The Reddening (2019) by Adam L.G. Nevill

The Reddening (2019) by Adam L.G. Nevill: Gripping, grueling, visionary work of cosmic folk horror from the author of The Ritual and Last Days. Archaeological discoveries in modern-day Devon draw a grieving sister and a depressed Lifestyle reporter into an ancient mystery and an ancient horror. 

Mysterious underground sounds, a long line of disappearances and unexpected suicides, and the run-down farm of a minor rock-folk star of the 1960's figure in the narrative. So, too, people high and low lacking all empathy.

The mysteries of the ancient cult and its supernatural progenitors are vividly imagined and described, as are the psychologies of protagonists and antagonists alike. While not for the squeamish, the violence is modulated and necessary to the depiction of the cult and to the larger questions about humanity's love for ultra-violence. 

Nevill weaves social commentary into the horrible imaginings, with the worst instincts of humanity being linked to Brexit and austerity measures and the overall rise of xenophobia and fascism throughout the world. It's the sort of novel that justifies my recent blurby observation that Nevill's two clearest forerunners in British horror are James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell. Highly recommended.

The Last Hieroglyph: Volume Five of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith

The Last Hieroglyph:  Volume Five of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith (2010); edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger.

One
Two
Three
Four...

Clark Ashton Smith was a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. With those two, he formed what became known as "The Three Musketeers of Weird Tales" in the late 1920's and 1930's. None of them was the most popular writer for Weird Tales -- that was Seabury Quinn. But in time they would become known as the three finest and most influential American fantasists of their era. 

Smith is the least well-known because he didn't create a fictional universe that others would adopt after him, as Lovecraft did with the Cthulhu Mythos and as Howard did with the world of Conan the Barbarian. His style and subject matter, however, have an incalculable influence and worth. His poetic prose (and Smith was a very good, published poet long before his short story years) testifies to horror, lushness, irony, and moments of grace. 

OK, sometimes it seems like he ate a thesaurus. Maybe three of them. But that's a part of the charm, especially as even Smith's diction can be ironic or satiric, especially when he's just making up words.

Truly remarkable too is that the bulk of Smith's stories were written in a five-year period. It's a burst of creativity almost unrivaled in fantasy literature. Most of the stories he wrote after that burst were based on story ideas he recorded at the time in his Commonplace Book.

In this fifth volume of The Collected Fantasies from Night Shade Press, Smith's creative juices continue to flow before rapidly going dry due to increased family responsibilities and a cessation of the creative forces that made for his incredible five-year burst of greatness. Nonetheless, many fine stories come from his pen, especially before 1939. Almost all the stories, regardless of date of composition or publication, began as entries in Smith's Commonplace Book of the early 1930's.

Note on bracketed categories:

• Averoigne: Fictional, demon-haunted French province during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
• Zothique: The "last continent" of Earth, uncounted millions or billions of years in the future.
• Hyperborea: The ancient civilized kingdoms of humanity prior to the last Ice Age.
• Poseidonis: Last city of sinking Atlantis.
• Cthulhu Mythos: A number of Smith's stories could be set within H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, especially those set during the time of Hyperborea and those featuring the dark god Tsathoggua. Well, and those mentioning Eibon or The Book of Eibon. Or Ubbo-Sathla. However, only those stories that are definitely Cthulhu Mythos stories are indicated.
• Malygris: Stories that involve the great Poseidonis mage Malygris (See also The Last Incantation, Vol. 1)

Contains the following stories and essays (All dates are publication, not composition -- the five volumes are arranged in order of publication)

1. Introduction by Richard A. Lupoff
2. A Note on the Texts
3. The Dark Age (1938) : Mournful science-fiction story about the descent of (a) Dark Age. 
4. The Death of Malygris [Malygris] (1934) ESSENTIAL. Posthumous revenge for one of Smith's mighty, malign sorcerers.
5. The Tomb-Spawn [Zothique] (1934) : Bleak horror tale of the last continent.
6. The Witchcraft of Ulua [Zothique] (1934) ESSENTIAL. Erotic, ironic tale of an innocent young man, a malign queen, and the thankful intercession of the man's magical uncle.
7. The Coming of the White Worm (Chapter IX of the Book of Eibon) [Hyperborea] (1941)  ESSENTIAL. Brilliant tale of the descending Ice Age at the end of the Age of Hyperborea. 
8. The Seven Geases [Hyperborea] (1934) ESSENTIAL. A droll, horrifying tale of malign justice directed at a very annoying nobleman.
9. The Chain of Aforgomon (1935) : Contemporary horror in the vein of the Cthulhu Mythos.
10. The Primal City (1934) : Weird, minor lost city tale. 
11. Xeethra [Zothique] (1934) : Almost a prose poem of Zothique, very atmospheric and melancholy.
12. The Last Hieroglyph [Zothique] (1935) ESSENTIAL. Brilliant, almost post-modern tale of gods, destiny, and... writing?
13. Necromancy in Naat [Zothique] (1936) ESSENTIAL. Moody and melancholy, but also a satisfying tale of revenge and love beyond the grave.
14. The Treader of the Dust (1935) ESSENTIAL. Another white guy reads the wrong spells from the wrong book. Horrifying decay and disintegration are marvelously expressed in Smith's prose. In the vein of the Cthulhu Mythos.
15. The Black Abbot of Puthuum [Zothique] (1936) ESSENTIAL. The closest Smith ever came to writing a Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sword-and-sorcery tale. A lot of funny, and surprisingly ribald.
16. The Death of Ilalotha [Zothique] (1937) : Minor horror tale with a memorable final few paragraphs.
17. Mother of Toads [Averoigne] (1938) ESSENTIAL. Erotic horror story. Genuinely creepy and disturbing, especially if you don't like toads.
18. The Garden of Adompha [Zothique] (1938) ESSENTIAL. This time the plants are the good guys! Some very curious erotica here at times.
19. The Great God Awto (1940) : Mild parody of Smith' hated automobile culture.
20. Strange Shadows (1984) : Attempt at a more contemporary (for 1941), flippant 'Unknown Magazine' style doesn't work, which may explain why it was not published for more than 40 years after composition.
21. The Enchantress of Sylaire [Averoigne] (1941) : Funny, erotic tale of Averoigne, witches, werewolves, and love rejected and found.
22. Double Cosmos (1983) : Minor alternate dimension story. 
23. Nemesis of the Unfinished (1984) : Very minor bit of 'horror' about writer's block.
24. The Master of the Crabs [Zothique] (1948) : Funny, grotesque tale of crabs and treasure and magic. 
25. Morthylla [Zothique] (1953) : Minor, mournful tale of the last continent. 
26. Schizoid Creator (1953) : Another stab at Unknown Magazine dark fantasy.
27. Monsters in the Night (1954) ESSENTIAL. Much-anthologized piece uncharacteristic of Smith's prose style.
28. Phoenix (1954) : Bradburyesque science-fiction story anticipates Danny Boyle's Sunshine, among other things.
29. The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles [Satampra Zeiros/ Hyperborea] (1958)  ESSENTIAL. Smith's lovable thief from his early story "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" returns for a curtain call. 
30. Symposium of the Gorgon (1958) : Minor drollery.
31. The Dart of Rasasfa (1984) : Very slight parody of Gernsbackian scifi of the 1920's. 
32. Story Notes
33. Variant Temptation Scenes from "The Witchcraft of Ulua"
34. "The Traveler" (1922) : poem
35. Material Removed from "The Black Abbot of Puthuum"
36. Alternate Ending to "I Am Your Shadow" 
37. Alternate Ending to "Nemesis of the Unfinished" 
38. Bibliography

