Ghoulfriend in a Coma

The Klarkash-Ton Cycle: Clark Ashton Smith's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction: edited and with notes by Robert M. Price (Collected 2008):

Chaosium reprints the Cthulhu Mythos-related short stories of Clark Ashton Smith in three volumes, with this being the one containing stories that aren't set in the distant past when the Book of Eibon was being composed nor those Smith stories that focus on his quasi-tricksterish god Tsathoggua.

Despite the availability of Smith's work in multiple editions, this text is valuable because it reprints several variant versions of Smith's stories that aren't available that easily, along with a long story fragment -- "The Infernal Star" -- that is otherwise out of print.

'Klarkash-Ton' was the nickname H.P. Lovecraft gave Smith in their correspondence in the 1930's. The stories range from straightforward horror to science fiction to science-fiction horror, while Smith's prose style ranges from the relatively plain to the poetically baroque, almost arcane diction that one really either loves or hates. I love it, in part because there's clearly a sense of humour at work behind the occasionally loopy word choices.

One caveat: the stories have been proofread and copy-edited with mind-boggling ineptitude. You may want to grab a pen and correct all the errors for the next person who reads the collection. Think of it as a fun game!

• "The Ghoul" (1934): Smith's ghoul isn't as idiosyncratic as Lovecraft's ghouls, though it sure loves to eat dead people. 
• "A Rendering from the Arabic" (Variant of "The Return of the Sorcerer" [1931]): Slightly different version of the oft-reprinted "The Return of the Sorcerer." Lovecraftian references abound in a story about the walking, shuffling dead.
• "The Hunters from Beyond" (1932): One of those Smith stories that plays with his own multi-talented career as a painter and sculptor as well as a writer of prose and poetry. It does seem a bit derivative of both HPL's "Pickman's Model" and Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos."
• "The Vaults of Abomi" (Variant of "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" [1932/1989]): A few hundred words flesh out the beginning of one of Smith's two or three finest works of science-fictional horror, set on his version of Mars and possessed of imagery and situations that anticipate such later horrors as Alien, The Thing, and The Puppet Masters.
• "The Nameless Offspring" (1932): Well, we get the offstage rape of a woman in a coma by a ghoul, followed by the resultant offspring. One of Smith's most obliquely disturbing works.
• "Ubbo-Sathla (1933)": Much-reprinted reincarnational horror story.
• "The Werewolf of Averoigne"  (Variant of "The Beast of Averoigne") [1931/1984]): The variant is superior to the standard version, preserving as it does Smith's original multi-viewpoint epistolary format.
• "The Eidolon of the Blind" (Variant of "The Dweller in the Gulf" [1933]): Another creepy science-fiction horror story set on Smith's version of Mars, which makes most other early 20th-century writers' versions of Mars seem like a goddam Disneyworld.
• "Vulthoom" (1935): Another Mars story, much lighter on horror and, as Price comments in the notes, not that different from many other contemporary interplanetary stories involving humans and decadent, Orientalist civilizations.
• "The Treader of the Dust" (1935): Excellent, concise horror story with a strikingly creepy evil god or demigod or whatever you want to call it.
• "The Infernal Star" (Fragment) (1935/1989): Fascinating, long fragment of what was to be a novella-length dark fantasy involving reincarnation, atomic 'memory,' and a Sun made, basically, of Evil.

In all: highly recommended, though I do wish for an edition with better copy editing.

Looking for Kadath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft (1927/first published 1943): The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath wasn't published until six years after H.P. Lovecraft's death. It's fascinating, poetic, uneven, and occasionally soporific. It's also the longest bridge between HPL's Dunsanian period and his mature Cthulhu Mythos work, having been completed after the publication of the seminal Mythos novella "The Call of Cthulhu." 

Lord Dunsany, far and away the most influential English-language fantasist of the first half of the 20th century, supplied a literary model for Lovecraft's in-between years. HPL's Dunsanian period moved him from verbose nods to Edgar Allan Poe and other horror writers to the cosmic horrors of the Mythos that would occupy Lovecraft from the mid-1920's to his death in 1937. 

The Dunsany stories, sometimes referred to as Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, aren't strictly horror. Instead, their lapidary prose and often surreal settings aim for a more nebulous form of the Weird and the Fantastic. They are indeed dream-like at even their shortest lengths, and many of the Dream-Cycle fragments are expansions of dreams set down by Lovecraft. From Dunsany also came Lovecraft's pantheons of strange gods with stranger names, and strange places with stranger names. Dunsany helped unshackle Lovecraft from real religions and traditional supernatural menaces. Dunsany helped Lovecraft fly.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath follows the efforts of recurring Dream-Cycle character Randolph Carter to discover why he's been banished from a wondrous city he'd previously been visiting in his dreams. Yes, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is indeed set in dreams -- or "Earth's Dreamlands," as Carter would say. There are also Dreamlands on other worlds. There are also Dreamlands in the dark between the stars, but you probably wouldn't want to find out what lives there.

Carter seeks the fortress of Kadath of the Cold Wastes, where dwell the gods of Earth, who seem to have barred Carter from his Dream-City. Looming far beyond and greater than the gods of Earth are the Other Gods. These are versions of the alien 'Gods' of the Cthulhu Mythos, though only Nyarlathotep and Azathoth are named among them. 

Carter will have to deal with these gods along with various monsters, ghouls, night-gaunts, cats, Gugs, almost-humans, vampires, and moon-beasts in the course of his quest. He'll meet Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow. He'll converse with Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, herald of the Other Gods. He'll make friends and allies of the Cats of Ulthar and the ghouls of the Dreamlands. And he'll voyage through strange and mysterious lands, over weird seas, and under strange ground.

And all without chapter breaks!

Those who would come to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath seeking cosmic horror in the vein of "The Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness" should steer clear. There are sections of weird, unsettling description. But this novella really works best as a lengthy prose poem devoted to evoking the weird, the surreal, and the logic of dreams.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath has some tiring passages. Its diction and syntax would have been helped in stretches by serious, ruthless editing. And HPL really, really falls in love with the word 'pshent' (now generally spelled 'pschent') over the last 20 pages or so. Nonetheless, it's a rewarding text both for the devotee of HPL and the general fantasy reader. Listening to prog-rock while reading it might also be a good idea. It's pretty trippy. Recommended.

The Old Shoe of Cthulhu

The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) by August Derleth, containing the following stories: "The Return of Hastur" (1939);  "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" (1948); "Something in Wood" (1948);  "The Sandwin Compact" (1940); "The House in the Valley" (1953); and "The Seal of R'lyeh" (1957).

August Derleth's Lovecraftian stories can send some people into a rage. The rage seems to stem from Derleth's attempt to recast the Cthulhu Mythos (a term which he coined, not Lovecraft) as a conflict between Good and Evil. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories generally suggested that the ancient aliens/gods that threatened humanity were amoral, not immoral: basically, they just wanted their universe back, and humans were the ants that were getting in the way.

So it goes. A lot of writers have continued in the Derlethian vein of Cthulhu Mythos, though -- among them, Brian Lumley, Lin Carter, and Colin Wilson. It's a subset of Lovecraftian horror, and one that's no more or less legitimate than the far larger school of Lovecraftian horror that ends every story in absolute despair and defeat for humanity. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories ended with humanity still hanging in there, somehow, though his protagonists often took it in the chin. Both schools diverge from Lovecraft's vision, then.

But as to this collection of some of Derleth's wanderings in Lovecraft-land. Well, Derleth was superior to Lovecraft in at least one aspect: his depiction of rural life. His small towns and the countryside around them generally seem fairly believable, and his rural dialects aren't absolutely bananas the way that Lovecraft's forays into self-invented rural dialect in stories that include "The Colour out of Space" and "The Dunwich Horror" tend to be.

