That Is Not Dead: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Through the Centuries (2015)

That Is Not Dead: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Through the Centuries (2015): edited by Darrell Schweitzer, containing the following stories:

• Herald of Chaos by Keith Taylor
• What a Girl Needs by Esther M. Friesner [as by Esther Friesner]
• The Horn of the World's Ending by John Langan
• Monsters in the Mountains at the Edge of the World by Jay Lake
• Come, Follow Me  by Darrell Schweitzer
• Ophiuchus by Don Webb
• Of Queens and Pawns by Lois H. Gresh
• Smoking Mirror by Will Murray
• Incident at Ferney by S. T. Joshi
• Anno Domini Azathoth by John R. Fultz
• Slowness by Don Webb
• The Salamanca Encounter by Richard A. Lupoff
• Old Time Entombed by W. H. Pugmire
• Nine Drowned Churches by Harry Turtledove

Fun, often grim collection of Cthulhu Mythos tales spanning about 4500 years and many continents. Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi checks in with a rare piece of fiction, one in which Voltaire must face the Great Old Ones in rural 18th-century France. John Fultz crafts a chilling tale of Azathothian cultists in the Spanish West, Will Murray one of false gods in colonial Mexico, and editor Darrell Schweitzer a disturbing tale of the Pauper's Crusade.

There isn't a lot of comedy here -- really, only Harry Turtledove, Don Webb, and Esther Friesner offer even slightly light-hearted looks at the Cthulhu Mythos. A recurring theme is the destruction of a character's personal faith in the gods of men through exposure to the Truth about who really runs the universe. Dick Lupoff does take this in a different direction than the other tales, to a place more of cosmic wonder than terror. More typical is how an encounter with Azathoth destroys a devout Catholic's faith in John Fultz's story.

John Langan's tale of Roman-era Britain and a curious magical artifact is splendid as well, recalling some of the Roman-era-set dark fantasy of David Drake. "Monsters in the Mountains at the Edge of the World" by Jay Lake pits Romans and the fringes of the Chinese empire against the abominable Mi-Go, while "Herald of Chaos" by Keith Taylor sets Taylor's recurring, dynastic-Egyptian priest of Anubis against Lovecraft's Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, with the fate of the world in the balance.

In all, a highly enjoyable anthology. I even felt like I learned something! Highly recommended.

Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008) by John Langan

Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008) by John Langan, containing the stories "On Skua Island" (2001), "Mr. Gaunt" (2002), "Tutorial" (2003), "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers" (2007), and "Laocoon, or, The Singularity" (2008):

John Langan's 2002 novella "Mr. Gaunt" is on my all-time list of the most startling 'first-time' reading experiences I've had with an author. It's a great, disturbing piece of horror that acknowledges the past (especially Henry James explicitly and J. Sheridan LeFanu implicitly) while being a fresh and contemporary take on venerable horror tropes. Langan makes the skeleton scary again. How improbable is that?

"Mr. Gaunt" was only Langan's second published story, but it signaled the arrival of a new master of horror. "On Skua Island" was his first work, a slightly more conventional take on horror tropes with a frame story that's as old as ghost stories and as post-modern as any nod to the storyness of a story. 

There's only one problem with Langan's first collection. In going with a chronological approach, it puts the two most horrifying stories first. It's a problem that's easily rectified by the reader, of course -- start with "On Skua Island" but move "Mr. Gaunt" to the end of your reading of the five stories included in the collection. It's really a show-stopper.

"Tutorial" is a nice piece of academic horror/satire that takes shots at ideologically stagnant Creative Writing courses and the omnipresence of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Kudos, I say! Langan was and is in academia, and his observations about the terrors of the Ivory Tower are keenly observed and often darkly hilarious.

"Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers" is both the most pulpy and the most avant-garde of the stories included herein. It's a collaboration between John Langan and his 10-years'-earlier self. 

It's a propulsive running battle between a man and a woman on one side and a pack of mysterious monsters on the other. In media res is the order of the day, along with unanswered questions about the nature of the apocalypse these two humans have found themselves trapped within, all served up with the final cherry of an ending that offers no real closure. It's very enjoyable but also almost weightless.

"Laocoon, or, The Singularity" is the most recent of the stories in the collection. It's also previously unpublished, so, Bonus Content! Its portrayal of a depressed, dejected All But Dissertation (ABD) fine arts student trapped in the Hell of Sessional Lecturers rings absolutely true, says I, who once resided in English Literature's version of that Hell. 

