Plantation Pan
by Eddie Generous
Genre: Science Fiction
A cosmic horror and science fiction sequel to Arthur Machen’s masterpiece, The Great God Pan.
Centuries after Earth has become uninhabitable, the planet has rejuvenated. The Union, the organization governing the diaspora, sends a team to the mother planet with hopes of resuming life on the homeland.
For months, activity on Plantation Earth has been irregular and The Union has been receiving strange transmissions, until finally, they’ve lost contact altogether.
The Union recruits Lay Watt to be a member of the second team to go the planet’s surface. Lay finds that the close-knit crew considers her an outsider. This is a dangerous state of affairs as the team wades through humanity’s ruins to seek out the ancient source of the current disaster. As they explore, a figure on the periphery of their dreams stalks the edges of their reality and threatens to destroy all they know to be true.
First taste of adult suspense literature
As a kid, I was a pretty good reader. I fell away from it in
my double digits and stayed away until late in high school.
I’d had a teacher unlike any other I’d had before. Totally
open to me and she was not at all in for the usual bullshit. Here was a
middle-aged horse farmer who sold overpriced free-range eggs to wealthy
cityfolk. Something I got, being a farmkid and knowing city people who bought
farms to settle down.
A couple weeks into the semester, she filled me in on the
breakroom gossip. Turned out several teachers said they felt sorry for her,
having me in two of her classes, like, good luck with that troublemaker—my
whole family had a rep—or whatever colorful moniker they’d given me.
I’d always figured as much, but having it confirmed kind of
fueled the stance I’ve lived with my entire adult life. Bucking the status quo
is pretty much what keeps me going and even back in the twelfth grade, I
understood it would take smart work—I had no idea how much—and I swiped books
from my buddy’s garage. His parents were both doctors and if there was ever an
opposite of my disposition, it’s a pair of doctors.
Mostly the books would fit into a philosophy or maybe
sociology course somewhere fancy, but I read them to add to a checklist, like,
you got me all wrong, I’m not going to jail or rehab or the psyche ward, look
at all these books I’ve read. Then I had my first adult holy shitballs Batman
moment while reading, and after that, the books became more.
Picture it, book after book of fairly stuffy subject matter,
page after page of dense prose designed to present high ideas, and me,
eighteen, yawning away, but doing the work. It was almost certainly like any
other night: lonely me in my $75/week boarding room with my TV, my makeshift
bed, and the beat-up paperbacks. Maybe 100 pages in, more dense paragraphs and
a historic setting, kind of boring—but a little cool because I can relate to
the poverty of the characters in this one—and then blamo:
He had not a minute
more to lose. He pulled the axe quite out and swung it with both arms, scarcely
conscious of himself, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her
head… Then he dealt her another and another blow with the blunt side on the
same spot. The blood gushed as if from an overturned glass…
I burned through the rest of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Then one after
another, I tackled the books of his I could get my paws on—slowly but steadily,
it took years. Then came Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Then came H.G. Wells, Dean
Koontz, Stephen King…
Probably I’d be an adult reader without that broke man
attacking the old moneylender, but maybe not, maybe I’d never have stumbled
onto the road that led to suspenseful books.
Eddie Generous is an author of Savage Beasts of the Arctic Circle, RAWR, Trouble at Camp Still Waters, Great Big Teeth, and Radio Run (all from Severed Press), Plantation Pan (from Omnium Gatherum), and several collections. He is the founder/editor/publisher/artist behind Unnerving and Unnerving Magazine, and the host of the Unnerving Podcast. He lives on the Pacific Coast of Canada with his wife and their cat overlords.
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