The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe / Kij Johnson. New York, Tor Books, 2016, 169 pp. ISBN 978-0-7653-9141-4. $14.99.

I know H. P. Lovecraft by reputation and a reasonable amount of reading, and Kij Johnson by reputation and very little investigation. I will be investigating her work further in the wake of The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. This book is her response to Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and other dreamland tales, which I remember fondly from my younger days. She does well with it.

Don’t expect too much horror; the dreamlands were early Lovecraft, influenced more by Dunsany than Poe, and are thus fantasy stories, with anything worse just creeping in around the edges, as it were. The same holds true of Johnson’s corrective tribute. Her quest is, in a sense, a conversation between modernity and antiquity, or the living and the dead, in contention over the same world. It seems she too loved Lovecraft’s original growing up, but as an adult found some aspects of it, shall we say, uncomfortable?

When adults start asking questions about cherished fantasy settings, you know there’s going to be trouble, that the necessarily sense of wonder will crash and burn, and the willing suspension of disbelief come unwillingly unsuspended, dropping precipitously and coming to grief amid the dreaded rocks of reality. What questions, you ask? How about “How can there be Christmas in Narnia?” (Crash.) “How can superheroes get away with ignoring due process?” (Crash.) “How do Pixar’s Cars reproduce, or, for that matter, breed true to model?” (CGI crash. And burn.) Like I said. Trouble.

Or, maybe not. Rather than rake Lovecraft’s dream world up one side and down the other, Johnson has chosen to engage with it—revisit it, in point of fact. Spoilers follow, as I’m going to spend the rest of this review romping through Johnson’s story. Just because.

Vellitt Boe is a former far-traveler, currently an instructor in the Women’s College in the city of Ulthar—you know, the place with all the cats? It’s a good life, but a precarious one; there aren’t many women in the dreamlands, and they’re Repressed. Complication: Clarie Jurat, one of Vellitt’s students has disappeared, apparently enticed out to the waking world by a visiting dreamer from Earth. You can always tell if someone’s a dreamer. A dreamer’s special, romantic, kind of shiny, and invariably male. Because, um, women don’t have the same capacity for dream, or something. Yeah, Vellitt considers that bullshit, too. Anyway, Clarie’s run away, and this is bad. Because it seems Runaway Girl’s the granddaughter of a god, and if he wakes up and realizes she’s missing he’ll likely go all gangsta and turn Ulthar into a crispy treat. Why? Because the gods are insane, that’s why, and that’s what they do. So someone needs to go after Clarie and fetch her back quick. Someone named Vellitt Boe, as it happens.

Just how does a denizen of the dream world get out into the waking one? Well, a dreamer can take you there, obviously. Otherwise the best way is via one of those fun little McGuffins—sorry, talismans—that dream worlds are so liberally sprinkled with, a silver key. Trouble is, they aren’t as common as they ought to be, and tend to be in the possession of dreamers. But Vellitt used to be best buds with Randolph Carter, dreamer par excellence, currently slumming—er, kinging it in far off Ilek-Vad, and he owes her a favor, maybe. Assuming he even remembers her, since to dreamers females are more or less unnoticed aspects of the scenery. If that.

Anyway, no time like the present to go wayfaring again. Since otherwise Ulthar could be reduced to cinders at any moment, Bringing to Naught Everything the College Hath Accomplished. Or even because Ulthar might be reduced to cinders at any moment. Might not want to be there if it happens.

There’s even a cat who wants to go with her. I mean, how cute is that?

So off Vellitt goes. She walks. She has adventures. We experience her world and see the scenery through new eyes (hers, really Johnson’s), and find it fresh and invigorating, rather more so than we did via Lovecraft, who invented the place. Which could just be because we haven’t read the original stories in a while, but I don’t think so. The journey is long and arduous, or occasionally short and sweet, because time ain’t what it is in the waking world, and neither is distance. Nor are they likely what they were the last time you traveled the same route. Try not to notice the unhealthy interest taken in you by foreign agents and stooges of the gods. Go by ship if you can, and watch out for the edge of the world.

Little comments and asides call our attention to the oddities of this little world, while simultaneously normalizing them. For instance, we learn that women are so rare in it because it’s dreamed by misogynistic recluses who longed to be eighteenth-century gentlemen. Or, (*cough*—Lovecraft—*cough*) one in particular. In fact, Vellitt finds the notion of a waking world in which her sex constitutes half the population more than a little strange. Also, scorch marks here and there, little or large, remind us of hovels, hamlets, villages, towns, and whole cities that once contrived to offend the gods in some unknowing fashion, possibly by just existing. Which is inconvenient, because now nothing will grow there. Be amazed at the sky. It’s crinkly and crumply, not blue, awful and empty like ours, and contains precisely ninety-seven stars, no more, no less. Oh, and you might occasionally catch sight of a floating city among the crinkles.

