Review: A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, ed. S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke, 2009.
Is this 1,004 page set of books worth picking up?
Absolutely, if you’re the sort who read Arkham House’s old Selected Letters from Lovecraft. These two volumes have all the extant correspondence between Lovecraft and Howard and not just excerpts of Lovecraft’s side.
(more…)Contributor David Hambling sent me a review copy of this one. As usual, it jumped the review queue.
Review: Tales of Shub-Niggurath, 2025.
There’s an obvious motif and plot element exerting a gravitational pull on any story about Shub-Niggurath, H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic personification of fertility. Somebody is going to end up on an altar in the woods surrounded by cultists and strange creatures. Some of these stories end up there; others skirt that destination, and others avoid it altogether.
Fertility and reproduction aren’t just viewed with ambivalence in our age of Malthus, modernity, and feminism. After all, Lovecraft depicted the dark cult of Shub-Niggurath as an ancient one. Reproduction can come from rape or romance. Families can be forced or fostered with love, children a joy or a burden. It’s that duality that leads to so many stories here having a more varied range of emotions than what you’d expect in a Mythos anthology.
(more…)Review: World’s Fair Deep One, Byron Craft, 2024.
Craft goes backward in his Arkham Detective series for this one since it seemingly takes place right after The Innsmouth Look. The Detective (who, of course, never tells us his name) was still a member of the Arkham Police Department and is looking back 30 years to the events of 1933.
A World’s Fair is being held in Chicago to celebrate the centenary of the city’s founding. The trouble is the fair has been plagued with a series of killings. Chicago has managed to keep it secret, but they’re short on manpower so ask for some assistance from Arkham.
Unsurprisingly, given the title, a Deep One is involved.
(more…)I just finished this one, and it gets an immediate review solely because it has some follow up material to Wynne’s SPECTRA trilogy which I recently looked at.
Los Res Scan: Something in the Water and Other Stories, Douglas Wynne, 2022.
You don’t get any bad stories in this collection. Most are Cthulhu Mythos stories where Wynne offers interesting variations on the plots and motifs you usually see in that subgenre, many featuring aspects of contemporary life. As with the SPECTRA stories, his cultists have broader motivations than you usually see. In a few stories, he approaches the plot cliché of a narrator telling us their tale before being probably consumed by some horror with more realistic detail. In some tales, he has a theme of maternal women’s reaction to brushing up against forces from other dimensions and calculating how best to protect their children.
You can see a glimpse of that theme of mothers in “Rattled”, but I’ve reviewed it before and have little to add.
“Something in the Water” is sort of Wynne’s variation on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, but it’s not Innsmouth here but Dunbury, and we focus not on some hapless traveler discovering horrible secrets but a resident of the town. That would be eleven-year-old Tommy Shayne. He’s curious, helpful, and naïve about what really goes on in Dunbury. We do have some travelers, the Braddocks on their honeymoon en route to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Their car breaks down in Dunbury, and they ignore the offer of a ride from an out-of-towner and his, of course salient, advice not to drink the local water. Instead, they go with Tommy’s helpful advice about a local mechanic and to stay at the Dunbury Inn run by his parents.
(more…)It’s another book involving a policeman (sort of) that I’ve had a review copy of for a while. So, this review got jumped to the head of a long line of pending reviews.
Review: Red Equinox, Douglas Wynne, 2015.
When, at the end of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, he had the denizens of the town hauled off to concentration camps with a cover story about enforcing prohibition, he pointed the way to a modern strain of the Cthulhu Mythos story: linking Yog-Sothothery with espionage and the world of covert military operations. Modern versions include series by Charles Stross and David Conyers. And Wynne’s SPECTRA series, of which this is the initial installment, treads similar ground.
But first we start with family secrets.