The novella manages the difficult task of moving a reader's feelings for the protagonist from sympathy to pity as the unacknowledged horror of his situation grows. The end can be taken straight up or as an allegory on self-destructiveness -- or as an allegory on the transformations that can be wrought on someone with an undiagnosed and unrecognized mental illness that gradually eats away the better self.

The collection also includes a generous Notes section by Langan on the origins and process of the stories. It's a fine collection overall, and you'll only heighten its overall effect if you leave "Mr. Gaunt" for last. Highly recommended.

Cthulhu's Reign (2010): edited by Darrell Schweitzer

Cthulhu's Reign (2010): edited by Darrell Schweitzer:

• The Walker in the Cemetery by Ian Watson
• Sanctuary by Don Webb 
• Her Acres of Pastoral Playground by Mike Allen 
• Spherical Trigonometry by 朝松健 [as by Ken Asamatsu] 
• What Brings the Void by Will Murray 
• The New Pauline Corpus by Matt Cardin 
• Ghost Dancing by Darrell Schweitzer 
• This Is How the World Ends by John R. Fultz 
• The Shallows by John Langan 
• Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names by Jay Lake 
• The Seals of New R'lyeh by Gregory Frost 
• The Holocaust of Ecstasy by Brian Stableford 
• Vastation by Laird Barron 
• Nothing Personal by Richard A. Lupoff 
• Remnants by Fred Chappell 

Entertaining anthology goes with the depressing scenario 'What happens AFTER H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones return to reclaim the Earth?' and runs with it in enjoyable albeit often oppressively depressing ways. But some of the stories contain faint hope, and the overall selection ranges broadly from Heist Comedy ("The Seals of New R'lyeh" by Gregory Frost) to hard science fiction ("Nothing Personal" by Richard A. Lupoff) to post-modern stream-of-consciousness ("Vastation" by Laird Barron).

Along the way, stories attempt to portray what the world post-Cthulhu would look like. A writhing mass of endless screaming meat? A patchwork of broken reality? A maze haunted by sadistic smaller versions of Cthulhu? A world in the process of being changed to suit its new masters, the Moon already transformed into a red and glaring five-pointed star in the squirming heavens? A seemingly normal neighbourhood that gets less normal the closer one looks? A baleful orb of anti-matter? 

Yes, all this and more!

The stories are all at least competent. Many are inspired. "The Shallows" by John Langan is a modern classic, I think, counterpointing the mundane and the weird both in setting and in the (one-sided) conversation a survivor of the rise of Cthulhu tells to, well, an unusually crabby house-guest. Fred Chappell's "Remnants" offers a slice of hope in what sometimes seems like the first part of an epic, hard-science-fiction series. Recommended.

Sh*t Sandwich, Cthulhu-style

The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu (2016) edited by Paula Guran, containing the following stories:  

• “In Syllables of Elder Seas” by Lisa L. Hannett
• “The Peddler’s Tale, or, Isobel’s Revenge” by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• “It’s All the Same Road in the End” by Brian Hodge
• “Caro in Carno” by Helen Marshall
• “The Cthulhu Navy Wife” by Sandra McDonald
• “Those Who Watch” by Ruthanna Emrys
• “A Clutch” by Laird Barron
• “Just Beyond the Trailer Park” by John Shirley
• “The Sea Inside” by Amanda Downum
• “Outside the House, Watching for the Crows” by John Langan
• “Alexandra Lost” by Simon Strantzas
• “Falcon-and-Sparrows” by Yoon Ha Lee
• “A Shadow of Thine Own Design” by W. H. Pugmire
• “Backbite” by Norman Partridge
• “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” by Usman T. Malik
• “Legacy of Salt” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• “I Do Not Count the Hours” by Michael Wehunt
• “An Open Letter to Mister Edgar Allan Poe, from a Fervent Admirer” by Michael Shea
• “I Dress My Lover in Yellow” by A. C. Wise
• “Deep Eden” by Richard Gavin
• “The Future Eats Everything” by Don Webb
• “I Believe That We Will Win” by Nadia Bulkin
• “In the Sacred Cave” by Lois H. Gresh
• “Umbilicus” by Damien Angelica Walters
• “Variations on Lovecraftian Themes” by Veronica Schanoes

The Mammoth Book of Occasionally Lovercraftian Horror, Occasionally Written by People Who Despise H.P. Lovecraft would have been more accurate. In her sloppy, poorly researched introduction, editor Paula Guran admits that the title is a bait-and-switch: “This anthology has little to do specifically with Cthulhu and everything to do with ‘new Lovecraftian fiction.’ ” Why call it The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu? Because Cthulhu sells, now more than ever.