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness (1987): written and directed by John Carpenter (writer's credit to 'Martin Quatermass'); starring Donald Pleasence (Priest), Jameson Parker (Brian Marsh), Victor Wong (Professor Birack), Lisa Blount (Catherine Danforth), and Dennis Dun (Walter): 

John Carpenter's ode to cosmic horror also nods to Nigel Kneale's quintessential 1950's BBC Quatermass serials that became movies in the 1950's and 1960's, most specifically Quatermass and the Pit, aka Five Million Years to Earth. It's not just the subject matter of Prince of Darkness that cues us to the Quatermass connection. Carpenter adopts the pseudonym 'Martin Quatermass' for the screenplay.

The quantum physics is completely ludicrous if you've done any reading in the subject at all. Especially as we're shown what is supposed to be a graduate class in theoretical physics. But Carpenter is pitching his cosmic horror to a general audience, so we'll give him a pass. I'm not sure I can give him a pass on Jameson Parker's mustache, though, or his character's early, stalkery behaviour. Oh well. We don't always get Kurt Russell as the protagonist of a John Carpenter film. But we should!

Basically, there's a jar of liquid Satan in the basement of an old church in Los Angeles. The last keeper-priest of the church has died. Even the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy has forgotten about the church, the secret order named The Brotherhood of Sleep, and, you know, JAR OF SATAN. 

JAR OF SATAN

The great Donald Pleasence, named only 'Priest' in the credits, travels to meet with quantum physicist Victor Wong. The RCC wants scientific proof that the Jar of Satan is actually a Jar of Satan before they proceed with trying to avert the rapidly approaching apocalypse.

Why is the apocalypse coming? Well, the Satan Jar seems to be awake and trying to either escape the jar or reincarnate itself somehow.

Shenanigans ensue over the course of one bad weekend with the Jar of Satan. Certain things are underwhelming, but the underlying pseudo-scientific explanation for evil -- that it was an invading force for another universe -- is suitably cosmic and disturbing. 

Kudos also to Carpenter for being here and in other films far ahead of the Hollywood curve in hiring Asian-Americans in non-traditional roles. It's an underlooked trait of his oeuvre. Also, Victor Wong is always hilarious, even when he's explaining Quantum Physics for Dummies. Highly recommended.

Black Wings of Cthulhu 5 (2016) edited by S.T. Joshi

Black Wings of Cthulhu 5 (2016) edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following stories:

• Plenty of Irem by Jonathan Thomas
• Diary of a Sane Man by Nicole Cushing
• The Woman in the Attic by Robert H. Waugh
• Far from Any Shore by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• In Blackness Etched, My Name by W. H. Pugmire
• Snakeladder by Cody Goodfellow
• The Walker in the Night by Jason C. Eckhardt
• In Bloom by Lynne Jamneck
• The Black Abbess by John Reppion
• The Quest by Mollie L. Burleson
• A Question of Blood by David Hambling
• Red Walls by Mark Howard Jones
• The Organ of Chaos by Donald Tyson
• Seed of the Gods by Donald R. Burleson
• Fire Breeders by Sunni K Brock
• Casting Fractals by Sam Gafford
• The Red Witch of Chorazin by Darrell Schweitzer
• The Oldies by Nancy Kilpatrick
• Voodoo by Stephen Woodworth
• Lore by Wade German

Another year, another superior Black Wings anthology of cosmic horror from editor S.T. Joshi. The 'of Cthulhu' is added to the trade paperback editions of these anthologies for commercial considerations, by the way. The hardcovers, per the originating H.P. Lovecraft quote, are simply Black Wings.

As is usual for Joshi anthologies, the stories range from good to excellent. Familiar names that include Caitlin Kiernan, W.H. Pugmire, and Darrell Schweitzer offer up superior tales of dark gods and that menacing, indifferent universe of cosmic dread. Sunni Brock offers a fresh take on Innsmouth, complete with what seems like a nod to the Japanese horror story that would become the American movie Dark Water (that story being "Floating Water" by Koji Suzuki). Schweitzer offers an ambitiously circular mise en abyme. Kiernan's background in paleontology informs the unfortunate findings of her characters. 

There's a sarcastic cheekiness to Nancy Kilpatrick's "The Oldies" that doesn't undermine the horror of its collision of Old Gods and traumatized people. As flies to wanton boys, and all that jazz. Jonathan Thomas (The Color Over Occam) offers a wry visit to Lovecraft's Kingsport that nods to the odd festival held there, and its odder participants, in a story whose droll tone resembles that of a vintage Clark Ashton Smith story like "The Seven Geases" or "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros." 

A couple of stories -- John Reppion's "The Black Abbess" and David Hambling's "A Question of Blood" specifically -- don't quite stick their landings as they embrace a little too much lack of closure. Still, they're worth reading, as the anthology is as a whole. And Wade German's concluding poem is a nice touch, especially given Lovecraft's embrace of weird poetry. Highly recommended.

Der Farbe/ The Colour [Out Of Space] (2010)

Der Farbe/ The Colour [Out Of Space] (2010): written and directed by Huan Vu; adapted from the story by H.P. Lovecraft; starring Ingo Heise (Jonathan Davis), Marco Leibnitz (Armin Pierske - young) and Michael Kausch (Armin Pierske - old): Deliberately paced, excellent German adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's pivotal 1920's tale of cosmic horror and bodily degeneration "The Colour Out Of Space."

The film-makers relocate much of the action to pre-WWII Germany, with an American prologue in and around Lovecraft's demon-haunted Arkham, Massachusetts. 