Beyond that, there's a sort of comforting nature to Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories. His monsters aren't particularly scary. Indeed, he goes to the well of the Deep Ones (from Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth") so many times in his stories that they lose all capacity to shock. 

So, too, one of Derleth's preferred narratives, in which a person moves into a house or a region and subsequently either gets possessed by ancient, resident evil or at least severely threatened by it. Five of the six stories in this volume follow that pattern; there are an awful lot of the same type of story throughout the rest of Derleth's work as well. It's an interesting psychological obsession: Derleth, working in someone else's milieu, again and again writes about people who end up... working in someone or something else's milieu. Lovecraft himself used this plot on several occasions, though not nearly as many times as Derleth did -- and in Lovecraft's case, the affected parties are related to the ancestors who plague them in the present.

The one story here that doesn't follow this pattern, "Something in Wood," instead has its doomed character gradually possessed by a statue of Cthulhu. I guess we're really six for six in this vein, aren't we? This subset divides into two categories: people who are related to previous occupants of the house and people who aren't. The subset that cuts across these are people who are overwhelmed by the evil in the house and people who defeat it. 

Another thing that happens several times in the collection is a scene in which it's discovered that someone has vanished somehow from inside their clothes, leaving an empty outfit on the floor or on a chair as if they'd been sucked right out of it. It's a nice image when used sparingly. I enjoyed these stories, though they're not frightening and some of the breathless, italicized concluding paragraphs seem almost intentionally self-parodic. Recommended.

Back to Cthulhu

Black Wings of Cthulhu 2 (2012): edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following stories: And the Sea Gave Up the Dead by Jason C. Eckhardt; Appointed by Chet Williamson; Bloom by John Langan; Casting Call by Don Webb; Correlated Discontents by Rick Dakan; Dahlias by Melanie Tem; Dead Media by Nick Mamatas; Houndwife by Caitlin R. Kiernan; King of Cat Swamp by Jonathan Thomas; The Abject by Richard Gavin; The Clockwork King, the Queen of Glass, and the Man with the Hundred Knives by Darrell Schweitzer; The History of a Letter by Jason V Brock; The Other Man by Nicholas Royle; The Skinless Face by Donald Tyson; The Wilcox Remainder by Brian Evenson; View by Tom Fletcher; Waiting at the Crossroads Motel by Steve Rasnic Tem; and When Death Wakes Me to Myself by John Shirley.

When it comes to both the general (horror fiction) and the specific (H.P. Lovecraft), S.T. Joshi's credentials are impeccable. His emendations and annotations to Lovecraft's fiction have been a gift to the reading public, as has his other work.

This is certainly a mostly enjoyable anthology with a somewhat misleading title forced upon Joshi by his publishers. The first of these anthologies was simply entitled 'Black Wings' in its original hardcover publication, a quotation from an essay by Lovecraft about horror. 'of Cthulhu' was added to the paperback release to grab the eye of the reader. However, the addition makes the title of the anthology somewhat erroneous. Writers riff here on all of Lovecraft's output, and on the more general aspects of his approach to cosmic horror. This isn't a Cthulhu Mythos theme anthology. So if you want a Cthulhu Mythos theme anthology, look elsewhere. It will probably also have 'Cthulhu' in the title. They're not hard to find.

None of the stories selected by Joshi are bad in the way that Cthulhu Mythos pastiches can be bad (though I'm definitely not alone in my enjoyment of even the most clumsy of attempts to replicate both Lovecraft's style and content). Really, none of them are bad at all. They do fall within a range that also fails to ascend beyond the level of, 'Well, that was enjoyable.'

But wait. Was I frightened by anything here in a cosmic, metaphysical manner? No. Steve and Melanie Tem's stories do disturb on a metaphysical level. John Shirley's piece is a delightful romp, but not a scary one. Jason Brock's "A History of a Letter" does a solid job as an epistolary work of mounting unease, though the jokiness of the footnotes cuts against total investment. Caitlin Kiernan's story does invest totally in its horrific elements, but it's a character study, not an exercise in terror.

Another problem shared by several stories is, well, an absent middle -- "Dead Media" and "The Abject" pretty much jump from detailed introduction to loopy conclusion. And the loopiness of both sudden conclusions works against horror. It doesn't help that "The Abject" has been critically overdetermined, starting with that title, which is actually attached to a large, scary rock in the story. I kept waiting for a Phallic Mother to appear and, you know, it sort of does.

Dire consequences await many of the protagonists of these tales, at a much higher rate of Dire than that found in Lovecraft's whole output. One of the things that you can count on in modern Lovecraft-related fiction is that down endings and cosmic disaster are the norm and not something that may arrive in the near future but does not arrive in the text itself. When the disastrous ending becomes standard, that standard becomes cliche.

It's an interesting development in horror fiction, suggesting that at least when it comes to the fiction they produce, an awful lot of today's writers are far more misanthropic and defeatist than the notoriously misanthropic and "futilitarian" Lovecraft ever was. Some of them make me long for the Derlethian deus ex machina that ended many (but not all) of Derleth's Lovecraft pastiches.

There may be a fairly high level of literary acumen on display here, but the endings too often echo the endings of the last twenty years of horror movies, in which supernatural evil always triumphs. And when evil always triumphs, as T.E.D. Klein noted in a riff on an earlier critic's musings, then I don't see what the point of the point is other than knee-jerk nihilism. Lightly recommended.

Return of the Yellow King

The Hastur Cycle (2nd revised edition) (1996; 2007): edited by Robert M. Price, containing the following stories: Carcosa (1969) by Richard L. Tierney; Halta the Shepherd (1891) by Ambrose Bierce; An Inhabitant of Carcosa (1886) by Ambrose Bierce; The Repairer of Reputations (1895) by Robert W. Chambers; The Yellow Sign (1895) by Robert W. Chambers; The River of Night's Dreaming (1981) by Karl Edward Wagner; More Light (1970) by James Blish; The Novel of the Black Seal (1895) by Arthur Machen; The Whisperer in Darkness (1931) by H. P. Lovecraft; Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley (1982) by Richard A. Lupoff; The Mine on Yuggoth (1964) by Ramsey Campbell; Planetfall on Yuggoth (1972) by James Wade; The Return of Hastur (1939) by August Derleth; The Feaster from Afar (1976) by Joseph Payne Brennan; Dreams from R'lyeh(1965)/Carcosa Story about Hali(1989)/King in Yellow: A Tragedy in Verse(1993) by Lin Carter.

Robert Price does a nice job in these Chaosium Press thematic Lovecraftian anthologies of putting together a broad assortment of related stories from a long time period. The 'Hastur' of the 'Cycle' began life as a bucolic god in a 19th-century allegory by Ambrose Bierce, was almost immediately thereafter lifted by Robert W. Chambers for his pre-Lovecraftian horror stories about the looming, supernatural city of Carcosa and the mysterious, malign King in Yellow, and then incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and others. Earlier this year, Carcosa, the King in Yellow, Hastur, and other concepts riffing on Chambers and the Cthulhu Mythos played a major role in the HBO series True Detective. Rust never sleeps.

Price's notes can get a bit wonky in a breathlessly undergraduate-who-just-swallowed-nine-pounds-of-literary-theory way, no moreso than when he goes off on a riff about the true meaning of Chambers' play-within-a-story The King in Yellow, a riff not only lacking textual evidence but contradicting what evidence there is of that play's content. Oh, well.