There are a few stand-outs. OK, one. “Outside the House, Watching for the Crows” by John Langan is excellent, evoking fear and cosmic horror in the seemingly most mundane of situations. “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” by Usman T. Malik is also a solid piece, though it fails to stick the landing. Admittedly, HPL occasionally failed to stick the landing. But Malik may be a writer to watch.

Caitlin Kiernan, W.H. Pugmire, and Brian Hodge deliver solid work, none of it all that related to the Cthulhu Mythos (Kiernan riffs on HPL's Dunsanian period; Pugmire is, well, Pugmire, and God bless him for it; and Hodge's story is a solid one with unusual elements that goes on about five pages too long). Norman Partridge riffs on HPL's pre-Cthulhu "The Hound" to decent effect, albeit with a dud of an ending. Laird Barron seems to have had an homage to Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance sitting on his desk when the call for submissions came in -- or at least that's what his atypical, mildly diverting "The Clutch" reads like.

That's about it. Looking at the titles of the stories, I note that I can't remember what most of them were about. I think HPL got accused of misogyny in Paula Guran's introduction, which is actually a very difficult case to make. However, Guran doesn't give the impression of having read much about HPL in that introduction. Honestly, it's possible she's never read any HPL. That could explain how one gets an anthology with Cthulhu in the title and pretty much no Cthulhu in the stories.

The final piece, a biographical attack on HPL's racism and anti-Semitism that we're apparently supposed to believe is a story, is a hell of a way to end the anthology. It's easy to score points off HPL's racism. Writing a great story that deals with that racism -- a story like David Drake's "Than Curse the Darkness" or Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" -- requires talent, something the writer of the concluding 'story' does not seem to possess. 

It didn't help that the writer quotes a racist outburst about New York by then-Atlanta Braves reliever John Rocker near the beginning of her 'story.' The quote dates from 1999. How long was this shitty essay... sorry, 'story'... sitting in a drawer? Why resurrect the words of a now-forgotten relief pitcher in a screed... sorry, 'story'... about H.P. Lovecraft? Oh, well. Hidey ho. So it goes.

Anyway, save your money. If you're going to buy a new anthology of Lovecraftian-themed stories, look for S.T. Joshi and avoid Paula Guran. Avoid this book in particular. It's a waste of money.

House of Windows (2009) by John Langan

House of Windows by John Langan (2009): John Langan's first novel is terrific, an erudite ghost story informed by Langan's knowledge of the horror genre and by his experiences in academia. It's a first-person tale within a frame -- a perennial structure in horror. It's a novel of academia. And its main narrator would seem utterly persuasive if it weren't for brief, gem-like moments throughout her narration that seem to highlight a pronounced lack of self-knowledge. Or do they?

Over the course of two long nights, SUNY-Huguenot graduate student and sessional instructor Veronica Croydon tells the story of her husband's mysterious disappearance to a narrator who seems to be John Langan. She does so because Langan writes horror stories and thus may be a good choice to hear the tale. During the day between the two nights, Langan and his wife discuss the possibility that he may also have been chosen for his perceived gullibility when it comes to the supernatural.

Veronica's narrative voice is sharp, self-assured, and intermittently unsympathetic. She's a great creation. Overall, her story of the supernatural seems convincing. It's the sudden revelations of a pronounced lack of self-evaluation spotted throughout the text that raise the possibility that her narration is flawed or possibly confabulated in its entirety. But these moments are few and far between, and subtle enough in most cases to sneak by.

Langan's depiction of academic life rings utterly true to this former academic. Veronica reminds me of a handful of graduate students I've known without in any way being a stereotype. The 40-years-older, married professor she herself marries within about a year of starting her graduate studies is also familiar without being a type. But we learn of him (and everything inside the frame) only from Veronica's point-of-view. Do we trust her? Do we trust any first-person narrator? Do we trust any narrator at all?

I don't know. In general, the discontinuities in the narrative include moments in which Veronica engages in stereotypical gender constructions of the male while at other points bristling at such constructions being attached to the female. She denigrates Herman Melville for being a detail-obsessed windbag while occasionally relating such a list of minutiae that the narrative almost bogs down in soporific descriptions of making dinner or sitting in a living room. She may have become her near-future husband's favourite student in the space of one class, with their out-of-class socializing beginning immediately thereafter, but she doesn't believe in being familiar with her own students. The failure of the earlier marriage was all the fault of the first wife -- but we learn of the first wife only through Veronica's narration. Well, we learn almost everything only through Veronica's narration. And a story that details the tragically flawed relationships of at least two sets of fathers and sons -- as commented upon throughout by Veronica -- also features Veronica's distant, annoyed relationship with a mother with whom she goes years between conversations. 

