Acolytes of Cthulhu (2001) edited by Robert M. Price

Acolytes of Cthulhu  (2001/ This edition 2014): edited by Robert M. Price:

1. Doom of the House of Duryea  (1936) by Earl Pierce, Jr.
2. The Seventh Incantation (1963) by Joseph Payne Brennan
3. From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy (2008) by Robert M. Price and Hugh B. Cave 
4. The Jewels of Charlotte (1935) by Duane W. Rimel
5. The Letters of Cold Fire  (1944) by Manly Wade Wellman
6. Horror at Vecra (1943) by Henry Hasse
7. Out of the Jar (1941) by Charles R. Tanner
8. The Earth-Brain (1932) by Edmond Hamilton
9. Through the Alien Angle (1941) by Elwin G. Powers
10. Legacy in Crystal (1943) by James Causey
11. The Will of Claude Ashur (1947) by C. Hall Thompson
12. The Final War (1949) by David H. Keller, M.D.
13. The Dunstable Horror (1964) by Arthur Pendragon
14. The Crib of Hell (1965) by Arthur Pendragon
15. The Last Work of Pietro of Apono (1969) by Steffan B. Aletti
16. The Eye of Horus (1968) by Steffan B. Aletti
17. The Cellar Room (1970) by Steffan B. Aletti
18. Mythos (1961) by John S. Glasby
19. There Are More Things (1975) by Jorge Luis Borges
20. The Horror Out of Time (1978) by Randall Garrett
21. The Recurring Doom  (1980) by S. T. Joshi
22. Necrotic Knowledge  (1976) by Dirk W. Mosig [as by Cemetarius Nightcrawler]
23. Night Bus  (1985) by Donald R. Burleson
24. The Pewter Ring  (1987) by Peter Cannon
25. John Lehmann Alone  (1987) by David Kaufman
26. The Purple Death  (2001) by Gustav Meyrink  (trans. of Der violette Tod 1902)
27. Mists of Death  (2001) by Richard F. Searight and Franklyn Searight 
28. Shoggoth's Old Peculiar (1998) by Neil Gaiman 

Excellent selection of Lovecraftian short stories spanning the years 1932 to 2001. Acolytes of Cthulhu is probably better suited to a reader well-acquainted with Lovecraftian weird fiction. Not all the stories are great. But I hadn't run across most of them, making the anthology a lot of fun as it avoids reprinting stories that have become familiar from multiple appearances.

In some stories, the Lovecraftian taint is faint -- perhaps as little as some curious tome of apocalyptic demon lore sitting on a desk. Other stories are just plain nuts, David Keller's "The Final War" chief among them. I won't even try to describe it in detail. It's just plain bananas.

Jorge Luis Borges' nod to HPL, "There Are More Things," gratifyingly appears, and is about as Borgesian a nod to Lovecraft as one could hope for. A piece of juvenilia by Weird-Fiction Historian-Supreme S.T. Joshi is a fun pastiche. 

The stand-out is Randall Garrett's tricky, fun "The Horror Out of Time." The kicker really kicks. Neil Gaiman's humourous "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" closes the anthology with a wink. A squamous, batrachian wink.  Though the winner for best title has to be "From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy" by editor Robert M. Price and Hugh B. Cave, whose career in weird fiction began around the same time that HPL's ended in the 1930's. 

Price has done an admirable job of seeking out stories previously excluded from virtually all Lovecraftian anthologies. They may not all be great, or even good, but they are a historic delight. Highly recommended.

Detective Ghosts and Defective Monsters

Caliban (2015): written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Facundo Percio and Sebastian Cabrol:  Dedicated to Alien designer H.R. Giger, Caliban presents a similar storyline about an unfortunate encounter of a human spaceship with an alien spaceship. It's enjoyable and diverting, though the malevolent alien's powers reminded me a bit of the David Tennant Doctor Who two-parter "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit." Garth Ennis is his usual pissy self, and Facundo Percio does a solid though not particularly frightening job of drawing the monsters, human and otherwise. Lightly recommended.

The Dead Boy Detectives (2005) by Jill Thompson: The two, um, dead boys who would become The Dead Boy Detectives are Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, forever 13 and 12, respectively, the former dying in 1990 and the latter in 1916, both at the same horrible boys' school in England. They managed to avoid being collected by Death in the pages of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and now solve crimes whenever they can.

Here, they find themselves in a B&W, manga-influenced adventure written and illustrated by Jill Thompson. They go undercover at the International Academy in Chicago, a girls' school for the wealthy. Various shenanigans ensue while things are kept light. It's fun and frothy, which is not a description one would usually attach to the Sandman source text. Recommended.