The central importance of The King in Yellow to the development of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is as follows: Chambers creates a malign, supernatural play named The King in Yellow in the short-story cycle also called The King in Yellow, first published in 1895. The play figures in that story cycle in a number of ways. In the two Chambers stories reprinted here, the play drives one already unstable person to violent, delusional madness ("The Repairer of Reputations"). In "The Yellow Sign," the play seems to have supernatural powers leading to the resurrection of the dead and malign consequences for the two people who read the play.

Lovecraft and his literary circle (or Affinity Group, if you prefer) began to follow Chambers' lead in creating fictional texts within their fictions beginning with Lovecraft in the 1920's and continuing to the present day, from Lovecraft's demonic compendium the Necronomicon through August Derleth's Ghoul Cults, Robert Bloch's Mysteries of the Worm, and Ramsey Campbell's Book of Gla'aki. However, while Chambers' The King in Yellow was a play, future fictional texts would be 'non-fiction.' All would carry with them some danger, often mortal, to anyone curious enough to seek them out.

Accreting around these fictional texts would be an assortment of fictional 'gods,' though in Lovecraft's world, the gods are aliens from other worlds and other dimensions in space and time. Their powers are god-like when compared to humanity's feeble abilities, but they are nonetheless natural beings, albeit of a nature utterly alien to humanity's world.

Price's selection traces the use and development of Bierce and Chambers' concepts over the course of a hundred years. Lovecraft briefly mentions some of the concepts in "The Whisperer in Darkness," and Price nicely lays out the critical basis for believing that the King in Yellow appears in that story, and that Lovecraft there makes explicit the idea that the King and Lovecraft's malign messenger of the Great Old Ones, Nyarlathotep, are one and the same.

Besides the excellence of Bierce, Chambers, and Lovecraft, we also get solid though peripherally related stories by Arthur Machen and Richard Lupoff, and an assortment of other stories that work with either Chambers or Lovecraft in the development of The King in Yellow. James Blish contributes a startling, sly gem from 1970 in "More Light," in which he attempts to (re-)create the play The King in Yellow, from which Chambers only ever gave us a few short lines and vague descriptions of characters and action. It's dynamite. In all, highly recommended.

Stephen Leacock, Sherlock Holmes, Boobies

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: edited by John Joseph Adams (2009), containing the following stories:

The Doctor's Case (1987) by Stephen King;
The Horror of the Many Faces (2003) by Tim Lebbon;
The Case of the Bloodless Sock  (2001) by Anne Perry;
The Adventure of the Other Detective  (2001) by Bradley H. Sinor;
A Scandal in Montreal (2008) by Edward D. Hoch;
The Adventure of the Field Theorems (1995) by Vonda N. McIntyre;
The Adventure of the Death-Fetch (1994) by Darrell Schweitzer;
The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland (2005) by Mary Robinette Kowal;
The Adventure of the Mummy's Curse (2006) by H. Paul Jeffers;
The Things That Shall Come Upon Them (2008) by Barbara Roden;
Murder to Music (1989)   by Anthony Burgess;
The Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor  (1997) by Stephen Baxter;
Mrs Hudson's Case (1997) by Laurie R. King;
The Singular Habits of Wasps (1994) by Geoffrey A. Landis;
The Affair of the 46th Birthday (2008) by Amy Myers;
The Specter of Tullyfane Abbey (2001) by Peter Tremayne;
The Vale of the White Horse (2003) by Sharyn McCrumb;
The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger (1995) by Michael Moorcock;
The Adventure of the Lost World (2004) by Dominic Green;
The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece (2003) by Barbara Hambly;
Dynamics of a Hanging (2005) by Tony Pi;
Merridew of Abominable Memory (2008)  by Chris Roberson;
Commonplaces (2008) by Naomi Novik;
The Adventure of the Pirates of Devil's Cape (2008) by Rob Rogers;
The Adventure of the Green Skull (2008) by Mark Valentine;
The Human Mystery (1999) by Tanith Lee;
A Study in Emerald (2003) by Neil Gaiman;
You See But You Do Not Observe (1995) by Robert J. Sawyer.

Hugely entertaining and lengthy anthology, mostly consisting of reprints, of Sherlock Holmes stories from the two decades previous to the anthology's publication. Many of the stories involve either science fiction or the supernatural, hence the 'improbable' part of the title. That itself riffs on Holmes' famous quotation, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth."

Some stories expand upon brief mentions of unchronicled cases in the original Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle ("Merridew of Abominable Memory" by Chris Roberson and "The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland" by Mary Robinette Kowal both reference the original mention in their titles). Others pit Holmes against the supernatural ("The Horror of the Many Faces" by Tim Lebbon, "The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece" by Barbara Hambly, and "A Study in Emerald" (2003) by Neil Gaiman memorably riff on H.P. Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror).

Writers also bounce Holmes off the works and characters of other writers ("The Things That Shall Come Upon Them" by Barbara Roden puts Holmes into a sequel of sorts to the classic M.R. James ghost story "Casting the Runes") or Doyle's own non-Holmesian works ("The Adventure of the Lost World" (2004) by Dominic Green). Mrs. Hudson and Doctor Watson get chances to solve crimes before Holmes does. Alternate worlds and science-fictional devices appear. Conan Doyle himself appears as a character. Holmes' childhood and college years are speculated upon, as is his family history. He even teams up with Stephen Leacock! In Canada!

There are a few duds here, but very few. One doesn't need to be a Holmes expert to enjoy the stories, and a concise history of Holmes included in the volume will aid those with too little knowledge of the World's First Consulting Detective. Highly recommended.


The Witchcraft Reader: edited by Peter Haining (1969) containing the following stories: Timothy (1966) by Keith Roberts; The Witch (1943) by A. E. van Vogt; The Warlock (1960) by Fritz Leiber; All the Devils in Hell  (1960) by John Brunner; From Shadowed Places (1960) by Richard Matheson; One Foot and the Grave (1949) by Theodore Sturgeon; Broomstick Ride (1957) by Robert Bloch; The Mad Wizards of Mars (1949) by Ray Bradbury.

Another of the voluminous Haining's fascinating anthologies. At his peak, he seemed to be releasing one of these a week. OK, he wasn't THAT prolific. Still, his selections are often immensely valuable because they're often way, way off the beaten path for this sort of thing.

The best character study here is John Brunner's  "All the Devils in Hell ." It's a marvelous exploration of a man in conflict with occult powers that ultimately can be opposed. Fritz Leiber's story puts a modern spin on witchcraft, while Robert Bloch's story deals with ancient witchcraft during a future era of interstellar travel. It's a solid little anthology. Also, there are naked boobies on the cover of the paperback. Huzzah! Recommended.

H.P. Lovecraft's Holiday Grab-Bag

The Evil People: edited by Peter Haining (1968) containing the following stories:

The Nocturnal Meeting by William Harrison Ainsworth; The Peabody Heritage by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth; The Witch's Vengeance by William B. Seabrook; The Snake by Dennis Wheatley; Prince Borgia's Mass by August Derleth; Secret Worship by Algernon Blackwood; The Devil-Worshipper by Francis C. Prevot; Archives of the Dead by Basil Copper; Mother of Serpents by Robert Bloch; Cerimarie by Arthur J. Burks; The Witch by Shirley Jackson; Homecoming by Ray Bradbury; Never Bet the Devil Your Head by Edgar Allan Poe.

Certainly not one of the prolific anthologist Peter Haining's better efforts in the horror field, but nonetheless interesting and informative from a historical perspective. Many of the stories were little- or uncollected prior to their appearance here. The Evil People offers a survey of witchcraft and voodoo in Anglo-American literature over about a century.