This transplant is a good idea because the German actors do occasionally have problems with a convincing American accent. On the other hand, Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a much worse American accent than any of the Germans in his portrayal of Dr. Strange, so perhaps throwing brickbats at the German amateurs here is a bit wanky on the part of the cranky wankers of Internet nitpickery.

Another good idea was to film everything in black and white except for the titular colour. This makes for a creepy contrast that rises above the very limited visual effects. The film-makers also compensate for a lack of funds by suggesting and implying rather than showing. This makes the horror more horrific when it comes. Would that all horror movies took such care regardless of budget!

I really liked the increasingly haunted and hollow look of the actors in the Pre-War section. They face a contamination from Outside that no one could be prepared for. Ants in a meaningless cosmos, some of them believe they are being punished by the Judeo-Christian God. Ha ha! As if you're that lucky you poor bastards!

The DVD, procured from our friends at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS), has the most interesting (and necessary) sub-titling mode I've encountered -- English sub-titles on only when people speak German. Unless you're fluent in German, use it. 

In all, this is an impressive piece of horror movie-making regardless of the budget. It's not intentionally 'retro' as the two movies actually produced by the HPLHS are, but the black and white certainly makes it feel partially retro, though the performances are pretty modern. A movie like this or the HPLHS Joints should show aspiring film-makers what can be done without a budget. Highly recommended.

Dagon (1968) by Fred Chappell

Dagon (1968) by Fred Chappell: Chappell has long been a respected Southern writer with academic ties. But he's also been a periodic contributor to the vast shared universe inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Dagon is his one novel-length foray into Lovecraftiana. And boy, it is not what one expects, not hardly!

Dagon begins by looking like one of those Lovecraft homages (think Stephen King's "Jerusalem's Lot") in which a man returns to his ancestral home to discover that he has some family tie to horrifying secrets. The HPL Ur-text for this is "The Rats In the Walls." Our preacher-protagonist returns to the family farm in the American South to work on a theology text. His luminous, often sarcastic wife accompanies him.

Almost immediately, our protagonist begins to be haunted by strange dreams and visions and compulsions, all tied to the tenant family also living on the rural property. They're vaguely fishy looking. Literally. 

Someone familiar with HPL's universe will almost immediately think, "Oh oh. They've got the Innsmouth Look!" Yes. Yes they do. And this will indeed prefigure what comes, though not in any 'normal' way when it comes to stories that nod to HPL's Deep Ones.

About a third of the way through this short novel, things make a dramatic and unexpected shift into something startling and horrible. I did not see it coming. Probably, neither will you. What follows is something that still seems radical for a Cthulhu Mythos text, if a Cthulhu Mythos text this is. Certainly the eponymous Lovecraftian water god, borrowed from the Babylonians by HPL, is involved, as are mentions of Lovecraftian texts and deities. And an early HPL tale bears the same title.

What occupies Chappell in the last two-thirds of Dagon is an exploration of the aberrant psychology of someone trapped by an ancestral association with non-traditional Evil, gradually stripped of all free will and agency, gradually broken down into a sacrificial victim. But what kind of sacrifice? Telling more would be telling too much. It may not even be Objective Evil -- it may just be Subjective Evil and Objective Other.

Dagon is not for everyone. It is excruciating, depressing, and horrifying. It takes some of its inspiration from the mental transmogrifications we see in the narrator at the end of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and then goes far beyond that, beyond even the dismal mental destruction of the narrator of the aforementioned "The Rats In the Walls." 

Throughout this dark descent, we're guided by third-person narration, not the first-person narration of the above two stories. Chappell maintains a bit of narrative distance so as to allow for a more clinical observation of a mind in the midst of destruction and debasement. And when the ending comes -- well, it too is unexpected and very much both a nod to HPL and a sort of perfection of the ruthless cosmicism of some of HPL's works.

This is a brilliant, disturbing, exhausting novel. Rewarding to the extreme, but I couldn't blame anyone for throwing it into the fireplace without finishing it. This is about as dark as it gets. Highly recommended.

IT (1990, 2017)

It (1990): adapted from the 1986 Stephen King novel by Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen; directed by Tommy Lee Wallace; starring Harry Anderson/ Seth Green (Richie Tozier), Dennis Christopher/ Adam Faraizi (Eddie Kaspbrak), Richard Masur/ Ben Heller (Stanley Uris), Annette O'Toole/ Emily Perkins (Bev Marsh), Tim Reid/ Marlon Taylor (Mike Hanlon), John Ritter/ Brandon Crane (Ben Hanscom), Richard Thomas/ Jonathan Brandis (Bill Denbrough), and Tim Curry (Pennywise): 

It (2017): adapted by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Andy Muschietti; starring Bill Skarsgard (Pennywise), Jaeden Lieberher (Bill), Jeremy Ray Taylor (Ben), Sophia Lillis (Bev), Finn Wolfhard (Richie), Chosen Jacobs (Mike), Jack Dylan Grazer (Eddie), and Wyatt Oleff (Stanley):

The 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's It is more faithful to the book in many ways, even allowing for the fact that the miniseries tells the whole story while the 2017 movie deals only with the childhood sections of the novel. In the miniseries, British Columbia plays Derry, Maine while the real-world locations for the movie are mostly located in Ontario, Canada. Hmm.

The faithfulness of the miniseries does lead to a certain breathlessness at points, as the filmmakers cram an astonishing amount of the novel into about three hours. Why didn't ABC make It a six- or eight-hour miniseries? No idea. Without commercials, the miniseries clocks in at about 187 minutes, less than an hour longer than the 2017 movie while tackling the entire novel. That's some impressive condensation!

The performances by both the children and the adults the children grow into are good, for the most part, with Brandon Crane as a young Ben Hanscom especially seeming truer to Ben's physical appearance in the book than Jeremy Ray Taylor in the 2017 movie. We will not go on at length about the ponytail sported by Richard Thomas as the adult Bill Denbrough except to say that it is immensely distracting. Tim Reid is especially impressive as the adult Mike Hanlon. Yes, Venus Flytrap from WKRP. John Ritter is also pitch-perfect as the adult Ben Hanscom. 

One of the oddities of the miniseries is that Harry Anderson as the adult Richie Tozier towers over the other characters (Anderson is 6'4" while Ritter was 5'11" and Thomas is a shade below 5'9"), which seems weird if one has read the novel. Ah, Hollywood. 

Movie It's Jeremy Ray Taylor's Ben Hanscom seems about six inches too short for his character, and lacks the character-defining sweatshirts of his novel and miniseries counterparts, though only the novel explains the significance of a 'fat' kid wearing sweatshirts even in the hottest weather. Both miniseries and movie could use more character-building like this, as just the sweatshirt stuff in the novel makes Ben more poignant while also showing the young Richie Tozier's combination of insight and crude bonhomie.