Death and the Batman

Batman: Gothic (Deluxe Edition) (1990/ Collected 2015): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Klaus Janson: Writer Grant Morrison's second major foray into the world of Batman (after 1989's Arkham Asylum) hurls the Dark Knight into a literary hellscape of nods to Faustus, Don Giovanni, Lord Byron's Manfred, Fritz Lang's M., Lewis's The Monk, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and a host of other horrific antecedents. There's even an exquisitely detailed, Rube Goldbergesque death trap for Batman to escape.

Batman faces an enemy from his past -- his past as a schoolboy at a private school, that is, in the days before Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered and Bruce's journey towards being Batman began. But the enemy threatens Gotham's major mobsters as well, whom this old enemy hunts for revenge. Klaus Janson supplies lots of moodiness and doom as artist. It's one of Batman's most nightmarish adventures, even with the typical splash of Morrisonian postmodernism. This would make a terrific Batman movie, live-action or animated. Come on, DC! Highly recommended.

Death: The Deluxe Edition (1989-2003/ Collected 2014): written by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham, Mark Pennington, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Dave McKean, Jeffrey Jones, P. Craig Russell, Colleen Doran, and others: Neil Gaiman's goth-chick Death gets her solo adventures from The Sandman, two miniseries, and several other places collected here in over-sized hardcover. 

I'd read them all before, but it's nice to catch up with Death, the friendly and understanding embodiment of, well, Death, one of Gaiman's seven Endless personifications of natural forces (the others being Dream, Destiny, Desire, Delirium (nee Delight), Despair, and Destruction because the universe speaks English and enjoys alliteration). 

The bulk of the volume is occupied by two three-part miniseries, Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life. I'm partial to the first above all others in this volume, playing as it does with the form of the 'quest' and possessed as it is of a grumpy, teen-aged protagonist saddled with the name Sexton Furnival who goes out one day to commit suicide, instead falls into some garbage, and is rescued by the human avatar Death creates for one day every century so as to experience life among the living. It's one of Gaiman's finest pieces of writing, amplified by the lovely, slightly twee artwork of Chris Bachalo and Mark Buckingham.

The other stories are fine as well, though Bachalo disappears halfway through the second Death miniseries, leaving Mark Buckingham and Mark Pennington to finish up the job without moving too jarringly away from Bachalo's style. That miniseries reunites us with several characters from The Sandman arc "A Game of You" a few years down the road. It's solid as well, though Death is much more of a supporting player this time around. Death's answer to one character's enquiry about The Problem of Evil is glib and shallow, but that may be the point -- she's trying to comfort somebody who isn't very bright, not offer a comprehensive solution to theodicy. 

The volume also includes Death's first appearance in The Sandman, in which she tries to cheer up her mopey Byronic brother Dream, and a standalone issue in which Death is called upon by a very minor DC superhero (Element Woman, or possibly Element Girl) who doesn't know how to die. 

A handful of stories (including one in which Death and John Constantine talk about safe sex!) and a length series of illustrations by various artists round out the volume. There's also an oblique introduction from Tori Amos, reprinted from a 1994 collection: one of the oddities of most of DC's new Deluxe editions is that they contain very little 'new' material. 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.

Horror Comix Anthologies: The Big Book of Taboo

Taboo Issue 4 (1990): edited by Stephen Bissette and Nancy O'Connor, containing the following comics: Text pieces, interviews, and bios by Steve Bissette with Jean-Marc Lofficier; Front cover by Moebius; Back cover by Brian Sendelbach; Frontispiece by Nancy O'Connor; "Dreaming And The Law" written and illustrated by Phillip Hester; "1963" illustrated by Dave Sim; Untitled written and illustrated by Charles Burns; "Babycakes" written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Michael Zulli; "Cholesterol" written and illustrated by D’Israeli"; "Davey’s Dream" written by Mark Askwith and illustrated by Rick Taylor; "Eyes Of The Cat aka Les Yeux Du Chat" written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Moebius (originally printed in France in 1978); "El Topo" written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Spain Rodriguez (originally printed in Europe in 1979);  "Retinal Worm" written and illustrated by S. Clay Wilson; "La Fugue {The Escape}" written and illustrated by P. Foerster;  "Blue Angel" written by Tim Lucas and illustrated by Steve White; "Morrigan Tales" written by Elaine Lee and illustrated by Charles Vess; "These Things Happen" written and illustrated by  Rick Grimes; "Neither Seen Nor Heard" written by L. Roy Aiken and illustrated by Mike Hoffman; From Hell, Chapter Three: Blackmail or Mrs. Barrett written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell; From Hell Pin-Up illustrated by Alan Moore.