The major characters filling out the novel's pas de quatre are Ted, Roger's 30ish son from his previous marriage, and the house the Croydons have lived in for decades, Belvedere House. It's an old house. And it's about to become haunted. Or something.

Langan's vision of the supernatural in this novel bridges a gap between the cosmic, impersonal, non-traditional horrors of the Lovecraftian and the more traditional wonders and terrors of a ghost story, with psychology hanging over all. It helps to have read Fritz Leiber's great Our Lady of Darkness before reading his novel, but one doesn't need to: Langan lays everything out that the reader needs to know. Knowledge of the Leiber novel enriches one's enjoyment of House of Windows, though. And it's a swell novel.

As is this novel. The horrors here are both gross and subtle, supernatural and strictly human. There may not have ever been a haunting. But whether or not there was, there's a story of a haunting and the haunted -- there's horror and sorrow. Highly recommended.

Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 1 (2013/Published 2014): edited by Laird Barron and Michael Kelly

Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 1 (2013/Published 2014): edited by Laird Barron and Michael Kelly, containing the following stories:

• The Nineteenth Step by Simon Strantzas: Not so much a story as an opening that's missing a middle and an end. 
• Swim Wants to Know If It's as Bad as Swim Thinks by Paul G. Tremblay: Sharp and nasty character study suddenly turns into a vaguely observed (and possibly completely subjective) invasion of Lovecraftian horrors.
• Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron by A. C. Wise: Well, it's sort of funny, and it sort of feels like something that was written in about 1970 for the magazine Weird Heroes, given that the genre tropes it spoofs are all very, very, very old. 
• The Year of the Rat by Chen Qiufan: Nice dystopian satire in translation from the Chinese would be pretty much at home in an issue of Galaxy magazine from 1955.
• Olimpia's Ghost by Sofia Samatar: Something to do with Sigmund Freud but I never really cared what or why.
• Furnace by Livia Llewellyn: Solid bit of weird horror reminds me a lot of late-career Thomas Ligotti...which makes a lot of sense when you realize that it's from a Ligotti tribute anthology.
• Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us? by Damien Walters Grintalis: The pomposity of the title has literally erased the story from my memory. Honestly, it's like an episode title from Season 3 of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.
• Bor Urus by John Langan: Typically solid Langan piece with a really spooky, disturbingly dream-like climax.
• A Quest of Dream by W. H. Pugmire: A tip of the hat to H.P. Lovecraft's Dream-Cycle stories. There's really only one W.H. Pugmire story, a sort of Swinburne-meets-early-Lovecraft fragment, and this is another one of those. Enjoyable, rotted twee.
• The Krakatoan by Maria Dahvana Headley: Promising start, completely goofy weird ending.
• The Girl in the Blue Coat by Anna Taborska: Solidly written and observed ghost story of the Holocaust.
• (he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror... by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.: No memory of this.
• In Limbo by Jeffrey Thomas: Twilight Zone-like set-up for a keenly observed character study. Very reminiscent of a lot of stories that appeared in Charles Grant's Shadows anthologies in the 1970's and 1980's.
• A Cavern of Redbrick by Richard Gavin: Very nice weird tale with a disturbing either/or conclusion that offers closure without a definitive answer to what just happened.
• Eyes Exchange Bank by Scott Nicolay: Really the 900-pound gorilla of this anthology super-collides splatterpunk and kitchen-sink horror with some great riffs on Poe and the Decadents.
• Fox Into Lady by Anne-Sylvie Salzman: Mostly unpleasant, amorphous, mythy.
• Like Feather, Like Bone by Kristi DeMeester: Story fragment about some gross stuff.
• A Terror by Jeffrey Ford: Excellent period piece depicts Emily Dickinson's first meeting with Death.
• Success by Michael Blumlein: I could imagine this story as having been written by someone like Robert Sheckley or Cyril Kornbluth and published in a 1957 issue of Galaxy magazine, only at about one-third the length. As is, it's almost monstrously attenuated.
• Moonstruck by Karin Tidbeck: A sort of inert bit of dark fantasy shading into a postmodern folk story.
• The Key to Your Heart is Made of Brass by John R. Fultz: This one, enjoyable as it is, would be more enjoyable if it were the script to a Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant comic-book story from 1979, preferably illustrated by some very baroque and murky European comics artist of the time.
• No Breather in the World But Thee by Jeff VanderMeer: The usually subtle and understated VanderMeer cuts loose, to increasingly dire and unengaging effect. It may be a satire of weird-fiction tropes the writer has grown tired of. It's sort of a rubbery, pointless, "shocking" mess.