Overt racism figures in several stories. There aren't a lot of scares here, though it's fascinating to see how witchcraft was depicted in some 19th-century stories and excerpts. Poe's story is one of his comic trifles; the Derleth-Lovecraft 'collaboration' is one of those stories written by Derleth from a few notes scrawled by Lovecraft; Basil Copper's story is strong right up to a fizzle of a climax. The Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Algernon Blackwood stories are all excellent. Recommended for historical purposes.


Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft and others; edited by Stephen Jones (2011), containing the following pieces by H.P. Lovecraft and others where indicated:

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1917); Afterword: Lovecraft in Britain by Stephen Jones; Azathoth (1921); Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919); Celephaïs (1922); Despair (1919); Ex Oblivione (1921); Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family(1920); The Festival (1925); Fungi from Yuggoth (1931); Hallowe'en in a Suburb (1926); He (1926); History of the Necronomicon (1938); Hypnos (1922); Ibid (1938); In a Sequester'd Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk'd (1937); Memory (1923); Nathicana (1927); Nyarlathotep (2008); Poetry and the Gods (1920) by H. P. Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts; Polaris (1920) by H. P. Lovecraft; Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme (1919); Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927); The Alchemist (1916); The Ancient Track; The Beast in the Cave (1918); The Book (1938); The Challenge from Beyond (1935); The Crawling Chaos (1921) by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft; The Descendant (1926); The Electric Executioner (1930) by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro; The Evil Clergyman (1939); The Festival (1925) by H. P. Lovecraft; The Green Meadow (1918) by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft; The Horror at Martin's Beach (1923) by H. P. Lovecraft and Sonia Greene; The House(1920); The Last Test (1928) by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro; The Messenger (1938); The Moon-Bog (1926); The Nightmare Lake (1919); The Other Gods (1933); The Picture in the House (1919); The Poe-et's Nightmare (1918); The Quest of Iranon (1935); The Street (1920); The Temple (1925); The Terrible Old Man (1921); The Thing in the Moonlight (1934); The Tomb (1922); The Transition of Juan Romero (1919); The Trap (1932) by H. P. Lovecraft and Henry S. Whitehead; The Tree (1921); The Very Old Folk (1927); The White Ship (1925); The Wood (1929); Two Black Bottles (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft and Wilfred Blanch Talman; and What the Moon Brings (1922).

The second of Gollancz's new line of H.P. Lovecraft collections for the British market covers a lot of ground among Lovecraft's lesser-read works. There's juvenalia, Dream-Cycle stories, collaborations, revisions, poems, and Lovecraft's excellent critical-survey essay, "Supernatural Horror in LIterature."

If the reader has already read Lovecraft's better-known works from his later years as a writer, this book offers a far-ranging sample of his development as a writer. Some of the juvenalia is terrible, but all of it is at the very least interesting. And much of the poetry -- especially the cosmic/comic "The Poe-et's Nightmare" (1918) and the horror-poem cycle of sonnets, Fungi from Yuggoth (1930-31)  -- is surprisingly good. Highly recommended to people who want more H.P. Lovecraft; lightly recommended to people who don't know who H.P. Lovecraft is.

Ghoulish Grab-bag

Nameless Places: edited by Gerald W. Page, containing the following stories: Glimpses by A. A. Attanasio; The Night of the Unicorn by Thomas Burnett Swann; The Warlord of Kul Satu by Brian N. Ball; More Things by G. N. Gabbard; The Real Road to the Church by Robert Aickman; The Gods of Earth by Gary Myers; Walls of Yellow Clay by Robert E. Gilbert; Businessman's Lament by Scott Edelstein; Dark Vintage by Joseph F. Pumilia; Simaitha by David A. English; In the Land of Angra Mainyu by Stephen Goldin; Worldsong by Gerald W. Page; What Dark God? by Brian Lumley; The Stuff of Heroes by Bob Maurus; Forringer's Fortune by Joseph Payne Brennan; Before the Event by Denys Val Baker; In 'Ygiroth by Walter C. DeBill, Jr.; The Last Hand by Ramsey Campbell; Out of the Ages by Lin Carter; Awakening by David Drake; In the Vale of Pnath by Lin Carter; Chameleon Town by Carl Jacobi; Botch by Scott Edelstein; Black Iron by David Drake; Selene by E. Hoffmann Price; The Christmas Present by Ramsey Campbell; and Lifeguard by Arthur Byron Cover (1975).

Some of this classic (and never-reprinted) Arkham House anthology from the demon-haunted 1970's consists of stories submitted to Arkham co-founder August Derleth before his death in 1971. Overall, there's no real theme to the anthology, as editor Gerald Page notes in his introduction. It's simply a large collection of often very-short stories of horror, dark fantasy, and the supernatural.

This being an Arkham House release, and Arkham having been originally founded to get the stories of H.P. Lovecraft into permanent hardcover editions, there's more than a soupcon of Lovecraftian shenanigans at work here. Lin Carter and a few others pastiche for all they're worth, both Cthulhu Mythos-era HPL and earlier Dunsanian HPL.  Joseph Payne Brennan refers to Lovecraft in his story, though the style and content of "Forringer's Fortune" remain much in line with Brennan's other work, written in a much more demotic plain style than anything Lovecraft assayed.

It's interesting to me that two horror writers who began as Lovecraft pastiche writers, Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell, both give us tales of non-Lovecraftian supernatural horror set on trains. Both tales are effective, though Campbell's "The Last Hand" is the more effective simply because he doesn't try to explain outright the true identities of the three passengers his protagonist must engage in a poker game with.

Several stories herein have been much anthologized, including Campbell's Christmas-short "The Christmas Present." We also get Arthur Byron Cover's poignant story of small-town inertia, a couple of stories from a young David Drake, and an extraordinarily good riff on Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos that I've never seen anthologized elsewhere -- A. A. Attanasio's "Glimpses." The quality of the stories is mostly high, and the relatively large number of very short stories means that dissatisfaction with one story may quickly be soothed by another story. Highly recommended.

100 Years of H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft's Legacy: edited by Robert E. Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg, (1990) containing the following stories:

• A Secret of the Heart by Mort Castle: Solid tale written in a convincing homage to 19th-century diction, with a tip of the cap to all those ancient white-male antagonists in Lovecraft's stories.
• The Other Man by Ray Garton: Garton combines something Lovecraft didn't really deal with (romantic relationships) with a suitably surreal and sinister voyage through the Dreamlands.
• Will by Graham Masterton: Terrific piece of history-based Lovecraftiana featuring shenanigans in England during the Renaissance.
• Big "C" by Brian Lumley: Fun, too long, slight. The ending seems to be telegraphed from about the second page of the story.
• Ugly by Gary Brandner: A Lovecraftian object figures in another story of a (non-Lovecraftian) romantic relationship gone wrong.
• The Blade and the Claw by Hugh B. Cave: Interesting voodoo tale from the venerable Cave would seem more at home in a tribute to Frank Belknap Long due to its subject matter (and Long's classic short story "Second Night Out", aka "The Dead, Black Thing."
• Soul Keeper by Joseph A. Citro: A nod to the New England landscape and the sort of weirdos hiding in it that often showed up in Lovecraft stories that include "The Shunned House" and many others.
• From the Papers of Helmut Hecker by Chet Williamson: Delightful comic romp takes shots at a few modern writers.
• Meryphillia by Brian McNaughton: Pitch-perfect riff on Lovecraft's ghouls from his 'Dream Cycle' period.
• Lord of the Land by Gene Wolfe: Haunting, disturbing tale of cosmic horror and Egyptian mythology in the American heartland.
• H.P.L. by Gahan Wilson: Out-and-out comedy reads almost like a sitcom pilot for a really weird show about Lovecraft and friends/fiends.
• The Order of Things Unknown by Ed Gorman: Tenuously Lovecraftian but still enjoyable and terse.
• The Barrens by F. Paul Wilson: Absolutely top-level novella by the prolific Wilson combines very specific period- and regional detail about New Jersey's Pine Barrens with the sort of quasi-documentary search seen in many of Lovecraft's stories, and a fascinating extrapolation of regional ghost stories into a basis for cosmic horror.