The miniseries also hews closer to the age of the children in the novel while the movie up-aged them by a couple of years. Tim Curry's Pennywise is a brasher, less physically startling Pennywise than Bill Skarsgard's, though neither actor really captures the novel's idea that Pennywise should be appealing at first meeting. Their Pennywises are just creepy and scary all the time, a decision made by the directors, I'd assume. An ingratiating John Candy would have probably made the best Pennywise.

The miniseries leaves the truly cosmic origins of It (the creature) mostly untouched. Supposedly, the next movie will actually delve into this. I'll be interested to see how that goes. Both the movie and the miniseries do admirable jobs of adapting King's work. I'd guess that most people who saw the miniseries last when it aired probably remember it as beginning, as with the movie, with Georgie's fateful encounter with Pennywise in the storm drain. 

Not so! And it's not a puzzling choice, as the miniseries has to set up the dual timelines of its plot immediately. But it did seem a little Mandela Effect for a moment as I rewatched the miniseries for the first time in 28 years. Live and learn. Both miniseries and movie: recommended.

Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows

Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows: 

Alan Moore called Providence a version of his own Watchmen for the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. I think he's wrong. It's much more like his terrific Jack the Ripper saga From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell. There's a wealth of factual material especially as related to HPL's own life here, along with an almost encyclopedic tour through all of Lovecraft's fiction. The deadly Boston molasses flood shows up in one issue. That was a real thing !!! The ghouls who got sugar-coated corpses because of it, maybe not so real. I hope.

Technically, Providence is simply named for HPL's beloved home town in Rhode Island. The title accretes other meanings as the story proceeds. 

For the first ten issues, we follow the adventures of Robert Black during the year 1920. He's a closeted gay man who has left his New York reporting job after the death of his lover to research various elements of New England legends and folklore.

Black's name riffs on Lovecraft pen-pal Robert Bloch, who would create Psycho, among other things. Like Bloch, Black originally hails from Wisconsin. Black's homosexuality plays on that of several other Lovecraft 'disciples,' some of whom (all of whom?) appear at least briefly in Providence.

The graphic novel rewards multiple readings and punishes the short attention span. Like Watchmen, Providence increases the density of its narrative by including lengthy prose pieces at the back of the comic book. This is Moore's densest comic-book work since From Hell with its 100+pages of appendices.

All one really needs to know is, um, all of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, no. Indeed, it would be interesting to tackle HPL's work AFTER reading Providence. Be sure to tell me how that goes if you try it!

The world of Providence isn't meant to be ours. One of the fascinating metafictional herein is Moore's use of the work of Robert W. Chambers, one of the acknowledged precursors to HPL in American horror. In the world of Providence there is no Chambers because elements of Chambers' stories exist in the real world -- most notably, state-sanctioned suicide booths. 

But Lovecraft himself exists, and is a writer. And he's about to start writing that crazy Cthulhu Mythos stuff after apprenticing with Poe-influenced horror and works inspired by the wide-ranging whimsies of Lord Dunsany (who also appears as a character).

William S. Burroughs also briefly appears. The anecdote connecting Burroughs and one of HPL's disciples? That's totally true!

Moore's approach to the story privileges psychological and bodily horrors over those of the cosmic. This is a very cloachal approach to HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. The starkest moments of horror, three of them spaced throughout the book, deal with rape as the defining sin of cosmic horror. Providence is not for the squeamish. But the rape scenes are justified, and there's nothing risible about them. They're deeply horrifying.

One of the key structural elements of Providence is the format (and the idea) of the Commonplace Book. Robert Black keeps one on his journeys, containing both things he finds along the way (including a hilarious church newsletter) and his own musings. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. And Providence combines fact, fiction, comics, written sections, and an overwhelming array of different covers to give the work some flavour of the Commonplace. Make of all of this what you will. Providence rewards patient study.

To tell much more would be to give something away. Technically, Providence is both prequel and sequel to Moore and Burrows' The Courtyard and Neonomicon. Search them out! 

As to Burrows' art -- it's perfectly suited to Moore's cold, clinical eye in Providence. It's a horror equivalent of Dave Gibbons' straightforward, subtle art on Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. Burrows can draw horrible imaginings with great skill, but he's at his best throughout Providence giving the reader the creeps by being matter-of-fact and (seemingly) representational.

Oh, and the ghouls. Moore and Burrows' ghouls are unlike their forebears in HPL's own work. They're a terrific, funny, strangely lovable creation. Not that you would ever, ever want to meet them, in a subway station or a graveyard or in your own living room. In all, Providence is horrifying, sad, funny, satirical, scathing work from one of comic-book-writing's Grandmasters. Highest recommendation.

Born To the Dark (Book Two of The Three Births of Daoloth) (2017) by Ramsey Campbell

Born To the Dark (Book Two of The Three Births of Daoloth) (2017) by Ramsey Campbell: In The Searching Dead (2016), narrator Dominick Sheldrake told of his early teen-aged years in 1952 Liverpool. Along with friends Roberta (Bobby) and Jim, Dominick encountered increasingly weird occult occurrences, though by the end of the book he alone faced the final horrors. 

Now it's 1985 and Dominick is all grown up, teaching film studies at a Liverpool college, married, with a five-year-old son. But the son has a curious sleep disorder. A nurse recommends a new clinic specializing in successful treatment of this disorder. And Dominick finds himself plunged into new iterations of the horrors of the past.

Ramsey Campbell is at the height of his multitudinous powers in this, the middle novel of The Three Births of Daoloth. Narrated again at some time after the events of the novel by Dominick, Born To the Dark is cosmic horror amplified by Sheldrake's fears for his son, his friends, and his sanity. We view much of the cosmic terror through Sheldrake's son's descriptions of his dreams and the strange things and events lurking there. Somehow, this makes it worse.

Like many protagonists of horror novels, Dominick struggles to find someone -- anyone -- who will believe his story. And he also struggles with the consequences of telling his wife and others about the cosmic threat that seemingly only he sees: paranoia, abandonment, the threat of divorce, the threat of police action, public humiliation...

But this isn't simply psychological horror about an unjustifiably paranoid narrator. Something is coming, something worse than whatever it is that's already there. The novel climaxes with a lengthy journey into a place being undermined by an invading reality. And with a third book to go, there are (as Manly Wade Wellman once observed) Worse Things Waiting.