Finally, we reach Ilek-Vad, and King Randolph Carter. He’s a prick, like most dreamers, but reasonably benevolent as dreamers go. As has been long rumored, he proves to Know How to Speak Cat, and has a nice little palaver with Vellitt’s companion. Oh, and he remembers Vellitt, and is inclined to be helpful. But, alas, he’s lost his silver key, so no getting out that way. Still, he knows other ways to leave the dream world, most overly hazardous to life or sanity. But ha! he has it, he’ll recommend her to the ghouls, who have shortcuts into all worlds (the better to raid the larders represented by their graveyards). See, he’s buds with the lot thanks to a former fellow dreamer who went native and became one of them, and maybe they won’t remember how helping him out got so many of them killed last time.

So, off to the underworld, and a guided tour courtesy of the ghouls, who steer Vellitt past such hazards as ghasts and gugs, whom they don’t get on with. Until, oh no, there’s an ambush, the escort’s reduced to crunchings and munchings, and Vellitt’s imprisoned by ghasts to await the pleasure of those unhealthily interested gods who who’ve been spying on her. Evidently, traveling women attract attention, which in a world with gods like these is not a good idea. One such god, we learn, will now that he’s aware of her more than happily smash up Ulthar just for her sake, because he doesn’t like her looks or something, regardless of whether or not she manages to retrieve Runaway Girl. Bummer.

But Vellitt’s in luck. I mean, why not? The nice thing about dream worlds is never having to apologize for over-pumping the long arm of coincidence. It’s expected. Turns out a little baby gug she once saved on one of her past wayfarings has grown up to be one honking big gug, who senses she’s in trouble, tracks her down, and busts her out of the slammer, thereafter becoming her new guide and companion. The gug’s not as articulate as the ghouls, or even the cat, but under the circumstances, she’s cool with it. Off to the real world!

Climbing out of the dreamlands’ underworld to the surface lands of wakey-wakey, the gug undergoes a strange transformation. By the time they’re up and out, it’s become a Buick Riviera. Because gugs can’t exist in the real world, and it seems Buicks are the closest equivalent. Just as well, because Vellitt needs transportation; she’s in Wisconsin, and thanks to her handy-dandy quarry-finder thingy (we would say cell phone) she knows Runaway Girl’s in Miles City, Montana. (She emerges ready-equipped with local knowledge because That’s Just the Way Things Work. It works in reverse, too, which is how dreamers manage to navigate the dreamlands and end up getting to be kings and such.) I figure Wisconsin’s a shout-out to native son August Derleth, on the grounds that, like him, Johnson’s playing posthumously in Lovecraft’s sandbox. (Posthumously for Lovecraft, not his successors. Though Derleth’s dead too, actually.)

It’s also the present day. Double-take. Wasn’t Randolph Carter local to the 1930s, and didn’t he get turned into something unnatural after he lost his silver key and woke up? Never fear. Time’s relative in the dreamlands. You can spend a century or so kinging it there in the course of one night’s slumber, only on waking to snapped right back to the era and bed you started in. So he’s still got plenty of time, forward and back, in which to meet his fate. Because That’s Just the Way Things Work.

In Miles City, Clarie Jurat is discovered blithely playing shop girl in some little notions place, because in the light of day her dream lover seemed a lot less of a catch and she dropped him like a hot potato. She still loves the waking world, though; I mean, who wouldn’t trade the status of oppressed minority for oppressed parity? So she needs some convincing to go back. Like, her home town being in the gunsights of the angry god who happens to be her grandfather? Darn! Relatives spoil everything!

Nothing for it, Runaway Girl will just have to go home, become the goddess she was born to be, and save everyone’s hash. (Assuming she just doesn’t end up becoming one more crazy-mad deity, which is an occupational hazard in the dreamlands.) Happily, with her god blood, home is just a hop, skip and a jump away for her. Coming, Vellitt? Can’t. Even if you manage to save Ulthar, there’s another god waiting to trash it as soon as he catches sight of me, just to see me suffer. Darn again! Some women have all the luck.

Off she goes. Vellitt’s stuck in reality. Well, at least she has a nice shop, and the keys to the gug.

Does any of this sound like fun? Oh, it is! It’s been long enough since I’ve read Lovecraft’s original Dream-Quest that I can’t really compare and contrast for you, or say whether his or Johnson’s version is more attractive. Never mind. Hers stands just fine on its own, and does some nice spackle-work on the limitations of his. Guess I’d give HPL points for the creation and KJ points for the execution.

My advice? Buy this puppy! (Okay, kitty.) Pack up your old kit bag, thumb a ride to Ulthar, and then, welcome to a world in which time and distance are relative, the sky is crumpled, cats are king, women are scarce, gods are homicidal dicks when not soul-sucking manifestations of a nihilistic, uncaring universe, foreigners tend to be other-than-human spies, dreamers have a nice, buff sheen to them even when stinking drunk, and, oh yes, the underworld brims with ghouls and ghasts and gugs, oh my! Come for the journey. Stay for the fun.

In a nutshell, I thoroughly enjoyed The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, especially the revelation that gugs can only manifest in our world as Buicks. Four and a half out of five stars, and only not five because original creation has to count for something. Well done, Kij Johnson!

—Brian.