A very solid anthology celebrating the 100th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft's birth in 1990, this one, like most HPL-related volumes, remains in print today. There really isn't a bad story in the bunch, though a few seem very weakly related to Lovecraft's work. This possesses the most weirdly jaunty cover to a Lovecraft-related volume I've seen in a long time, because of colour choices and not subject matter. Also includes a useful, poignant introduction from Lovecraft's friend Robert (Psycho, Star Trek's Jack the Ripper episode) Bloch, and similarly useful and enjoyable afterwords by the assorted authors. Recommended.

Lovecraft Again

Future Lovecraft: edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles, including the following stories and poems (2011):

In This Brief Interval by Ann K. Schwader
In the Hall of the Yellow King by Peter Rawlik
Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep by Nick Mamatas
Tri-TV by Bobby Cranestone
Do Not Imagine by Mari Ness
Rubedo, an Alchemy of Madness by Michael Matheson
People are Reading What You are Writing by Luso Mnthali
Harmony Amid the Stars by Ada Hoffmann
The Comet Called Ithaqua by Don Webb
Phoenix Woman by Kelda Crich
PostFlesh by Paul Jessup
The Library Twins and the Nekrobees by Martha Hubbard
Go, Go, Go, Said the Byakhee by Molly Tanzer
Skin by Helen Marshall
The Old 44th by Randy Stafford
Iron Footfalls by Julio Toro San Martin
This Song Is Not For You by Avery Cahill
Tloque Nahuaque by Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rosas
Dolly in the Window by Robyn Seale
A Cool, Private Place by Jen White
Venice Burning by A. C. Wise
A Day and A Night in Providence by Anthony Boulanger
A Welcome Sestina From Cruise Director Isabeau Molyneux by Mae Empson
Lottie Versus the Moon Hopper by Pamela Rentz
The Damnable Asteroid by Leigh Kimmel
Myristica Fragrans by E. Catherine Tobler
Dark of the Moon by James S. Dorr
Trajectory of A Cursed Spirit by Meddy Ligner
Transmigration by Lee Clark Zumpe
Concerning the Last Days of the Colony At New Roanoke by Tucker Cummings
The Kadath Angle by Maria Mitchell
The Last Man Standing by Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso
Exhibit at the National Anthropology Museum in Tombouctou by Andrew Dombalagian
The Door From Earth by Jesse Bullington
The Deep Ones by Bryan Thao Worra
The Labyrinth of Sleep by Orrin Grey
Deep Blue Dreams by Sean Craven
Big Bro by Arlene J. Yandug

This really is a collection of short stories and poems, which explains why a 350-page book has so many entries jammed into it. No novelettes allowed, much less novellas! Most of the works appear here for the first time, with a few exceptions.

As the title isn't Future Cthulhu, some selections have only a vague aura of Lovecraftian menace hanging about them. "The Last Man Standing," for example, is a nice little story that would perhaps be better found in an anthology called Future (Mary) Shelley.

Other stories pile on the references to the work of Lovecraft, Robert Chambers, and others of their ilk to such an extent that they read like hypermanic fan fiction -- "In the Hall of the Yellow King" probably most of all reaches a level of intertextual inertia that starts off amusingly and ends up in the Hall of Inutterable Goofiness (a female spawn of Cthulhu! With boobs! Seducing...oh, never mind).

There's some nice work here, whether the droll offering from Nick Mamatas, the documentary riff by Tucker Cummings, or the pitch-perfect "The Damnable Asteroid," whose author gets the fact that while most of Lovecraft's stories were downbeat, their endings were not necessarily so -- conditional victory over the forces of darkness was a recurring plot point, no matter how dire the overall situation. A lot of stories here instead go for the destruction or conquest of everything by dark forces; that gets pretty tiring after awhile.

I wouldn't call this a great anthology -- the poems especially are a real drag. But I've certainly read higher profile homages to Lovecraft that were worse, and the shortness of the works allows one to sample an awful lot of writers one may not have heard of. In general, though, I'd argue that homages to Lovecraft -- and the Cthulhu portion of his body of work -- are best attempted at novella length. Recommended.

Worm-Rise

The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene (2005): Brian Keene enjoys ending the world. A lot. And while he's a very specifically American horror writer, many of his novels fall more comfortably into the disaster-horror sub-genre perfected by writers like Brit James Herbert, with his apocalyptic rats and fogs and crawling dark. Keene's scenarios tend to involve the supernatural far more than Herbert's, but their love of squishy, brutal scenes of ultraviolence -- and the occasional sex scene -- cause me to link them, if only in my own mind.

Keene's fictional multiverse contains many of his novels, along with a multiplicity of Earths, many of them under siege by the forces of darkness, all of them apparently working for one of several demon-kings exiled from the physical universe(s) eons ago by, I guess, God. Or gods.

It's a Lovecraftian set-up that touches at points upon real-world mythologies. Earth is under siege, anyway. A lot. And the cause in many of the novels (though not all) is generally hopeless. What the horror novels explore is grace, and the lack thereof, under supernatural pressure: the human heart in conflict with giant monsters, if you will.

In The Conqueror Worms, a seemingly supernatural rain devastates the planet. And it won't stop. Coastal cities fall to tsunamis; humanity flees to the hills. And then the mountains. And then, entire houses start disappearing into what look like sinkholes, but are not. While land-based humanity comes under siege by increasingly giant, carnivorous worms, sea-based humanity faces sea monsters that seem to have swum right out of mythology.

Keene keeps our sympathy throughout with his narrators -- an 80-year-old man whose West Virginia mountain residence has endured 41 days of rain when the novel opens, and a much-younger man and woman who endured the terrrors of flooded Baltimore for several weeks. Along the way, the reader can piece together the probable cause of the apocalypse, but there's never a moment of epiphanic exposition. This is a worm's eye view of the end of the world, not one from from the heights (or narrative centre) of understanding.

There's brutality here, and grandeur, and a lot of WTF? Boy, those worms are cranky. Recommended.

Mr. X-Men

Mr. X by Peter Straub (1999): Very much a transitional novel for Straub between his particular form of literary horror and a much more postmodern, self-reflexive mode of weirdness that persists in his fiction to this day. While there are scenes of graphic violence early in the novel, they eventually give way to an increasingly loopy narrative involving doppelgangers, psychics, superpowers, time travel, jazz, precocious children, and the enduring appeal of the supernatural fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.

Straub's novels since the late 1980's have been preoccupied with serial killers, for the most part in full pop-culture Omnipotent, Omniscient Killer Mode. Mr. X does play with that model to good effect at points, especially towards the end of the novel, as assorted secrets are revealed -- offering a mirror image to the hyper-competent serial killers of so many of Straub's previous and subsequent novels.

The narrator, who is (probably) not the eponymous serial killer, is an engaging fellow. There's a gigantic, never-explicitly-stated 'secret' to the characters in the novel which you may pick up as you're reading it, or if you consult interviews about the novel. I think the 'secret' causes more problems than it solves while also causing the novel to sidestep exploring the many ramifications of that secret, at least one of which actually needs to be addressed for the novel to fully make sense. It's a choice that's at once too clever by half and half as clever as it needs to be.

Other than that, readers may find that things get a bit twee as the novel progresses. Or a lot twee. There's a child character who is probably in the top ten of 'Most Annoying Peter Straub Characters Ever,' and a few eccentric aunts who come close. Your results may vary.