The characterization of Dom and the other characters is sharp, the mood and description unnerving throughout. As in many of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal tales of cosmic horror, Born To the Dark gives us a protagonist who continues to attempt to stop a rising tide of horror that is almost certainly beyond his powers to stop. Yet he persists. Highly recommended.

From a Buick 8 (2002) by Stephen King

From a Buick 8 (2002) by Stephen King: King's closest foray into what people now call the New Weird. Sort of. From a Buick 8 is as the very least a foray into the cosmic in which the horror elements are reined in, making Cosmic Mystery rather than Cosmic Terror the order of the day.

Circumstances leave Pennsylvania State Troop D with a bizarre automobile stored in a shed. It was left at a gas station by a creepy looking fellow. Its design is just enough off-normal to make it disturbing. And a quick check of its engine -- or its dashboard -- reveals that it shouldn't be able to run. Stamped on the engine block are the words 'Buick 8,' though the troopers will come over the years to call it a Buick Roadmaster. And on its first day in storage back in 1979, a veteran officer disappears off the face of the Earth, never to be seen again.

Stylistically, this is one of King's great achievements. Several first-person narrators (with one primary narrator) tell the story of the Buick Roadmaster over the course of one long night in 2001. The narrative voices are separate and distinct, and the rhythms of the telling approximate the stops and starts of oral storytelling. They're telling a ghost story around a campfire, but there's no fire and the ghost is real -- and not something as simple as a ghost.

There are a number of effective horror scenes scattered throughout the narrative, mostly rooted in Fear of the Unknown. In many ways, From a Buick 8 is a lengthy riff on H.P. Lovecraft's seminal "The Colour Out of Space." But this time it's a car -- a car whose paint colour doesn't seem quite right to any of those who look at it.

King avoids the third-act problems of many of his more science-fictiony novels here by avoiding any final explanation for the presence and purpose of the Buick Roadmaster. Where Under the Dome or The Tommyknockers sputtered out at the end with disappointing explanations, From a Buick 8 roars off into the silence, unexplained and unknowable. Highly recommended.

My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) by Thomas Ligotti

My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) by Thomas Ligotti, containing the short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done and the short stories "I Have A Special Plan For This World" and "The Nightmare Network.": Frank Dominio hates his job as a mid-level project manager in a nameless city. And he's going to get screwed over by his immediate superior and his fellow managers. And then he's going to get revenge.

Supernatural revenge. Crazy, weird supernatural revenge in which the punishment fits the crime, sort of. Because nothing here works all that well in the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy -- it's not Falling Down or 9 to 5 or The Office. It's existentially bleak horror comedy from Thomas Ligotti, the king of existentially bleak horror comedy.

As almost always, Ligotti can be droll and blackly humourous without detracting from the abysmal horror of the work. My Work Is Not Yet Done and the two short stories in this volume all imagine a workplace environment of utter, soul-crushing horror. Which is to say, the workplace a lot of people spend a lot of their lives within. 

My Work Is Not Yet Done's protagonist, narrating in first-person, isn't necessarily a sympathetic figure. But sympathy isn't necessary because he's fascinating, flawed, fractured, and more than a little self-loathing. And his adventures in revenge take him further and further into a world of absolute Night. 

Ligotti's stories don't take place in a meaningless universe, in general -- they take place in a universe in which human beings are meaningless except insofar as they entertain the vast bleak powers of that universe. There's a reason Ligotti's stories return again and again to sinister puppets and marionettes (and there's one here too).

Ligotti's style -- droll, incantatory, spotted with repeated phrases that become almost meaningless placeholders at times (to bleak effect) -- is in full bloom here, full bloom at night. He's not a popular writer, but those who like him, like him a lot. And the writers he cites as his main influences -- H.P. Lovecraft, Franz Kafka, and Nabokov -- can be seen in his own work, transmuted by his own peculiar sensibilities. He's one of a handful of the greatest horror writers of the last 50 years. Highly recommended.

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909)

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909): William Hope Hodgson's brilliant short novel of the sea and its terrors is a fine, tightly plotted work of horror and disquieting weirdness. A careful, fairly slow build of suspense climaxes in a rapid-fire and horrifying climax. 

Hodgson's early days as a merchant sailor come into full play in this tale of the cargo ship Mortzestus, plying the seas some time early in the 20th century or late in the 19th. The Mortzestus is a sailing ship on an Atlantic run. But she's also a ship whose crews have felt her to be more and more strange as the years have passed. And strange she is, and becoming moreso.

The joys of The Ghost Pirates lie in a lot of areas, from the unusual but intelligibly delivered dialects of the sailors (and of this particular sailing milieu itself, really) to the gradual but accelerating accumulation of details and events that give the novel its name. 

From the beginning, we know something has happened -- the narrative is framed as being the written testimony of Jessop, last survivor of the Mortzestus. Jessop has been rescued by another ship. Rescued from what? Well, that's why there's a novel.

The Ghost Pirates is one of two Hodgson weird novels of the sea (The Boats of the Glen Carrig is the other). Hodgson also wrote dozens of other stories set at sea, from comic pieces to thrillers to horror and the supernatural. He also wrote in a sub-genre I'd probably call 'Fictional Sea Cryptids,' tales of unusual animals and other... things... which come into conflict with human beings. 

The Ghost Pirates is part ghost story, part cryptid fiction, part pseudo-scientific horror story. Perhaps. Jessop offers an explanation for the events of the novel that's not a tale of actual ghosts, but he doesn't necessarily know what really caused the events of the novel. 

Nonetheless, Jessop's quasi-scientific explanation of the horrors he and the rest of the crew of the Mortzestus are beset by is in line with many of Hodgson's other stories and novels in which supernatural events are given disturbing, visionary, cosmic explanations. A model of narrative economy, The Ghost Pirates is one of the treasures of weird fiction. Highly recommended.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer (With these contents 2010) by Thomas Ligotti

Songs of a Dead Dreamer (With these contents 2010) by Thomas Ligotti, in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (2015). Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer; containing the following stories:

The Frolic • (1982)
Les Fleurs • (1981)
Alice's Last Adventure • (1985)
Dream of a Manikin • (1982)
The Nyctalops Trilogy, consisting of The Chymist • (1981), Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes • (1982), and Eye of the Lynx • (1983)
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story • (1985)
The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe • (1983)
The Lost Art of Twilight • (1986)
The Troubles of Dr. Thoss • (1985)
Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie • (1986
Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech • (1983)
Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror • (1985)
Dr. Locrian's Asylum • (1987)
The Sect of the Idiot • (1988)
The Greater Festival of Masks • (1985)
The Music of the Moon • (1987)
The Journal of J.P. Drapeau • (1987)
Vastarien • (1987) 


Songs of a Dead Dreamer first appeared in 1985 as Thomas Ligotti's first short-story collection. Its contents changed in different editions over the years. In this Penguin 'Double,' paired with Grimscribe, his second collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer uses the same contents as the 2010 Subterranean Press edition.