The fourth oversized paperback issue of the late, much-lamented Taboo contains a wealth of great horror and weird comics material. The high point is a reprint of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's 1978 collaboration "The Eyes of the Cat," a lengthy weird horror tale made up entirely of gorgeous and occasionally disturbing full-page panels by Moebius. Combined with interviews with the two, it makes for quite a treat. Spain Rodriquez's odd 'tie-in' to the Jodorowsky film El Topo completes this part of the package.

The rest of the anthology is excellent as well, from the third serialized chapter of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's epic graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, From Hell, to a horrifying bit of insect craziness from underground comix mainstay S. Clay Wilson. Elaine Lee writes a fascinating new-wave fairy tale illustrated by Charles Vess in his old-school, Hal Foster by way of N.C. Wyeth style. Most of the short pieces are genuinely horrific, and it's interesting to see relatively early, non-Sandman Neil Gaiman as illustrated by the fine, overlooked Michael Zulli, and very early Phil Hester writing and drawing. Taboo was very much cutting-edge horror for its time, and rewards reading now if one can find issues of it. Highly recommended.

The Big Book of the Unexplained: written by Doug Moench; illustrated by Russ Heath, Sergio Aragones, Brent Anderson, Joe Sacco, Steve Leialoha, and many others (1997): Another enjoyable entry in Paradox Press' 'Big Book of' series of single-author, multiple-artist comics anthologies from the 1990's. This foray into the world of UFO's, cryptids, and general all-around Fortean madness (indeed, a cartoon version of Charles Fort is our narrator) is fun stuff with a wide variety of artists working in a wide variety of styles to alternately creep the reader out and make the reader laugh while, perhaps, thinking a little, at least about the credulity of the human animal. Recommended.

Stephen Leacock, Sherlock Holmes, Boobies

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

A Game of Hellboy

Hellboy: Masks and Monsters: written by Mike Mignola and James Robinson; illustrated by Mike Mignola, Scott Benefiel, and Jasen Rodriguez (Collected 2009): Short volume collects two Hellboy miniseries team-ups with three other characters -- DC's Batman and Starman in one adventure and Dark Horse's own Ghost in the other.

A good time is pretty much had by all. Though I'm not familiar with Ghost -- a two-gunned female ghost fighting crime -- Hellboy's adventure with her makes a certain amount of sense given their supernatural backgrounds. Mignola's script presents an interesting mix of mythology and the mundane as organized crime gets mixed up with ancient gods who want Hellboy's giant hand for something nefarious. The art by Scott Benefiel, from Mignola's layouts, is fairly smooth, though perhaps a bit too representational for Mignola's blocky, occasionally impressionistic Hellboy.

The Starman/Batman team-up, plotted by Mignola and scripted by Starman's James Robinson, is really serious fun, with Mignola handling the art. Batman and Hellboy team up to fight magical Aryan Nation types in Gotham. With Batman temporaily sidelined by a re-appearance of the Joker, it's then up to Hellboy and second-generation Starman Jack Knight to rescue the Golden-Age Starman (who's also Jack's father Ted Knight) from a Nazi base in South America. There, the Nazis have supernaturally coerced Ted into helping them bring a very large, evil God back to Earth.

Oh, Nazis! Mignola's Batman is shadowy and bulky, while his Starman is quite a change from the more representational art generally seen in Jack Knight's own title. The whole volume goes down nicely, and is also an enjoyable break from the increasingly labyrinthine continuity of Hellboy's own adventures. Recommended.

The Sandman Volume 5: A Game of You: written by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Shawn McManus, Colleen Doran, George Pratt, Stan Woch, Dick Giordano, and Bryan Talbot (1991-92): The fifth volume of Gaiman's now twenty-year-old+ Sandman adventures presents a mostly self-contained tale concerned with gender, identity, race, and childhood dreams. Minor characters from previous story arcs do reappear here, along with the Lord of Dreams and his attendant (wise)-talking raven Matthew.

The six issues focus on one minor character from an earlier story arc, Barbie, whose previous encounter with the world of the Dreaming destabilized her marriage to Ken (!), along with her own carefully constructed self-image, and sent her to New York to figure out who she is. That previous interaction with the world of Dreams also had an unintended consequence. She's stopped dreaming.