But if you want narrative closure, you should probably read another novel. As with so many of Straub's novels after this one, closure is not on the table, or certainty. We're questioning identity here, not resolving it. Recommended.

　

Harbinger: Children of the Eighth Day: written by Jim Shooter; illustrated by David Lapham and John Dixon (1991-92): Now that a rebooted Harbinger has been back in the comics marketplace for a year-and-a-half, it's interesting to look at Version 1.0. Created by ousted Marvel Comics EIC Jim Shooter as a theoretically more realistic riff on Marvel's X-Men, Harbinger is an odd mix of dense dialogue and sudden breakneck action.

One of the problems here, corrected in the reboot, lies with the antagonist, Harada, and his evil Harbinger Foundation, which among other things collects and trains people with super-powers ('psiots' in the terminology of the Valiant universe). We're told he's bad, and we get a couple of pro forma superhero battles between the 'Renegades' who are the protagonists and Harada's forces, but that's about it.

And suddenly, rather than developing the ongoing battle between the Renegades and Harada, the book suddenly takes off for a superhero battle with aliens on the Moon in issue 3. Then the group breaks up and reforms in the space of an issue.

Events move so quickly that characters, and their decisions, become weightless. It doesn't help that the Renegades, all of them teenagers, are neither written nor drawn as such. They're pretty much your standard squabbling superhero group, one of dozens. They just use words like "slut" and "hosebag" a lot more than the X-Men ever did, and tell a lot more fat jokes at the expense of one of the characters. Recommended for historical purposes only.

The Wendigo in the Willows

The Ithaqua Cycle: edited by Robert M. Price (1998), containing the following stories:
The Wendigo (1910) by Algernon Blackwood; The Thing from Outside (1923) by George Allan England;; The Thing That Walked on the Wind (1933), The Snow-Thing (1941), and Beyond the Threshold (1941) by August Derleth; Born of the Winds (1975) by Brian Lumley; Spawn of the North (1975) by George C. Diezel, II and Gordon Linzner; They Only Come Out at Night (1975) by Randy Medoff; Footsteps in the Sky (1986) by Pierre Comtois; Jendick's Swamp (1987) by Joseph Payne Brennan; The Wind Has Teeth (1990) by G. Warlock Vance and Scott H. Urban; Stalker of the Wild Wind (1993) by Stephen Mark Rainey; The Country of the Wind (1994) by Pierre Comtois; and Wrath of the Wind-Walker (1999) by James Ambuehl.

In addition to producing The Call of Cthulhu rpg and its offshoots (tendrils?), Chaosium Press also releases mostly reprint volumes of Cthulhu Mythos and Cthulhu-Mythos-adjacent short stories. So kudos to them!

This anthology focuses on one of the more minor Mythos beings, Ithaqua, added to the Mythos by August Derleth and not H.P. Lovecraft himself. It's a wind deity and a spirit of the North. It's also a weird and accidental illustration of how myths -- real myths -- can alter over time, represented in the condensed timeline of 80 years of stories.

Because it all starts with Algernon Blackwood's very European reconfiguration of the myth of the Wendigo, a story with variants among various Native-American peoples of North America's Northcentral and Northeast. As generally constituted in those myths, the Wendigo is both a legendary reinforcer of the taboo against cannibalism and a cautionary fable about the evils of greed and hoarding.

Blackwood, though, reconstitutes the being as instead a sort of embodiment of the dangerous appeal of Going Wild, of surrendering to a sort of Rapture of the Empty Woods and running away from civilization. Blackwood also beefs up the idea of the Wendigo's association with the wind.

And we're off.

Derleth takes some of his cues from Blackwood and further distances his Wendigo (known now also as Ithaqua the Wind-Walker) from its mythological roots. Now it's a malign wind elemental. And that, pretty much, is what the post-Derlethian stories in this anthology work with, to lesser or greater effect.

The stories are all enjoyable, though none are major -- most are pastiches of Lovecraftian style and structure rather than their own unique takes on the Mythos, and that's true of Derleth as much as anyone else. Great post-Lovecraftian stories in the Cthulhu Mythos tend to strike out on their own paths, finding personal approaches. Letting some air in.

Nonetheless, the anthology is quite enjoyable, as noted. The most startling story herein is George Allan England's "The Thing from Outside" -- it's basically a Cthulhu Mythos story before Lovecraft had truly begun the Mythos, a sort of bridge between Blackwood's proto-Lovecraftian "The Wendigo" and "The Willows" and H.P.L.'s "The Call of Cthulhu" and everything after. Recommended.

De-Klein

Reassuring Tales by T.E.D. Klein (2006), containing the following stories: Camera Shy (1988); Growing Things (1999); Curtains for Nat Crumley (1996); Magic Carpet (1976); One Size Eats All (1993); Ladder (1990); Well-Connected (1987); S.F. (1975); They Don't Write 'em Like This Anymore: A TV Treatment in Two Versions (1989); and The Events at Poroth Farm (1972).

Oh, T.E.D. Klein. One of the four or five great editors of horror of the past fifty years. Writer of a handful of the scariest novellas ever written. Writer of one great horror novel, The Ceremonies (1984), which should be read by anyone who enjoys reading literate horror. And so, so, so writer's-blocked since the mid-1980's, though rumour has had it for years that lurking somewhere in Klein's house is a lengthy, unfinished horror novel which may yet be completed and see the light of day.

This relatively recent volume collects pretty much every piece of short fiction not collected in Klein's cyclopean masterpiece of a collection of four novellas, 1985's Dark Gods. And Reassuring Tales is for Klein completists, really, and perhaps no one else. Though the great, early novella that Klein would expand into The Ceremonies, "The Events at Poroth Farm," is indeed collected here.

Some of the other stories are close to being juvenilia ("S.F.") while others are short gimmick stories ("One Size Eats All"). Klein's introduction to the volume is hilariously, almost troublingly self-deprecating -- if you've ever wanted to read a writer mercilessly trashing his own work even when it's decent material, then this is the collection for you.

But, "The Events at Poroth Farm." Pop pop! Some intelligent person at a publishing house great or small or in-between needs to publish a new edition of Dark Gods, with "...Poroth Farm" installed in its more reasonable place among those four other great novellas. Klein's output has been relatively tiny, but he still looms as a giant over American horror fiction for this exact handful of novellas and that one dynamite novel (and the editorship of Twilight Zone magazine for five years in the 1980's). Recommended for the novella, and for Klein completists.

Imago, Imago, Imago

The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron (Collected 2007) containing the following stories: Old Virginia (2003); Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001); Procession of the Black Sloth (2007); Bulldozer (2004); Proboscis (2005); Hallucigenia (2006); Parallax (2005); The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006); and The Imago Sequence (2005): Barron's fictional cosmos, in which most and possibly all of these early stories take place, exudes dread. Barron himself is a marvelous writer who seemed to arrive fully formed in 2000, as good or better than all of his contemporaries, and then proceeded to get better over the following decade.

As with H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Barron's fictional cosmos deploys many of the trappings of supernatural fiction in service to what is really science-fictional horror. What seems to be supernatural is really the result of beings and sciences too far beyond humanity to be fully fathomed by Barron's protagonists. None of the seemingly supernatural beings we encounter is remotely benign.

Humanity isn't so much cattle to many of these beings, per Charles Fort's classic construction, as it is game. Modern, 21st-century game animals, hopelessly doomed by the firepower of the modern hunter, still striving to escape while terrible things laugh at their impotency in the face of torture, death, dismemberment, or worst of all, transformation at the hands and tentacles and proboscises of their tormenters.

