Paranoid Magical Thinking

Unknown Kadath Estates #1

by Zachary Rawlins, Xi Lu (Illustrator)

Preston Tauschen is a liar. April Ersten is a severely troubled genius. Holly Diem is a morally-ambiguous witch. Sumire Iwakura is an invulnerable hero. Jenny Frost is a homeless psychotic. Professor Dawes is a scholar studying unreadable books. Joshua Fulton is an agoraphobic hacker.Unless, of course, they are all something else entirely.Welcome to The Kadath Estates, an apartment building in a city at the end of everything, an island of stability in a crumbling world. In the midst of a city full of desperate people and oppressive architecture, of half-remembered pasts and a future no one care to contemplate. A city where the moon is an object of fear, haunted by rumors of strange monsters and elder gods, and plagued by the seemingly random violence of a nameless cult.Preston and April are just hoping for a place to hide from their enemies, somewhere to heal and rest before they return to their flight without a destination. What they find at The Kadath Estates is something far beyond that, something outside the realm of previous experience. In The Kadath Estates and their bizarre inhabitants, Preston and April find something like magic.Unless, of course, it isn’t that at all.The first in The Unknown Kadath Estates trilogy by Zachary Rawlins, author of The Central Series, featuring illustrations by artist Xi Lu, Paranoid Magical Thinking is a warped blend of the Cthulhu Mythos, urban fantasy, and black humor in the style of a Japanese light novel.New version uploaded November 23, 2015, with refined and expanded text, improved edit and formatting, and higher quality illustration images.

Genres: Horror, Supernatural, Fantasy

210 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 17, 2011

About the author

Zachary Rawlins lives in Oakland, California, with his amazing wife Chloe and his genius Corgi, Ein. During the day, he works in the Environmental industry. In his free time, he enjoys hiking, comic books, urban exploring, and writing. To date, much of his work has been in two novel series, as well as a variety of other side projects.

The Central Series spans five volumes, concerning the remarkable life of one wholly unremarkable Alexander Warner. The first book, The Academy, as well as the second volume, The Anathema, are both available on the Kindle store, and are filled with telepaths, vampires, schoolgirls fighting werewolves, and the romantic mishaps of poor Alex.

Unknown Kadath Estates is a three-volume series, and perhaps the first American-written light novels. The first book, Paranoid Magical Thinking, is currently available on the Kindle Store. Combining elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, chemically induced psychosis, magical realism, and black humor, the novel features cover and illustrations by artist Xi Lu.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Describes itself as "a warped blend of the Cthulhu Mythos, urban fantasy, and black humor in the style of a Japanese light novel".

For me, what this story was about was "unreliable narrator".  Preston announces at the start of Chapter 1 that sometimes he lies.  Unfortunately, and as you might expect, it's sort of difficult to tell when.  So then I'm left with a story that seems to have some holes in it, some messy internal contradictions in places, some of which I can sort of explain and some of which I can't:

(Most of these are from memory rather than directly cited)

(1) Preston is traveling through the city and finds a woman from the Institute searching for him.  He sneaks up behind her and hears her reporting: "Nope, I don't think he's here."  Then he kills her.  This is really stupid, in that he's just confirmed his presence to her superiors.  Is he really that much of an idiot?  An alternate theory is that, actually, she somehow caught him and confirmed who he was, and then he had to kill her, and for some reason he lied about it.  --  Does that make sense?  It doesn't seem quite reasonable.  Shortly after killing her, Preston mumbles something about "...what she saw in my eyes", which doesn't seem consistent with his claim that she never saw him before he pushed her under a train.  Is Preston, in fact, some sort of deranged serial killer, and he deliberately abducted and interrogated her before killing her?

(2) Holly sends Preston across town, possibly (probably?) trying to get him killed by the Institute.  He opens the chapter mumbling something about "six corpses" and "blackouts".  Then he gets captured by three Institute goons, loosens his bonds so he can fight back when he needs to, sits there while they beat him, then stands up and kills them.  What?  Why didn't he fight back earlier?  When did six corpses turn into three?  What's all this about blackouts?  Does he have some sort of magic psycho-killer powers so he can win a fight one-against-three when he's already injured?  Something seems wrong here.  Did he just make up that whole scene to cover up a blackout?  That still doesn't explain the "six corpses" line.

