Tales from the Miskatonic University Library (2016): edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Jon Ashmead, containing the following stories:
Slowly Ticking Time Bomb by Don Webb
The Third Movement by Adrian Cole
To Be in Ulthar on a Summer Afternoon by Dirk Flinthart
Interlibrary Loan by Harry Turtledove
A Trillion Young by Will Murray
The Paradox Collection by A. C. Wise
The Way to a Man's Heart by Marilyn 'Mattie' Brahen
The White Door by Douglas Wynne
One Small Change by P. D. Cacek
Recall Notice by Alex Shvartsman
The Children's Collection by James Van Pelt
Not in the Card Catalog by Darrell Schweitzer
The Bonfire of the Blasphemies by Robert M. Price
Solid, enjoyable anthology of stories either related to the demon-haunted Special Collection library at Miskatonic University or fictional, forbidden tomes and their dangerous presence on this Earth or any other. Some stories are comic: "Recall Notice" by Alex Shvartsman and "The Way to a Man's Heart" by Marilyn 'Mattie' Brahen are the two most comic-satiric of these.
Some take what initially seems like a comic premise (say, what if H.P. Lovecraft's forbidden uber-tome The Necronomicon were digitized and put on-line?) and exploit it for horrifying rather than comic consequences. The sancrosanct nature of the Interlibrary Loan comes into comic, horrific play; so, too, the problems of hanging onto volumes that don't always feel like being confined to one shelf or one library. And "The Children's Collection" by James Van Pelt strikes a strikingly poignant note about the responsibilities of a librarian in Lovecraft's unusual Massachusetts coastal town of Innsmouth. In all, a lot of fun. Recommended.
The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteriess of Kyle Murchison Booth (2007/ 2nd edition 2011) by Sarah Monette; containing the following stories:
- Introduction by Sarah Monette
- Introduction to the Second Edition by Lynne M. Thomas
- Bringing Helena Back (2004)
- The Venebretti Necklace (2004)
- The Bone Key (2007)
- Wait for Me (2004)
- Drowning Palmer (2006)
- The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox (2004)
- Elegy for a Demon Lover (2005)
- The Wall of Clouds (2003)
- The Green Glass Paperweight (2004)
- Listening to Bone (2007)
- Story Notes by Sarah Monette (2007)
Overall: A well-written, revisionist 'nod' to the hermetic narrators and haunted academics in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. Monette notes in the introduction that she wanted to bring psychological realism and more fully realized characters to stories in the tradition of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft.
She succeeds in terms of psychological realism and character-building, with the caveat that it seems to me that Lovercraft was far better at characterization when a story called for it than Monette's dismissive evaluation suggests. Oh, well.
Our first-person narrator is Kyle Murchison Booth. He lives somewhere in New England in the first half of the 20th century in an unnamed city. He works as an archivist of rare books and documents at a fictional museum. He has a tormented family past. In his early 30's in the first story, he's morbidly shy, agoraphobic, and a closeted homosexual who seems to be a virgin when the book opens.
Booth checks a lot of the boxes for various characters in James and Lovecraft. Whether any of James' or HPL's characters were closeted homosexuals is a matter of interpretation. In any case, Booth is a sympathetic fringe figure, albeit one locked in personality stasis for much of the ten stories. He's pretty much the same character at the end as the beginning, though he's got a little better at dealing with the supernatural because the supernatural is what he deals with over those ten stories.
The horror elements are where the stories generally disappoint. In riffing on a variety of standard tropes, the stories often lack both actual horror and a sense of the unusual or new. We open with a demon-raising gone wrong in the way demon-raisings pretty much always go wrong. We have ghosts, bodies sealed behind walls for years, a poltergeist, a ghostly memory, a ghost whose attempts to kill people are really sort of pathetic, an incubus, and an evil paperweight.
OK, I like the paperweight, though as its victim is a dick, one doesn't feel much horror about the whole thing. So, too, the fate of several other victims of the supernatural. If the supernatural kills a lousy person, does anyone care? The most M.R. Jamesian story in the collection, "The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox," suffers from a similar problem. The supernatural ends up seeming like comeuppance for venial sins in this story and others. It's a sort of EC Comics-lite.
Throughout, though, the characterization of Booth makes him a compelling narrator. His isolation and self-loathing are the real horrors here, to the extent that the supernatural could be eliminated from the stories without any real loss of narrative power. This is a good collection. As horror is a subjective quality, you may find it scarier than I did. Recommended.