However, somewhere in dreams, a ragtag group of talking and sometimes imaginary animals continue to search for the vanished Princess Barbara, who is the only person who can defeat the all-devouring Cuckoo and its conquering hordes. But she's going to need the help of her neighbours -- the lesbian couple Hazel and Foxglove, the transvestite Wanda, and the mysterious Thessaly -- to negotiate an increasingly unstable fantasy world.

The real world and the dream world are, of course, connected, in both obvious and less-than-obvious ways. Things do not necessarily go well for everyone involved in this adventure, with its echoes of Narnia and Tolkien and The Wizard of Oz's game-changing tornado. We also learn an awful lot about the life-cycle of the cuckoo bird. Why did someone put these awful things in clocks to begin with? Recommended.

Fox Hunt

Sandman: The Dream Hunters: written by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano (1999): For the tenth anniversary of the first issue of his critically and commercially gigantic Sandman comic-book series (which ended its run in 1995), writer Neil Gaiman wrote a novella set in the Sandman universe and illustrated by acclaimed Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano. It's not a comic book, but rather an illustrated story, as Amano wasn't comfortable trying to draw a comic book.

We see several familiar characters again, chief among them Morpheus, also known as Dream, one of the seven Endless in Gaiman's comic book (the others being, circa 1989, Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction, and Delirium, the last once having been Delight before something changed).

Set in medieval Japan, The Dream Hunters ostensibly retells a Japanese folk tale. Gaiman's afterword in which he somewhat puckishly and straight-facedly describes this (imaginary) folk tale led a lot of people to believe there really was a folk tale to begin with. There wasn't. That thinly veiled versions of DC Comics' Cain and Abel make an appearance, along with the Dream King's raven, possibly should have tipped people off.

The story begins with a bet between a fox and a badger about who can force a young Monk to abandon his lonely mountain-side shrine so that either the fox or the badger can live there. As foxes and badgers have considerable abilities in the realms of shape-changing and illusion, this is a bet it seems one or the other must win. But things don't go the way either plans.

It's a very enjoyable story, and Amano's illustrations offer a new look at Gaiman's Lord of Dreams and his kingdom. I do think that Gaiman is a better comic-book writer than a writer of prose, however, and P. Craig Russell's comic-book adaptation of this novella, from 2009, is superior to this work. In either case, one doesn't have to know the backstory of Sandman to enjoy the book. Recommended.

Land of Dreams

Sandman: The Dream Hunters: adapted by P. Craig Russell from a novella by Neil Gaiman and Yoshiaka Amano (2009): Writer-artist Russell adapted Neil Gaiman's illustrated 1999 Sandman novella into comic-book form to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first issue of Gaiman's hyper-popular Sandman series. The novella itself was released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Sandman. What will the 30th anniversary bring?

Told as if it were an old Japanese folk story (it isn't, though Gaiman's afterword to the 1999 novella convinced a lot of people, including Russell, that it was), The Dream Hunters chronicles the adventures of a female fox, a young monk, and a magician searching for a cure for his chronic fear. It's set in a legendary Japan of animal spirits, demons, and witches. The Sandman himself -- Dream, or Morpheus -- plays a supporting role, as he periodically did in his own comic-book series. The narrative focus is squarely upon the fox and the monk.

Russell's art is pleasingly legendary in its own way, as sometimes cartoony and sometimes nightmarish demons rub shoulders with realistically rendered humans, a slightly anthropomorphic fox, and some truly horrible witches. Or are they oracles? Russell's faces are always expressive, that expressiveness the product of just a few lines properly placed.

The colouring by Lovern Kindzierski apparently tries to replicate the palette available to Japanese print-makers of a certain era. It's a lovely, muted wash of pastels and faded primary colours. Much of the wording remains Gaiman's, but Russell has done a fine job of selecting what to keep in language and what to render as art. All in all, this is a marvelous addition to the Sandman library, and worth owning whether or not one already has the novella. Highly recommended.