Ligotti is a relatively unknown quantity outside horror fiction -- his biggest career exposure came as people on-line debated whether or not he'd been plagiarized in the first season of True Detective to supply Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle with all his best lines.

Prior to that, Ligotti was a mysterious figure. After that, he was also a mysterious figure. His reclusiveness isn't at the level of Pynchon or Salinger, but it's still remarkable in today's media-saturated age. His stories and essays tell the story. He doesn't write novels, though he has written one fairly long novella (My Work is Not Yet Done). He's certainly not for everybody, but then again, what writer is?

Ligotti's literary universe, already distinctly Ligottian early in his career, resembles something assembled in a laboratory from pieces of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges. Then someone threw in an obsession with puppets, mannequins, and marionettes. Then someone set Phasers to Nihilism and roasted everything for about an hour. And that doesn't really describe his corpus all that well. He's got a more noticeable sense of humour than the four named authors, for one. Poe occasionally had a similar sense of humour in his blackly comic stories, but he didn't tend to exhibit that sense of humour in his horror stories. Ligotti often does.

But while there will always be attempts to classify Ligotti as Weird (including one by Weird spokesman Jeff VanderMeer in his clumsy, vague introduction to this Penguin volume), he's horror all the way down. His narrative structure and voice sometimes seem more Absurdist than horrific, but next to Ligotti, Kafka and other absurdists look like Pollyannas. 

There are no happy endings in these stories. There aren't even any points where one can imagine that anyone, anywhere is happy, or fulfilled, or anything other than Totally Damned except when that person is fulfilled by doing terrible things to other people. The biggest positive moral triumph in any of these stories comes when a mind-blasted person manages to kill himself, leaving a "victorious corpse" as a rebuke to his nemesis, a nemesis which is in actuality the personification of the Universe as a malign chaos at eternal play with everything that composes its body. That's a happy ending. 

For all that nihilism, the stories are exhilarating, witty, unique, intellectually challenging, aesthetically pleasing, and often bleakly hilarious. Ligotti riffs on predecessors such as H.P. Lovecraft and genre tropes such as vampirism at certain points ("The Cult of the Idiot" posits a cult devoted to Lovecraft's burbling, bubbling, atomic chaos of an idiot god Azathoth; "Alice's Last Adventure" bounces Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl and several other writers off some very hard and unforgiving walls; "The Lost Art of Twilight" makes vampires both horrible and absurd). 

Throughout, Ligotti offers short stories with enough Big Ideas to support entire novels. Ligotti may not write novels, but he certainly doesn't write miniatures. Stories such as "Vastarien" and "Les Fleurs" supply massive mythologies in Fun-Size form. And "The Frolic" presents one of the most annoying and tired of modern horror tropes, the antic and seemingly omniscient serial killer, in such a fresh and sinister way that in other hands it would have supported a trilogy. 

"The Frolic" is the first story in the collection and it's a killer -- a serial killer who makes Hannibal Lecter and his ilk look like the tired pop contrivances that they are and a horror mostly implied that clutches the heart. "The Frolic" also showcases a relative rarity for Ligotti as 'normal' suburban characters are set off against the horror of the world. It could almost be a Charles Beaumont or T.E.D. Klein story except for the bleak, nihilistic cosmic vistas described by the serial killer. 

Songs of a Dead Dreamer is an extraordinary collection, one that does indeed make one nervous about the realities of, well, reality. If your perfect model of horror runs to Stephen King (or John Saul, gods help you), then one should probably avoid this collection -- or buy it and shake yourself up. To lift Buzz Aldrin's phrase about the Moon, this is Magnificent Desolation. But Jesus, does Ligotti love puppets. Highly recommended.

The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein (1984)

The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein (1984): The Ceremonies isn't the greatest horror novel ever written, but it may be the greatest horror novel ever written in which the stakes are the survival of the world. There were a lot of those apocalyptic and pre-apocalyptic horror novels in the late 1970's and 1980's, during the later nuclear-war-fear years. I'd probably give the edge to The Ceremonies over all of them, 1980's or otherwise, though Ramsey Campbell's The Hungry Moon and Midnight Sun would offer stiff competition.

T.E.D. Klein is a Top-Ten American horror-writing talent despite his meager output: this novel; the four novellas collected in Dark Gods (1985); the novella The Ceremonies is based on, "The Events at Poroth Farm" (1973); and maybe 200 pages of ephemera. Horror readers sit and wait, hoping that second novel announced in 1985 will some day see publication.

The Ceremonies looms large for a number of reasons. It's beautifully written. Its allusions, intertexts, and interpolations of what sometimes seems to be the entire history of horror fiction are fascinating, keenly observed, and essential to the unfolding of the plot. The plot itself is expertly machined, building slowly until the climax explodes in the last thirty pages or so. The characterization of players minor and major is deft and witty and occasionally heart-breaking. The novel follows certain tropes and conventions while exploding others along the way. It's structurally and stylistically complex in an unshowy manner -- its use of three distinct, linked narrative streams in three different voices and tenses, for one, has thematic significance that only dawns on the reader gradually as the novel and its voices accumulate in one's head to increasingly disturbing effect. And it's capable of both cosmic uneasiness and gross-out horror, the latter used sparingly but to great effect, especially in the climactic scenes.

To appreciate The Ceremonies fully, one should read at least some of the texts it interacts with. But if one doesn't do so, one of the main characters labours away on a graduate English thesis on horror fiction throughout the novel. Along the way, we get his thoughts on texts ranging from The Castle of Otranto to The Haunting of Hill House. Some of these texts are important to the novel as a whole. All of the observations are, at the very least, interesting. Some are even hilarious. Because one can certainly agree with the protagonist's view that The Castle of Otranto sucks, or that Dracula stops being interesting once the novel exits Transylvania.

The protagonist of the novel, Jeremy Freirs, takes lodging on a farm near the small New Jersey town of Gilead for the summer in order to finish his M.A. thesis. His landlords are Sarr and Deborah Poroth, members of a small Christian sect that settled in the area more than a hundred years earlier. The sect bears some resemblance to the Pennsylvania Dutch or the Amish, though the Poroths have a truck and indoor plumbing. But it's not the Poroths or their sect or even Jeremy that are the real problem. 