(3) There's a scene where Preston wants to leave and then April convinces him not to.  Then there's a scene where Preston and April are leaving and the other residents want them not to.  Then April attacks the other residents, ostensibly to protect Preston, except after attacking them she abandons him and leaves and gets abducted.  Something is very strange here.  If I assume that Preston is lying about something, the conclusion seems to be that he's lying about the middle scene, and in fact he abducted April and fought his way out of the complex, after which she got captured as expected.  But that doesn't seem consistent with Sumire later helping him at the end of the book.

(4) ...Okay, April has narcotic pheromones and can mind-control people into wanting to protect her.  That's...  really disturbing, actually, because it implies that everything Preston has done was because of some sort of mind control thing.  Preston seems to know this, but there's no evidence that he cares.  Does that make it not mind control after all?

(5) The epilogue scene suggests that April "will be finished" with Preston "soon".  What?  Does that imply that she's rewriting his brain?  (An offhand comment in the scene with the three Institute goons would seem to confirm this, assuming that scene wasn't completely made up.)

Each chapter had some blue text at the start of it.  I didn't get anything from this, except a vague sense of terror when I tried reading them all at once.  If there was a hint here, I missed it.

I didn't notice contradictions in the bits of the story that didn't deal with the Institute plotline.

I guess the thing is, when I'm reading this book and there are all these things that don't make sense, one way to appreciate it would be to view it as a puzzle, to run through it and take notes, build a chart, cross-compare hints, resolve contradictions, and eventually reach a Theory Of What Was Going On.  But I'm not sure that I liked the story enough to do that; also, the presence of numerous typos in the story makes me worry that what I see as inconsistencies might just be plot errors. So it's awfully tempting to write the whole thing off as bad writing. I dunno.

Other notes: the book spent a lot of words describing things from the HP Lovecraft book "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath". That's fine, but very few of those things seemed to be integrated into the plot. Oh look, sometimes the city gets raided by moon-toads! (But they never show up in the story.) Hey, look over there, you can see R'lyeh! (But it doesn't matter.) Talking cats! (They secretly rule the world, apparently, but it doesn't seem to matter to the characters, except once when Preston gets directions from one.) Maybe all this stuff is meant to become relevant in future books?

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read and enjoyed Rawlins other ebook, The Academy, so I thought I would check out this one too. Paranoid Magical Thinking is very different than The Academy, and is written in the light novel style (meant to be a quick, easy to read snippets, like on a commute). This is not your run-of-the-mill genera novel, and similar to his longer novel, his characters are not just your usual archetypes. Paranoid Magical Thinking leaves a lot to the imagination; and I liked the experimental writing style. I had read a lot of really predictable books in the past few months and appreciated that I didn't know what to expect from these characters.

I personally have not read any Lovecraft, but I don't think one would have to in order to enjoy this book. I would recommend this to someone interested in Magical Realism and Urban Fantasy. It's gritty and dark, but has elements of humor as well. I am looking forward to the next one in the series. I want to know more about Holly, and her mysterious packages. I am hoping that further down the line there will be more about Jenny Frost too.

[Kevin F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zachary Rawlins has never disappointed me. I love his unique worlds and twisted plots, nothing like any other fantasy/sci fi books I've read. If you like all the questions to be answered, this book is not for you. If you like magic wands and a variety of races, this book is not for you. But if you like to think outside the box, coming to your own conclusions, then i highly recommend this book

[Jim Kratzok · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've got mixed feelings about this book. I liked the characters but didn't like the "Cthulhu Mythos" that wraps around the narrative. Still, it was a good read. I'm still trying to figure out the main character, April. I feel there's a lot that has been revealed about her but much more that hasn't.

[Thunderhawke23 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable combination of paranoid Japanese magna and lovecraftian horror. A lot of fun and with out a lot of the errors that plague self published books.