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird: edited by Paula Guran (2012)

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird: edited by Paula Guran (2012) containing the following stories:

"The Crevasse", Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud; "Old Virginia", Laird Barron; "Shoggoths in Bloom", Elizabeth Bear; "Mongoose", Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette; "The Oram County Whoosit", Steve Duffy; "A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman; "Grinding Rock", Cody Goodfellow; "Pickman’s Other Model (1929)", Caitlin Kiernan; "The Disciple", David Barr Kirtley; "The Vicar of R'lyeh", Marc Laidlaw; "Mr. Gaunt", John Langan; "Take Me to the River", Paul McAuley; "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft", Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt; "Details", China Mieville; "Bringing Helena Back", Sarah Monette; "Another Fish Story", Kim Newman; "Lesser Demons", Norm Partridge; "Cold Water Survival", Holly Phillips; "Head Music", Lon Prater; "Bad Sushi", Cherie Priest; "The Fungal Stain", W.H. Pugmire; "Tsathoggua", Michael Shea; "Buried in the Sky", John Shirley; "Fair Exchange", Michael Marshall Smith; "The Essayist in the Wilderness", William Browning Spencer; "A Colder War", Charles Stross; "The Great White Bed", Don Webb.

Editor Paula Guran's mandate here is focused -- the best Lovecraftian stories of the first 11 years or so of the new millennium. If there's a disappointment here, it lies in something that's only going to be immediately apparent to a reader who buys a lot of Lovecraft-influenced anthologies and collections.

However, as I imagine a high percentage of people who read this sort of thing do just that, I'll note the disappointment: too many stories taken from the same original anthologies (eight of the stories herein appear in just three other original anthologies) and a fairly significant overlap (four stories) with the 2011 anthology The Book of Cthulhu, the mandate of which was to collect Lovecraft-influenced stories from the last thirty years or so.

In a pinch, I'd suggest going with The Book of Cthulhu. Its overall quality is higher, though that's obviously a factor of a longer span of time to choose from. Furthermore, choosing a lot of stories from other anthologies strikes me as somewhat problematic -- I've got several of these stories in three anthologies already, a pretty heavy load for a story published in, say, 2008 to be carrying. This may indicate taste rather than laziness, but it feels like laziness. And a couple of the multiple stories from other anthologies really sort of stink. Others are a stretch for the anthology, especially for one with a big picture of Cthulhu on the cover.

Nonetheless, there are some corkers here, both too often repeated ("The Oram County Whoosit" is a terrific tale -- so terrific I've now seen it in three different anthologies) and relatively new to this anthology (the offerings from old pros Michael Shea and John Shirley are especially gratifying). Shirley's almost reads like a Cthulhu Mythos story semi-sarcastically super-collided with a Young Adult novel. Shea's story about Clark Ashton Smith's blobby toad-god addition to the Lovecraft pantheon (subsequently described by HPL in At the Mountains of Madness) is squishy and, thankfully, not the over-anthologized, excellent "Fat Face".

Neil Gaiman impresses with a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu Mythos crossover, but not only was it in a fairly high print-run anthology, the story also appeared on Gaiman's website free of charge for several years. China Mieville's terrific "Details" also appeared in an anthology that, ten years later, remains in print.

There's a problem of over-fishing the same ponds over and over again. Ponds filled with the Deep Ones. What is it with all the stories about people who identify with Lovecraft's Deep Ones? Yeuch. Alan Moore was on to something with Neonomicon. Lightly recommended.

My Long Zombie Nightmare

Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, edited by John Skipp (2010) containing the following stories:

* ? Lazarus (1906) by Leonid Andreyev,
* ". . . Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields"(1929) by William B. Seabrook,
* The Return of Timmy Baterman (1983) by Stephen King,
* ? The Emissary (1947) by Ray Bradbury,
? A Case of the Stubborns (1976) by Robert Bloch,
* ? It (1940) by Theodore Sturgeon,
* Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed (2007) by Steve Duffy,
Bitter Grounds (2003) by Neil Gaiman,
* ? Sea Oak (1998) by George Saunders,
* The Late Shift (1980) by Dennis Etchison,
A Zombie's Lament (2010) by S. G. Browne,
Best Served Cold (2010) by Justine Musk,
The Dead Gather on the Bridge to Seattle (2010) by Adam Golaski
The Quarantine Act (2010) by Mehitobel Wilson
The Good Parts (1989) by Les Daniels,
Bodies and Heads (1989) by Steve Rasnic Tem,
* On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks (1989) by Joe R. Lansdale,
* Like Pavlov's Dogs (1989) by Steven R. Boyett,
* Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy (1989) by David J. Schow,
The Visitor (1998) by Jack Ketchum,
The Prince of Nox (1992) by Kathe Koja,
Call Me Doctor by Eric Shapiro,
* The Great Wall: A Story from the Zombie War (2007) by Max Brooks,
Calcutta, Lord of Nerves (1992) by Poppy Z. Brite,
God Save the Queen (2006) by John Skipp and Marc Levinthal,
Eat Me (1989) by Robert R. McCammon,
We Will Rebuild (2010) by Cody Goodfellow,
Sparks Fly Upward (2005) by Lisa Morton,
Lemon Knives 'N' Cockroaches (2010) by Carlton Mellick III,
* Zaambi (2006) by Terry Morgan and Christopher Morgan,
The Zombies of Madison County (1997) by Douglas E. Winter,
Dead Like Me (2000) by Adam-Troy Castro.