The real problem is something that waited in the surrounding woods for 5000 years to be born again, something that spent centuries clinging to a tree branch in the distorted heart of a section of the forest initially called by the adjacent Native Americans "The Place of Burning." No one ever lived there or near there until settlers started to encroach in the 19th century. Then the thing's waiting ended, along with its life, and the Ceremonies began. And even in the 19th century, the forested heart of darkness sat only about 50 miles from New York City. 

Something beyond all measure fell into or broke through or seeped up into our universe; the novel leaves the thing's means of entry a "mystery." But the novel also suggests that the thing somehow also broke through into human mythology, folklore, rituals, stories, and even folk dances. Fragments of the rituals needed to resurrect the being hide in all these things, waiting to be reassembled and used so that the thing can be reassembled and reborn. Even a Coney Island Ferris Wheel and a grumpy cat fit into the Ceremonies.

One of the keen pleasures of The Ceremonies is its combination of mystery and precision. We're taken through various rituals and preparations and signs and portents. Strange, tarot-like cards are read. Complex ceremonies that must be followed with an anal-retentive attention to detail are enacted. But the mysteries of what awaits, of what will be done to the world and how it will change, remain to the very end of the text. At no time does Klein feel the need to have the ultimate antagonist of the novel deliver an expositional speech. 

And even the acolyte of the antagonist remains vague and refreshingly unglib to the very end. And this henchman, Rosie -- this short, fat, seemingly jolly old man -- is one of the novel's many terrific creations. He's awful. He's also pitiful, but only in terms of what he was before he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, nearly 100 years before the main action of the novel takes place. The third-person description of his thoughts doesn't give us the exterior charm of so many antagonists, from Hannibal Lecter all the way back to Milton's Satan. We see Rosie from inside, a manipulative and remorseless engine of death. Well, death for all humanity. If humanity were lucky. Which it probably won't be if Rosie gets his way. There are worse things than death.

The indispensable references for the novel are several late-19th and early-20th-century stories by the Welsh horror-writer/mystic Arthur Machen. The novel's title refers to three sets of ceremonies named but never fully explained in Machen's (mostly) first-person tour de force "The White People"; Machen's novella is also discussed by Jeremy in the novel itself. A short, cryptic Machen piece called "The Ceremony" also adds to one's appreciation of the novel, as do Machen's "The Novel of the Black Powder" and "The Great God Pan." These are all in the public domain, and worth reading regardless of whether or not you read The Ceremonies. 

But you should read The Ceremonies. You really should. It's both its own evocative, poetic, ruthless piece of horror and a terrific act of play with what sometimes seems to be every major horror and Gothic work ever written, either explicitly or implicitly. The Ceremonies rewards close and careful reading. It rewards multiple readings. And it has a killer inversion of a horror trope that horror readers will probably associate most with Stephen King's The Shining, as creatures almost never associated with goodness nonetheless ride to the rescue by accident, driven by instinctual fury, even as Nature itself comes under existential assault. Highly recommended.

The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death (1995) by H.P. Lovecraft

The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death (1995) by H.P. Lovecraft, containing the following stories (Publication dates in brackets):

Introduction: Concerning Dreams and Nightmares by Neil Gaiman: Enjoyable but light on context and somewhat glib. The volume could really use a historical overview of its contents to establish a context for the stories, along with both composition and publication dates for all the stories.

• Azathoth (1922): Short prose poem/fragment.
• The Descendant (1926) : Fragment.
• The Thing in the Moonlight (1934): Fragment.
• Polaris (1920): It's an oddity all right, one that could be sub-titled 'Angry Man Yells at North Star.'
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919): A scientific romance of multiple personalities got turned into a mostly unfaithful movie.
• The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1920): Maybe the best of Lovecraft's short, moody Dunsanian horror stories. Introduces a precursor to the Deep Ones.
• The Statement of Randolph Carter (1920): The first appearance of the closest thing to a recurring protagonist Lovecraft ever created. Has one of HPL's two most familiar, quoted and/or mocked concluding lines.
• The Cats of Ulthar (1920): HPL loved cats and he let it show. And they would show up again to play a major role in the events of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
• Celephais (1922): Prose poem.
• From Beyond (1934): Short horror story of perception. Turned into a sort-of faithful movie.
• Nyarlathotep (1920): Short prose poem/fragment about the Herald of the Great Old Ones from ancient Egypt to a briefly imagined dystopic future.
• The Nameless City (1921): That would be the lost desert city of Irem, which also figures in the Cthulhu Mythos.
• The Other Gods (1933): Whimsical bit of Dunsanian fabulism and cosmic relativism.
• Ex Oblivione (1921): Prose poem.
• The Quest of Iranon (1935): Dunsanian fable.
• The Hound (1924): Fairly straightforward horror story features two decadents and an unusual-for-HPL setting of Amsterdam.
• Hypnos (1922): As much a nod to Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" as it is a Dream-Cycle work.
• What the Moon Brings (1922): Prose poem.
• Pickman's Model  (1927): A straightforward horror story with elements that would be re-used in the Dream-Cycle short novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written the same year but published 16 years later. Has one of HPL's two most familiar, quoted and/or mocked concluding lines.
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943): HPL's oddest long work combines the soporific with the startling. Randolph Carter stars.
• The Silver Key (1929): Randolph Carter again, exploring the Dream-lands.
• The Strange High House in the Mist (1931): Demon-haunted Kingsport makes an appearance, though it's positively normal compared to its representation in "the Festival."
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1943): Unpublished for years after its composition, this short novel gave us "essential salts" and Lovecraft's most fully realized antagonist, Joseph Curwen. Certain sections approach a parody of overused tropes.
• The Dreams in the Witch-House (1933): Horror story has ties to both the Dream Cycle and to the Cthulhu Mythos. Somehow turned into soft-core-porn horror on TV anthology Masters of Horror.
• Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1934) by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price: Price and Lovecraft collaborate on a continuation of the story of Randolph Carter, for whom friends and relatives now search. A lengthy section on four-dimensional, non-linear space-time is nearly essential to understanding where Alan Moore is coming from in similar sections in his Lovecraft-inspired Neonomicon.

Overall: Certainly not as strong a collection as one of HPL's later-period work would be, but still extremely strong at points, and necessary for understanding him as a writer. Highly recommended.

Fears Unnamed by Tim Lebbon (2004)

Fears Unnamed by Tim Lebbon (2004) containing the following stories:

Remnants: A really lovely combination of eerie, cosmic, Time-Abyss adventures in a mysterious lost city and psychological realism, as the problems and disappointments of two life-long friends -- one an adventurer and archaeologist, the other a sedentary writer depressingly disappointed by the choices he's made -- are examined and evaluated during a descent into the unknown.

