The Tindalos Asset

The Tindalos Asset (Tinfoil Dossier #3) by Caitlin Kiernan

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I am conflicted in my assessment of this book. As with the second book of this series - Black Helicopters (Tinfoil Dossier #2) - I liked Kiernan's writing. She presents her story with ambiguity and vagueness that engaged me in trying to decode what was going on. She crafts some solid Lovecraftian language interlaced with spy jargon.

But does any of it have any meaning? I couldn't tell.

In this case, the Signalman reactiviates a broken asset, a young woman who had a horrific experience in a failed assignment and is attempting to erase her memory with drugs. The reason for her reactivation is that the end of the world is nigh as the target from her failed assignment seems intent on awakening Cthulhu.

Kiernan's style is not to present anything so straighforwardly as that. The narrative is chopped up into around 20 chapters which bounce around from the perspective of different characters over the course of nearly 100 years. (There is one chapter set in 2040.) Kiernan drops clues into the chapters, but the plot problem and resolution do develop over the course of the book.

One problem that I had with the book is that there seems to be a backstory I want to know about. The Signalman belongs to an organization referred to as “Albany” which is where its headquarters is located. It seems to be a very shadowy governmental agency dealing with supernatural threats. In this book, and in the prior books, there are references to other supernatural organizations (e.g., “the Julia Set”) that are opposed to Albany, but we have only the vaguest sense of what they stand for. Likewise there are references to Fata Morgana phenomenon, the “oceanic pole of inaccessiblity,” and how “that Fermi and his Project Y goons had inadvertently called up, these critters that can only reach us through angles.”

Two of those are real things.

I'll admit I love the weaving of obscure knowledge with pseudo-history. So, I'm pretty much a sucker for this kind of thing.

I also like looking up things. Because I am not a Lovecraft aficionado, until I looked it up on a hunch, I did not know that the “hounds of Tindalos” was a monster deriving from Frank Belknap Long's 1929 story “The Hounds of Tindalos.” Now, that I do, and a cursory overview of the story, I think I have a greater appreciation for this story. Perhaps more information should have been shared in this story about that subject, but, hey!, the premise of the story is that Dagon, Deep Ones, and Cthulhu are real, so why should this datum get treated differently?

So, I think I come down on the side of liking the story for its Lovecraft-Meets-LeCarre quality. If you are unwilling to live with obscure references and hidden plot points, this might not be your cup of tea.