Becca Phillips returns to Arkham for the funeral of her grandmother Catherine. She was a noted professor at Miskatonic U.. Becca loved Catherine as the grandmother who raised her after Becca’s mother committed suicide and Becca’s despairing father deserted is daughter. But it seems Catherine was a better grandmother than mother since there are hints Catherine perhaps caused that suicide and her son blamed her academic and occult pursuits for that. If that weren’t enough, Catherine’s own husband died in an insane asylum.
(more…)While there is a three month backlog of reviews to be done around here, some titles have their privilege and get jumped to the head of the line. This is one.
Review: The Book of Ghouls, 2024.
Ghouls are, David Hambling tells us in the introductory “The Book of Ghouls: The Origin Story of Lovecraft’s Eaters of the Dead”, unique among the “monsters” of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. While he eschewed vampires and werewolves and other creatures of traditional horror, he really liked ghouls. They show up in both his Dreamland stories and stories set in the waking world. While he took the idea of ghouls from Arabic folklore by way of French treatments, Lovecraft put his own spin on them. But where are ghouls from? Are they born or made? The writers of these stories often provide their own answers to those questions.
This is not one of Crossroad Press’ Books of Cthulhu where the stories are braided together, so I won’t be reviewing them in order of appearance.
With a C. T. Phipps Mythos story, you’re going to get intricate elaborations of Yog-Sothothery, apocalypticism, and reinforcement of the idea that there are some things you really don’t want to know. You can add snark for “Ethical Consumption”. And why wouldn’t our hero and narrator Rick Jameson be snarky? He’s a college sophomore, winner of Miskatonic University’s Armitage Award in history, stuck traveling with his advisor Professor Niles Warner, grad student Lisa Delapore, and fellow student and friend Karl Butcher. Lisa may be a hot Goth chick Rick would like to bed, but she has a creepy affection for a homicidal and cannibal branch of the family in Ireland. Karl, rich but not the world’s best student, seems to have embraced Warner’s crazy theories. And what are those theories?
(more…)My reading binge of fantastical variations on the private eye sub-genre continues.
The link between detective fiction and the Cthulhu Mythos is, of course, an old one going right back to H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”.
Review: Missing in Miskatonic, JP Behrens, 2024.
In the New York of 1928, our narrator Travis Daniels plys his trade as a private detective. Fortunately, it’s not all spying on cheating spouses. Madam Bina, the old, crazy owner of Keziah’s Curosities, has frequent jobs for him and pays well. (Crazy is, after all, what you would call a woman who says she cuts herself to feed the rats Daniels always hears scurrying around the shop. Right?) The work is just tracking down some antique, seeing if its for sale, and taking a picture of it if it isn’t.
Henchmen of the local mobster Castaigne try to shakedown Daniels down for protection money. But one threatens his beloved Buick Roadmaster, and Daniels lets loose on him. (Nobody touches Daniel’s car or his S&W Model 10 revolver.)
Fortunately, a client shows up. It’s the cadaverously thin Sir Edward Martin Mandeville dressed in an odd black suit and carrying a cane with an odd gem on its top. He offers Daniels $7,000 to find Leslie Owens, his niece. Not that he cares about Leslie at all, but her parents have been bugging him.
Daniels is suspicious. Nobody pays that kind of money to find a missing woman. But, after taking a look at the grinning Mandeville whom, just for a moment, seems to have a mouthful of “needle teeth” and feeling whoozy himself, Daniels takes the job.
(more…)It’s time for this week’s bit of weird fiction to be discussed over at LibraryThing.
Review: “Bringing Helena Back”, Sarah Monette, 2004.
While I’ve given this the “Cthulhu Mythos” tag solely on the basis of appearing in this book, I would really consider it one. First, this is a reprint anthology, and the original story appeared in an anthology called Hallows a magazine called All Hallows, and I don’t know if that’s a Mythos anthology. Second, unless I’m missing something with the titles of the occult tomes mentioned in the story, none of them seemed familiar.