White: An apocalyptic story of the 'Ten Little Indians' variety. Several acquaintances become snowbound in Northern England while the world rapidly plunges into chaos and mysterious destruction, and the snow keeps coming. And weird, weird, half-glimpsed creatures prowl the snow. Or are the gruesome murders being committed actually the work of someone inside the house?

Naming of Parts: Lebbon takes what initially seems to be a zombie plague observed by a 12-year-old boy and turns it into an apocalypse in which everything -- humanity, one's family, all of nature -- seems to be afflicted by entropy and rapid, irreversible decay. The ending in this one is a bit of a dud, as the story seems to demand some sort of closure that is instead given up to mysterious ambiguity. Nonetheless, very good and very sad.

The Unfortunate: Occasionally almost surreal weird-out about the sole survivor of a plane crash, and the supernatural forces behind his survival. The weirdness of the supernatural universe could use more development -- to the extent that this novella would probably make a wonderful novel -- though the bleakness of the material is never less than daunting. All four of these novellas evade and confound catharsis in a manner peculiar to the best horror fiction: there is no satisfying purgation here, only greater mysteries and sublime abjection.

In all: highly recommended.

The Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell (2002)

The Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell (2002): This novel, deliberately paced and filled to the bursting with unnerving, telling detail, is Campbell's most (Arthur) Machenesque long work, firmly in the tradition of that seminal horror writer's "The Great God Pan" and "The White People." There are cosmic, Lovecraftian elements as well -- Machen was one of the great influences on H.P. Lovecraft's conception of horror, after all.

30 years prior to the main events of the novel, biologist Lennox Price attempted to discover and contain whatever psychoactive agent had been mentally crippling generations of people unfortunate enough to encounter it in the small, ancient grove of Goodmanswood in the Severn Valley near Campbell's fictional city of Brichester.

Lennox apparently succeeded, but at the cost of his own sanity. Now, he and other similarly compromised men and women live in a mental hospital in Goodmanswood. His eldest daughter, wife, and grandson live nearby.

But a widening of the highway around the wood -- and the destruction of several of the trees therein -- seems to have awakened something. Or maybe it was never asleep. And while his younger daughter, wife, and grandson all seem to have been mentally influenced by the wood, it's eldest daughter Heather who will ultimately have to piece together what's been going on in the woods since before the Romans came. Birds fly over the wood, but they refuse to land anywhere in it, and wildlife has always been strangely absent.

This is Campbell's most densely descriptive novel, one with a fairly straightforward plot but an immensity of destabilizing descriptions and things almost but not quite seen. The wood itself was planted by the Romans to obscure or erase something that was there before, something the people we call the Druids either worshipped or feared. Or both.

Campbell's cheeky sense of humour occasionally shines through -- there's a particularly funny bit about religious book-burning -- but for the most part this is serious stuff. As Heather discovers early on, the Devil was often placated by being referred to as 'The Good Man.'

Readers who require subtext will certainly find some here (some of the effects of the thing or things in Goodmanswood closely resemble global warming, while others evoke the impact of non-indigenous plant and animal species on new environments). But the horror here is ultimately the Thing itself, and the price required to acknowledge it, much less stop it. Highly recommended.

Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron (2010)

Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron (2010) containing the following: "Introduction" by Michael Shea; "The Forest", "Occultation", "The Lagerstatte", "Mysterium Tremendum", "Catch Hell", "Strappado", "The Broadsword", "-30-", "Six Six Six.": Barron really is a relatively new wonder in the horror world, an American writer who's been greeted with the sort of astonished critical praise I last remember being attached to a young John Varley in science fiction in the 1970's.

Barron works in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, but he brings to the cosmic tradition of horror his own muscular, cloachal, sadomasochistic vision of evil. Many of his stories take place on an Earth much like ours, only behind the walls lurk the horrifying emissaries and representatives of the Children of Old Leech.

There's much that's Cthulhian about Old Leech, a world-ravaging god-monster whose followers have a pronounced fondness for torturing and eating children. But many of Barron's stories center around the horror of metamorphosis -- the Children want some humans to become them and share in their terrible ecstasies. There aren't many heroes in Barron's stories, but there are a lot of victims, and a lot of normal people doing the best they can when faced with evil of sublime and abyssal gravity.

Barron also makes some truly bizarre forays into more traditional supernatural tropes here, but they're as distinctive as the tales set in the world of Old Leech. He's got the fearlessness and the distinctiveness of a truly great writer, and his horrors aren't quite like anything I've read before. And trust me, I've read a lot of horror. Highly recommended.

The Croning by Laird Barron (2012)

The Croning by Laird Barron (2012): Laird Barron has fairly quickly made a name for himself in horror fiction with a unique blend of cosmic horror, graphic depictions of horrific violence, and a constant concern with masculinity and its discontents, satisfactions, and challenges when faced by maggot-like, child-eating horrors from beyond the rim of conventional space-time. Some of Barron's male protagonists (sort of) break even in their confrontations with gibbering, capering, nigh-omnipotent horrors, though generally only through escape or death. Most of them are either destroyed or subverted.

Many of Barron's stories share the same mythology, in which a race of cosmic horrors collectively known as the Children of Old Leech lurk in the lost places of the Earth, spiritually and physically feasting on humans while occasionally offering a small handful of people the "honour" of joining them. Technically speaking, the Leech are both endo- and exocolonists: they conquer from without and within, all in preparation for the day Old Leech itself wakes up hungry and devours the populations of whole planets. Which is what happened to the dinosaurs, among other lost Earth populations.

Yes, he's the feel-good writer of 2012!

The Croning is Barron's first novel, and it's a doozy. For the most part, the narrative follows hapless geologist Don Miller who, in the present day, is in his 80's and plagued by gaps in his memory that, when encountered, his mind scrambles to either explain or forget that such a discovery ever happened (he's even forgotten that he ever knew Spanish well enough to translate Spanish documents).

Don's uncannily young-looking wife of more than 50 years, Michelle Mock, has always pursued the anthropology and archaeology of "lost" tribes, periodically leaving Don for weeks or even months at a time. And as the narrative swings back and forth in time and space, we begin to see why Don's mind is so screwed up -- and why, despite his great love for Michelle, he also occasionally fears her.

The horrors here are indeed horrible, the worst coming from the failures of human morality when confronted by terrible tests. Barron weaves history and mythology and legend (including a crackerjack origin for the story of Rumplestiltskin) into this backwards-and-forwards-looking opus, presents the horrors of the flesh and the soul, and gives us scant light in the face of world-annihilating darkness. It's a brilliant debut, but not for the physically or philosophically squeamish. Highly recommended.