Barron casts the net so wide for his definition of the Weird in his introduction that the term becomes almost meaningless. And the extraordinarily broad reach of the contents bear this out. It seems less like an attempt to come up with a new genre and more like a land grab. Nonetheless, there's a lot of good stuff here. In all: recommended, a little lightly. 

The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4 (2011): edited by Ellen Datlow

The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4 (2011): edited by Ellen Datlow, containing the following stories: The Little Green God of Agony by Stephen King; Stay by Leah Bobet; The Moraine by Simon Bestwick; Blackwood's Baby by Laird Barron; Looker by David Nickle; The Show by Priya Sharma; Mulberry Boys by Margo Lanagan; Roots And All by Brian Hodge; Final Girl Theory by A. C. Wise; Omphalos by Livia Llewellyn; Dermot by Simon Bestwick; Black Feathers by Alison Littlewood; The Final Verse by Chet Williamson; In the Absence of Murdock by Terry Lamsley; You Become the Neighborhood by Glen Hirshberg; In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos by John Langan; Little Pig by Anna Taborska; and The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine by Peter Straub (all stories 2011):

Ellen Datlow's Best Horror anthologies tend towards an area of the horror axis in which weirdness and relationship problems are the highest values. It's not my favourite area of horror, but if it's yours, you may find Datlow's anthologies more rewarding than I do.

Certainly nothing here is badly written. The entries from Glen Hirshberg and Laird Barron are typically excellent. I like how Hirschberg lays out the long-term psychological effects of a brush with the supernatural, while Barron's world of muscular protagonists faced with an enormity of perverse, hidden horrors always gives me a kick. "Blackwood's Baby" seems like the sort of fever dream Hemingway might have had after getting punched in the mouth by Cthulhu.

The John Langan story is also good, though the ending is telegraphed all the way back to the title. Stephen King's story seems to be included solely to get King's name on the cover -- it's a curiously limp affair in which one can call all the plot points several pages before they occur and be right every time.

Peter Straub's story disappoints in a much different way. It's weird and creepy for awhile, but the eponymous couple's peculiar sexual fetish, once revealed, acts to distance one from any investment in the narrative's outcome. The ending comes several paragraphs too late, as a third-party explanation of what we've just read blunts whatever horror remained in what we'd previously read. Chet Williamson's otherwise excellent "The Final Verse" also has a problematic ending, as it veers into a sort of jokey, EC-Comics nihilism that doesn't fit the rest of the story.

Stylistically, the stories are well-written. Would I like more stories that are actually scary? Oh, yeah. I do like that Datlow includes a list of stories as 'Honourable Mentions' at the end of the volume. There's something weird and off-putting about it.  I could also probably go to the end of my days without reading another Bradburyesque story with the plot-engine removed, or another Weird Incest Tale. Weird Incest Tales: the worst fantasy magazine ever. Lightly 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.

The 2009 Horror

The Best Horror of the Year Volume 2 (2009) edited by Ellen Datlow (2010) containing

*Lowland Sea by Suzy McKee Charnas
The End of Everything by Steve Eller
Mrs Midnight by Reggie Oliver
*each thing i show you is a piece of my death by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer
*The Nimble Men by Glen Hirshberg
*What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night by Michael Marshall Smith
Wendigo by Micaela Morrissette
*In the Porches of My Ears by Norman Prentiss
Lonegan's Luck by Stephen Graham Jones
*The Crevasse by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey
The Lion's Den by Steve Duffy
Lotophagi by Edward Morris
The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall by Kaaron Warren
Dead Loss by Carole Johnstone
*Strappado by Laird Barron
*The Lammas Worm by Nina Allan
*Technicolor by John Langan

Big, big improvement on the first volume of this series, with a lot more excellent stories and fewer boring ones. I've starred the high points, which run the gamut from near-future apocalypse ("Lowland Sea" by Suzy McKee Charnas) through a bad night at the movies ("In the Porches of My Ears" by Norman Prentiss) to, well, a bad night ("What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night" by Michael Marshall Smith).

The Toronto-set Gemma Files/Stephen J. Barringer story does a lovely job of combining both the structure and the content of new media with one of the oldest structures for a horror story (the epistolary format), while John Langan's story presents us with a mountingly dread-filled college classroom lecture on Poe. Recommended.