sexuality or even nudity without a certain level of embarrassment. Is this disconnect symbolic of a specifically American tendency to view explicit violence with a heightened, quasi-sexualized form of prurience while viewing the depiction of explicit sexuality with a disconnected, unrealistic form of puritanism?

[Andrew “The Weirdling” Glos · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love a story in the Cthulhu mythos with a fine chthonic deity. They don’t even have to be particularly well written. And Lord Cthulhu knows, many of them (maybe most) aren’t well written. Nevertheless, I enjoy them and read them.

So I was surprised when I just plain lost patience with this story. While I completed it, it was a hard to cross the finish line.

It is hard for me to place what exactly did not work for me. Perhaps if I gain greater clarity on the matter, I will come back to this review and add to it.

For now, all I can say is this- The characters never really came alive for me. I had difficulty caring about their concerns or pain. The bad guys were often chased with fantasy elements that seemed incongruous to the rest of the story. Most of them never seem to be all that bad. The number one and number two baddy never really seem to be all that terrifying to me for some reason. When he was including elements that sort of have to be there because it is a Lovecraftian story, it came off as dull and tired. When he was trying to break new ground, shake up the story, and make it more interesting I felt like the story was getting lost and slipping off the pages. More than a few times I found myself thinking that this story would have made a fine short story or novella, that it really didn’t need to be a full novel.

[Carl Alves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Balak is a Cthulhian mythos style novel set in modern day Chicago. The novel starts off with the disappearance of a little boy, in part witnessed by Claire Challis, whose own child disappeared not long before that. This leads Claire and her boyfriend, Mike, into a dark church, whose members worship Balak, an ancient figure who serves an even more ancient god, who was around when the world was new in a typically HP Lovecraft motif. The Chicago police become involved. All of this leads to an end of the world scenario, where Balak is trying to use Claire to allow this ancient god to enter our world.

I’ve read a number of Lovecraftian type stories, and this kind of falls in the middle of the pack. There was nothing particularly bad about, but it also doesn’t rise above some of the others I’ve read. For me, the bar is set with Brett J. Talley’s work, whose take on Lovecraft is top notch. The situation is fairly ordinary. The characters are solid, but none of them fell into the category of someone I was rooting for too succeed. I just couldn’t latch on to them. The novel is very competently written and was a decent read. You could do a lot worse than this novel, but it’s not one that I feel as if I’ll remember a year later.

Carl Alves - author of The Invocation

[Justin Lowmaster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today I finished the audiobook Balak by Stephen Mark Rainey from Crossroad Press. I am the perfect market for this book, so keep that in mind when you read this review.

Here’s the blurb from the cover (if digital books can have covers):

Two years ago, Claire Challis's four-year-old son disappeared without a trace. Now, a neighbor's child has vanished from right outside of her apartment. Determined to discover the fate of her missing son, Claire set out on a quest that will lead to a place of madness, horror, and fate worse than death.


The book starts off with a very creepy scene and keeps up the unease the whole book. There are also some scenes in which I genuinely didn’t know if the viewpoint character would survive. Any book that does that gets bonus points.

The characters are all different and feel like real people. There are different motives and personalities in each of them.

While that characters drive the story, the plot is well constructed and stays consistent. I didn’t notice any holes in it.

Overall the book deals with relationships with children, romance, detective work, and a whole lot of cosmic horror thrown into the mix. I loved it.

The reader of the audio book is good. Not the best, but nothing your ears will complain about. I think I heard a couple misspoken words near the end, but they were so close to the word that should have been there than I wasn’t totally sure there was a mistake. He didn’t stumble over any words, in any case.

The book kept my attention from beginning to end. The start is a nice hook, the middle is engaging, and the ending wraps it all up nicely.

If you like stories of horror, mystery, suspense, and mind-altering horror from the dark reaches of the cosmos, then give this a go.

[Carpentermt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Balak is a novel by Stephen Mark Rainey published in 2000 by Wildside Press. I've had my copy sitting around forever; the cover painting is a stylized image vaguely suggestive of a sinister entity, very effective. The artist is Amy Casil although she was not credited in the book. Production qualities are good. Again, however, my copy is already showing some yellowing from aging. Of course I don't keep my books in plastic wrap, but this still seems a bit early for this effect, although it is not as severe as The Gardens of Lucullus (2001), which is not as bad as Dead But Dreaming (2002). Interestingly, Dagon by Chappell in the LSU Press edition has a little blurb on the title page about the book meeting standards from some sort of book longevity society; more power to 'em. Page count is 236, a nice substantial book.