What helps set Barron apart from the majority of those who have followed in Lovecraft's squamous, gambrel, rugose footsteps is the nature of many of his protagonists. Most tend to be the hardest of hard-cases: professional killers, enforcers, former soldiers, Pinkerton men. When they come face to face with the ravenous, cloachal, aggressively sadistic god-monsters that populate the dark place of the Earth, they find themselves punching way, way above their weight class. But by God, many of them keep punching. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Barron's keen eye for both psychological and physical description is a joy to behold, regardless of the awfulness of what it is he's beholding. Even the worst protagonists seem benign compared to what they're facing.

There's a real sense of pathos in "Hallucigenia," to cite one example, in which a millionaire real-estate developer whose business practices are mostly loathsome but legal -- he specializes in displacing the poor in places such as Viet Nam so as to build factories -- comes up against...something. Something in an abandoned barn in the Pacific Northwest, where many of Barron's stories are set. Is he being punished? Well, no, I don't think so: Barron's universe, like Hemingway's, doesn't discriminate morally in terms of who it kills. Or eats. Or tortures. Or transforms.

There are awful wonders here, and marvelous images, and a measured approach to the accumulation of psychological detail. There are oddities I can't recall reading in any other horror writers. And there's a tremendous amount of re-readability, both to catch all the things you missed the first time, and to make the connections among the stories collected here and elsewhere. The stories can all stand alone, but the various intersections of characters, names, and locations often add extra levels of dread and delight. Highly recommended.

Toads and Snakes and Ghostly Apes

Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors: written by Robert E. Howard; edited by David Drake (1987); containing the following stories and poems: Arkham (poem); The Black Stone; The Fire of Asshurbanipal; The Thing on the Roof; Dig Me No Grave; Silence Falls on Mecca's Walls (poem); The Valley of the Worm; The Shadow of the Beast; Old Garfield's Heart; People of the Dark; Worms of the Earth; Pigeons from Hell; and An Open Window (poem).

Nice little collection of Robert E. Howard horror stories, some but not all of them additions to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Howard added Nameless Cults, another evil tome of lore that should have been forgotten, to the Mythos, along with a few creatures, characters, books, and quasi-gods.

Among the Mythos tales, "The Black Stone" is by far the strongest. It places the action in Eastern Europe rather than North America, where much of Lovecraft's work was set. Besides introducing some of the poetry of Justin Geoffrey, who would be driven mad by the cosmic horrors he experienced and die screaming in an asylum, the story also gives us an extremely unpleasant toad-thing. It also introduces Muslims as, if not heroes, then not as villains -- their sweep into Hungary results in the destruction of a particularly horrible witch-cult. And in the Cthulhu universe, witch-cults aren't worshipping anything as mundane as Satan.

The other stories include a desert adventure into a lost city reputed to be guarded by something awful ("The Fire of Asshurbanipal") and a couple of heroic fantasies with major horror elements ("The Worms of the Earth" and "The Valley of the Worm"). "The Worms of the Earth" also ties in with "People of the Dark", as both present a subterranean race of reptilian 'men' driven underground by humanity some time in the dim past. These stories echo some of Arthur Machen's prototypical dark fantasies about the 'Little People', but with a typical Howard flavour (snakes and snake-like beings were one of Howard's most-favoured tropes).

"The Thing on the Roof" and "Dig Me No Grave" are fairly standard Mythos stories, although the former doesn't really achieve shock in its final revelation. "The Shadow of the Beast", one of Howard's many posthumously published stories, conjures up some nice atmospherics in a haunted house. The thing doing the haunting turns out to be quite interesting, partially because Howard's hard-bitten narrator shows some pity for its plight.

And then there's "Pigeons from Hell," adjudged by Stephen King to be one of the scariest stories ever written. It is quite a creep-out, and may be made even more creepy by the heavy lifting required to make a story with that somewhat goofy title legitimately scary.

Here, Howard seemed to be riffing on Lovecraft's repeated use of whippoorwills as psychopompic omens of death and the supernatural in the New England states, substituting pigeons for the Southern United States. It's the only thing about this horror story that doesn't quite play -- otherwise, this is a masterpiece of building tension and repeated shocks. It's Howard's finest horror short story, and one that stands up well against anyone else's horror stories, anywhere, anytime. In all, recommended.

The Black Druid and Other Stories by Frank Belknap Long,

The Black Druid and Other Stories by Frank Belknap Long (1924-1944; collected 1975), containing the following stories: "Death-Waters", "The Ocean-Leech", "The Space-Eaters", "The Black Druid", "The Flame Midget", "Dark Vision", "The Elemental", "Fisherman's Luck", "Step Into My Garden", "It Will Come To You", and "The Peeper" : 

Technically, this is the second half of an Arkham House collection of stories from the first 20 years of Frank Belknap Long's lengthy writing career (it stretched until his death in the 1980's).

Long was a long-time correspondent with horror master H.P. Lovecraft, and that influence shows most noticeably in stories from the 1920's until Lovecraft's death in 1937. By the time Long was contributing to the legendary, short-lived Unknown magazine in the early 1940's, his writing style had experienced a marked jump in quality -- stories collected herein from the Unknown period include "The Elemental" and "It Will Come to You", and they're definitely in the Unknown mode of horror or fantasy presented in a contemporary and often serio-comic setting.

However, despite that improvement (though Long struggles throughout his career with smooth transitioning -- I'll often find myself wondering if an entire sentence, or even paragraph, has been lost in the typesetting process), it's Long's Lovecraft-period material that will probably make him immortal. Herein appears "The Space-Eaters", one of those stories by a Lovecraft comrade in which a thinly veiled version of Lovecraft meets a dire end.

Lovecraft would occasionally return the favour, though not to Long (and it seems to me that the elderly writer who narrates T.E.D. Klein's terrific early 1980's Cthulhu Mythos story, "Black Man with a Horn", is himself a thinly veiled homage to Long).

Many of the stories Long wrote during Lovecraft's lifetime are heavily, almost overwhelmingly, expositional in nature. They read as if two people had been having a spirited dialogue about some arcane thought-experiment. This sort of exposition isn't generally recommended to writers beginning or otherwise, but in Long's best early work it comes across as a bizarre, darkly fantastic sub-genre of the novel (or story) of ideas. It's just that the ideas only apply to the fictional universe of the story. I hope.

"The Space-Eaters" contains pages and pages of the stuff, in what almost seems like a sub-sub-genre in which Long has collided the story of ideas with the deus ex machina. Just talking about some arcane idea causes it to happen. And when that arcane idea involves extra-dimensional entities scooping out pieces of brain from living humans and then playing with the pieces, and even accidentally dropping one piece on the narrator...well, one is really in a weird, weird narrative world. And what I just described is just the first couple of pages. Recommended.

The Book of the New

Neonomicon: written by Alan Moore with Antony Johnston; illustrated by Jacen Burroughs (2003, 2010-2011): Winner of the first-ever Bram Stoker Award for a Graphic Novel (from the Horror Writers' Association), Neonomicon is Alan Moore's dark valentine to the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft. 'Neonomicon' is a play on the title of Lovecraft's famous, imaginary volume of terrible knowledge, the Necronomicon.

All the sexual horrors that were vaguely implied in many of Lovecraft's stories are here made manifest, often in graphically disturbing fashion, all of them delineated in a razor-sharp quasi-realistic mode by Jacen Burroughs. It's a spectacular, and spectacularly disturbing, graphic novel that rewards multiple re-readings.

Burroughs's art complements the story beautifully, giving us a Cthulhu Mythos story with both the suggestiveness and the painful exactness necessary to certain sections. The relatively realistic nature of Burroughs's art may be seen as the equivalent of the faux-documentary stretches of many of Lovecraft's finest works, in which an accumulation of 'real' detail from interviews and newspaper articles served the construction of that awful Cthulhuian world.

