For a self-described atheist, Claude Lalumière writes a good deal about religion.
Lalumière authored enough stories on the topic, in fact, to fill a book with the telling title, Objects of Worship.
Tales in the collection, from Toronto’s ChiZine Publications, reference African shamanism, familiar faiths such as Judaism and Hinduism and unheard-of, often perverse modes of worship from Lalumière’s imagination.
Religion never seems precisely comforting or benevolent in his stories. “This is the Ice Age”, for example describes the birth of a paranoid, sacrificial cult in post-disaster Montréal. In the book’s title story a woman would rather select atheism than worship callous, ever-present gods with the power to bless, curse and impregnate.
Lalumière says what baffles him about religion is what inspires him.
“The romantic in me likes a really larger-than-life world view, the idea that yes, there is magic in the world, but the atheist in me cannot understand how anyone could believe this stuff,” he says. “So I kind of explore that dichotomy.”
Other competing impulses drive characters in Lalumière’s strange, sexy, dark-toned fantasies.
Humans and super-beings act on big desires to save the world, defeat nightmarish monsters, attain sexual release or simply find love via straight, gay, bisexual or zombie-on-zombie contact.
“I tend to concentrate not so much go to the why, but I kind of zero in on the yearning itself,” he says. “It’s all about what the characters hope for.”
Wish-fulfillment is an element of all fantasy fiction, but for the regular, vulnerable folk who stumble through several of Lalumière’s improbable worlds, the need to be extraordinary dominates and even cripples them.
The hobbled protagonist of “The Darkness at the Heart of the World”, for example, limps thousands of miles questing for magical powers. The powerless young man of “Hochelaga and Sons” is desperate to acquire the talents of his superhero father.
Lalumière admits to a personal obsession with superhero comics, a pop-culture portal to the “primal mythology” that fascinates him.
He acknowledges a comic-book approach to science as well, when his stories include futuristic or technological themes. The Nazi experiments which spawned the hero Hochelaga, for example, are more archetype than hard science.
“I don’t really care about being factual all that much,” he says. “What’s important to me is emotional truth. Something has to feel true.”
Lalumière claims his chief task as author is to imagine.
“Even when you write realist fiction, you’re really making things up,” he says. “If I’m going to do this I might as well have fun.”
Comments