Briefly, this is an excellent novel and is highly recommended to all fans of mythos fiction, all the more so because it is a novel in a genre that better lends itself to the format of a short story. This is what all us fans expect of Stephen Mark Rainey, well known for his many stories in various anthologies.

Now spoilers will follow - you have been warned.

First of all, I had picked this novel up a few years ago, and could not get into it. The reason was that the protagonist, Claire Challis, had a 4 yr old son kidnapped. I'm a father of 2 young boys and while I don't find generally horror fiction revolving around children personally offensive or off putting, the description that he was allowed to run away from his mommy, a responsible parent, in a busy grocery store in big city struck
me as absolutely grossly unbelievable (OK, this from a guy who is reading about giant alien entities....). Any parent in this day and age knows you chase them down, give them a stern warning and the second time they either end up in the cart where you ignore their squalling, or else you march them out of the store, abandoning your shopping for the time being....Look, I'm just telling you why I set it aside for a few years.

Well, Balak eventually worked its way back up to the top of my stack. The title relates to Rainey's very clever use of Biblical scripture to create a character, Balak, an ancient priest of a terrible ancient being, Golgolith, who is now represented as one of the Old Ones. Over the years Golgolith has granted power to Balak, who has done the same to his subordinates, through blood sacrifices that often involve
kidnapping of children. Balak is no longer anything resembling human. His main servitors are a human pastor named Lazar and a freaky part human Nyle.

A good prequel to this book would be The Music of Erich Zann. In fact in the author's note in Rainey's collection of stories The Last Trumpet he describes an interest in the ability of music to change spiritual awareness or cause a heightening of perception. This theme is threaded into Balak as well.

A very appealing feature of Rainey's work is the well crafted prose and meticulous plotting. Claire overhears a neighbor's child being kidnapped, it turns out, by Lazar, the pastor of the Church of the Seven Stars, where Balak has the real temple to Golgolith. When she gets involved this sets events in motion that end up swallowing Claire, her boyfriend Mike Selby, his sister Nancy and eventually police detective Trotter. Balak and Lazar set their intent on using Claire as the blood sacrifice who will allow Balak to finally open up a gate for Golgolith to enter our dimension.

One thing about mythos fiction, even though it is horror, after all these years it is well, not very scary. I remember being about 14, up late at night reading Winged Death, when a huge black wasp flew into my bedroom from a window, went straight to the light fixture and disappeared inside it never to be located again. That made me jump!! Rainey had one particular passage where Nancy and Claire are having dinner while examining a figurine of Golgoltih, and while Claire steps out of the room, suddenly Nancy and the figurine vanish, as she is captured by the malevolent forces from the church. This gave me a real
frisson of excitement in a way mythos fiction has not for a long time.

Events move along as first Claire and then Mike fall into the clutches of the Church of the Seven Stars, while Trotter looks for them. The final several chapters are the culmination as Lazar, Nyle and Balak attempt the ritual that will open the gate for Golgolith. The pace picks up as the book races to its exciting conclusion. There are some nicely creepy descriptions of non human entities and torments endured by the protagonists. Here is where I have a little bit of a bone to pick with the story. I can see where the police start destroying the 7
pointed internally lit up stars around the church, incidentally at first and then more deliberately as they begin to understand their implications. It was totally internally consistent. I can also appreciate the way this works to obviate the ability of Balak to perform his ritual or even to banish the supernatural entities they have on church premises. What I thought was a little too pat was how the principal bad guys fell on one another to destroy themselves so abruptly, clearing the way to the survival of the protagonists. I could easily understand how Lazar was a pawn to be discarded to a terrible fate, but the demise of Nyle and the Sultan Tuskachimaqqua were just a bit too easy, contrived, I dunno. The abandonment of even dedicated human servitors actually is true to mythos form and so I can see how Golgolith is either indifferent to the fate of Balak or was sadistically planning to cast him aside all millennia he was Golgoltih's chief minion on earth. I guess it was the timing seeming too much at the service of the story to allow Mike and Claire to get away that left me ever so slightly disgruntled. A minor issue with a very good novel!

I enjoyed this book so much I zipped right through the narrative in a few too-brief hours. It is highly recommended to all fans of mythos fiction. I will now turn my attention to The Last Trumpet, another book that I never got started on for some reason.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good tale of cosmic horror