However, it feels like a Lovecraftian story because it combines occult tomes, the resurrection of the dead, and what Darrell Schweitzer has dubbed the “old school chum” plot. Lovecraft used variations of it in “The Hound”, “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, and “From Beyond”. The narrators of those stories are dragged into horrifying events under the psychological dominance of another male friend.
Our narrator is Kyle Murchison Booth. The story opens with him examining an animal skull at his desk when in walks his old – and only – friend Augustus Blaine. Booth – Boothie as Blaine calls him – hasn’t seen his friend in ten years, and he finds him looking ten years older than his age.
(more…)Just in time, it’s this week’s weird fiction being discussed over at LibraryThing.
I certainly never expected to see a Cthulhu Mythos storiy from John Brunner.
Review: “Concerning the Forthcoming Inexpensive Paperback Translation of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred”, John Brunner, 1992.
A lot of this story is establishing the character – and it’s not a very likeable one – of the snobbish, pedantic, isolated, antisocial, reactionary of the narrator Jasper Abraham Wharton.
The story opens with Wharton imprisoned in a mental asylum in America. He is about 50 years and actually British. He is from another Arkham, this one in Marshwood Vale in Dorset County, England. He is unmarried, a man of small income, not given to the pleasures of the flesh, only the pleasures of the mind.
In his twenties, he became acquainted with the Lord Mayor of Dunwich which is in the parish of Arkham, Sir Adrian Peabody. Peabody was very much older than Wharton, a recluse because of some scandal that occurred before Wharton was born. When Peabody died, he willed the “recherché” library his ancestors had acquired over five centuries to Wharton. With the library was a small bequest which Wharton used to build an annex to his home to house the books. Wharton’s house is next door (there’s even a passageway) to the Arkham Public Library where he works as the head librarian.
Wharton is appalled at a reporter asking about the mere “investment value” of the inherited library, and the Peabody house suspiciously burnt down, perhaps to aid real estate investment.
(more…)I’m jumping this to the top of the line so I don’t get any further behind in the reading of David Hambling’s work.
Review: The Book of Hastur, 2024.
Have you seen the Yellow Sign?
Well, you’re going to, a lot, in this book. And that’s not a bad thing.
As someone notes in the “Foreword”, Hastur is one of the most nebulous gods of the Cthulhu Mythos. That’s partly because he passed through other hands before H. P. Lovecraft took him up. He was introduced by Ambrose Bierce in “Haita the Shepherd”. Robert W. Chambers used him as well as Bierce’s land of Carcosa in his The King in Yellow. Lovecraft never concentrated on Hastur in any story. So, the writers here use Hastur in several ways and mostly in the vein of Chambers and not Lovecraft.
C. T. Phipps’ “Weird Tales with Randolph Carter” is thoroughly Lovecraftian though. This Randolph Carter is a pulp writer competing with some other unnamed writer to fictionalize events around Arkham. Carter’s rich and occult-obsessed friend Harley Warren has returned from India with a copy of the Book of Hastur. He’s decoded it and hyped to go to Florida to check out a tomb. He drags Carter along and the events of Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” ensue. Here, though, Carter comes home to find that book waiting for him on his desk. Maybe Harley sent it. Maybe his “new master” did. In any case, the rest of the anthology seems to be tales from that book.
We were promised pulp action, and Phipps’ “Blood Eagle” delivers. It’s a medieval sword-and-sorcery story with our not terribly bright – but greedy – hero Harald Bjornson fleeing after the Viking raiding party his brother Nordi put together was undone in a mutiny. Harald finds himself hungry and on the run on a wooded island where he encounters an ancient monk in a smelly, yellow robe. Sure, he could kill the monk and take his food. He’s a Christian, after all, and Harald doesn’t like Christians. But the monk has a proposal. The island, which belongs to the Lord of Shepherds, is inhabited by some heretics who need killing. If Harald helps him kill them, they’ll be gold, a ship, and maybe a slave girl that was set to be sacrificed. Harald agrees. But the slave woman, the heretics, and the monk are not what they seem.
(more…)