This collected volume actually contains both the miniseries named Neonomicon and the earlier, shorter set-up, The Courtyard. On a slightly different alternate Earth where the major cities are domed so as to cut down on pollution and the telephones contain fax machines (!), three FBI agents at two different times try to seek out the origins of a strange rise in mass killings by people who seem totally unrelated.

While there are cloachal horrors and sexual horrors awaiting, there are also gratifyingly disturbing moments of weirdness that evoke the sort of cosmic horror Lovecraft strove for throughout his work, a breaking-down of existential categories, a collapse in causality. Moore's humour also plays out, sometimes in perfect harmony with the horror (as one cop says about a disturbing bit of graffitti/art, "I hope that's a tree." It isn't.).

The personal problems of the characters tie directly into the ideas Moore explores in the course of this dark odyssey: The Courtyard's protagonist is a hard-core racist, and his story plays out in the Red Hook district of New York, setting for Lovecraft's early, racist fear-of-miscegenation story, "The Horror at Red Hook." Neonomicon's protagonist is a female FBI agent whose career and personal problems with institutional sexism and exploitation will ultimately play a terrible role in the story's resolution. Lovecraft's stories didn't have female protagonists, and generally didn't have female characters with speaking roles.

This isn't a volume for everyone: it's vicious and boundary-pushing. But it's also an astonishing addition to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Highly recommended.

Arkham and Manchester

Ghosts Know by Ramsey Campbell (2011): What initially seems to be a horror novel soon turns into a murder mystery, with prickly first-person narrator Graham Wilde both the amateur investigator and the prime suspect. Wilde, the host of a Manchester call-in radio show when the novel opens, soon finds himself drawn into the world of "psychic investigators" and into the mysterious disappearance of a female teenager, Kylie Goodchild, who was ostensibly trying to track down Wilde on the night she disappeared.

Wilde's painful childhood has left him with anger-management issues that flare up verbally at unfortunate times. But he's also rightfully angry at a self-proclaimed psychic who inserts himself into the police investigation -- and then points the finger at Wilde, who's become a vociferous critic of such psychics. Wilde demonstrates on a couple of occasions the tricks people such as John Edward use to "read" an audience. And the psychic here, Frank Jarvis, turns out to be an especially odious charlatan whose tricks, Wilde believes with mounting frustration, should be transparent to all.

Campbell's use of first-person narration is solid here, and periodically leads us to question how much we actually trust Wilde and what he's telling us. Such narration also leads to a slightly different narrative voice for Campbell, whose off-beat descriptions of things have to be tailored to his narrator's relatively straightforward way of observing the world. Wilde is much more verbally inclined than he is to the visual, which makes perfect sense given his job.

The mystery aspect of the novel plays scrupulously fair with the reader. It helps, of course, to realize this is a murder mystery, but once one goes back to the relevant earlier sections of the novel, upon the revelation of the culprit, the whole thing has indeed been laid out fairly. There's a decent helping of humour here, both bleak and not-so-bleak. Wilde's callers sometimes seem to be completely addled, while Wilde, when angered, sometimes verges on Yosemite Sam-level outrage that he can barely contain.

As with many of Campbell's works, this one deals in large part with the scars, physical and psychic, of childhood, and the ways in which they have shaped the adults the children become. And one last twist towards the end of the novel comes like a kick in the stomach. Highly recommended.


　

The Watchers Out of Time by August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft (Collected 1974): Besides collecting and keeping in print the stories and letters of H.P. Lovecraft for 30 years at the small press he co-founded, Arkham House, August Derleth also published the work of many other fantasy and horror greats while also maintaining a thriving writing career himself. He's one of fantasy literature's most indispensable figures for Arkham House alone.

Derleth also extrapolated a number of stories from notes, fragments, and sections of letters left by H.P. Lovecraft. This collection actually lists Lovecraft as the primary author (as Derleth himself would have), though there's little here that's actually written by Lovecraft. And I've actually read enough pastiches and homages derived from Lovecraft's Commonplace Book to recognize a couple of examples here.

The bad news is that Derleth's odd love of italics, especially for the concluding paragraph of a story in which terrible things are revealed, is displayed here. Boy, I hate that, and I'm not alone.

The good news is that while Derleth lacks Lovecraft's weird imagination, he can sometimes make up for this with a superior sense of how to depict rural settings and rural residents. Derleth, a regional Wisconsin writer when he wasn't Lovecraft's posthumous Boswell, has a fine eye for natural description. Even a slight story like the first one collected here, "Wentworth's Day", benefits from that studied and accurate creation of an isolated rural world.

Other than a story or two too many about Lovecraft's Innsmouthian hybrid human-amphibians, this is a solid collection. It's also weirdly soothing, which is not something I'd say about Lovecraft's work. The one real debit here is that Derleth's last work, which gives the collection its title, appears here unfinished as it was on Derleth's death in the early 1970's. Given Derleth's own work finishing up Lovecraft, surely someone could have paid Ramsey Campbell or Brian Lumley -- two discoveries of Derleth in the 1960's who are still popular and active writers today -- to complete the story. Preferably without concluding italics and exclamation marks. Recommended.

Memories of Glaaki

The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell (1964; revised edition 2011): Ramsey Campbell's first published book was the Lovecraftian horror collection The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, published by Arkham House in 1964 when Campbell was 18 (!!!). This 2011 anniversary edition from Great Britain's PS Publishing (the anniversary being 50 years since Campbell first put pen to paper on the stories herein) is a terrifically well-produced and generous piece of work.

It's obviously best suited to Campbell completists, but it also offers a great deal of insight into the development of Campbell as a writer and into the methods of H.P. Lovecraft's posthumous Boswell, August Derleth, who co-founded Arkham House to keep HPL's work, and the work of other horror and dark-fantasy writers, alive.

The original cover illustrator actually got the title agreed upon by Campbell and Derleth wrong, as Campbell explains herein. The intended title is restored here. Along with the original contents of the volume, we also get new commentary from Campbell (Derleth died in 1971), the original versions of several of the stories, a story published elsewhere by Arkham House as a 'teaser' for Campbell's collection, and reprints of several of Derleth's letters to Campbell about the stories Campbell had submitted. Oh, and there are extremely apt new illustrations that capture the flavour of such classic Weird Tales illustrators as Lee Brown Coye.

Campbell's still very much a developing writer here, paying homage to the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and other Cthulhu Mythos scribes. But the original and published versions of several of the stories show how quickly Campbell was capable of developing, especially after he took Derleth's career-changing advice and created his own English environment for his Mythos stories.

Campbell's imaginary Cotswolds city of Brichester and its surrounding, demon-haunted towns of Temphill, Goatswood, and Clotton would serve Campbell well as he swiftly moved from pastiche writer to idiosyncratic, unique wordsmith. Campbell's unique narrative viewpoint would develop with great rapidity -- by 1968, he was writing stories that were recognizably 'Campbellian.' But one can see some of that individuality surfacing in this collection; flashes of what's to come.

Campbell's commentary on his own stories depicts a Derleth who was astonishingly generous with his time -- Campbell got Derleth to read several of his stories with a simple letter. It also takes the reader through some of the missteps that remained in the published versions (Campbell notes, for instance, the peculiar ability of a couple of his protagonists to fall asleep in situations during which no normal human would fall asleep, or his peculiar ideas about American regional history that ended up putting a decaying, ancient castle in rural Massachusetts).

But there's a lot that's compelling about these early efforts, especially for anyone interested in the Cthulhu Mythos and/or Ramsey Campbell. And the volume itself from PS Publishing is a handsome piece of work with surprisingly good copy-editing for this day and age. Kudos! Highly recommended.