Six months later and I'm finally finished this anthology. Now I know how the survivors of a zombie apocalypse feel. There are a number of good and/or historically relevant stories here. I starred them. There are a number of stories that I wouldn't classify as zonbie stories because while they feature dead people walking, I wouldn't classify 'dead people walking' as the sole determinant of zombieism. I question-marked those.

The rest run the gamut from perfectly OK to dreadful, but being a nice fellow, I didn't indicate which ones are which. I must say, I'm exhausted by boundary-pushing hyperviolence, especially when it's linked to sex. I just don't care and I'm not scared. There's a surprisingly low 'fun' level here. Zombies are serious business. So serious that I don't remember what half these stories were about. They've all vanished into the eternal slurry of the walking dead, of what the walking dead leave behind.

But you know what? Zombies aren't a horror trope that can support all that much seriousness or social commentary. I think George Romero's Dawn of the Dead beautifully shows how much heavy lifting the zombie can do, and how much that heavy lifting must be leavened with humour and pathos. Not recommended except for the zombie obsessive.

Debts

Lucifer Volume 5: Inferno: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Dean Ormiston and others (2002): After his fight with the malign, supernatural card deck (!) known as the Basanos, Lucifer is weakened, many of his powers separated from him and stored in two lost feathers from his wings (double !). Challengers with vengeance on their minds are after him. He really needs to get back to the administration of the universe he created.

Oh, and Lucifer owes a debt to part-angel Elaine Belloc, a debt that he must repay by rescuing her stolen soul from the great areas of uncreated space known as the Mansions of the Silence. And there are, of course, other loose ends that involve the archangel Michael, the fallen cherub Gaudium, and the fate of the demon who killed Elaine.

Add in supernatural avenger Solomon (son of David), Loki, Yahweh, Mazikeen of the Lilim, and a standalone tale featuring a cancer-stricken convenience store owner and the surprisingly decent demon who frequents his store and you've got a collection. Recommended if one has read the books before this volume.

Tarot of Terror

Lucifer Volume 4: The Divine Comedy: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross and Dean Ormiston (2002; collected 2003): Lucifer, based on the version of Lucifer in Neil Gaiman's earlier Sandman series, has succeeded in creating his own universe. Humans and supernatural beings have flocked there from God's universe through any one of thousands of portals, there to live by only two commandments: Thou shalt not worship any gods, and thou shalt not attempt to be worshipped as gods.

And things seem to proceed swimmingly.

But Lucifer has enemies and rivals. He also has allies, though he doesn't have any friends -- he's a self-involved jerk, which means readerly sympathy has to be built upon the supporting characters and, negatively, by showing that Lucifer's enemies are much, much worse than he is.

Carey, Gross, and Ormiston succeed in this task -- Carey's writing zips along, combining inventiveness with a quirky oddness of original creation; Gross and Ormiston are deft cartoonists, cleanly rendering a world of wonders and terrors both supernatural and natural. And the fallen Cherubim Gaudium really is cute in a gargoyley way as he complains his way across two creations.

Lucifer's chief opponent here is the Basanos, a sentient Tarot Card deck created as a malign twin of the Book of Destiny. The Basanos can see all possible realities and force the outcome they desire; Lucifer is powerful enough to shrug off almost any and all attacks imaginable. But we're dealing with a deck of cards here -- They/It have something up Their/Its sleeve(s). Highly recommended.

Live Twee or Die Hard

Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology: edited by Peter Straub, containing the following stories:

The Bees by Dan Chaon
Cleopatra Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand
The Man on the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
The Great God Pan by M. John Harrison
The Voice of the Beach by Ramsey Campbell
The Body by Brian Evenson
Louise's Ghost by Kelly Link
The Sadness of Detail by Jonathan Carroll
Leda by M. Rickert
In Praise of Folly by Thomas Tessier
Plot Twist by David J. Schow
The Two Sams by Glen Hirshberg
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story by Thomas Ligotti
Unearthed by Benjamin Percy
Gardener of Heart by Bradford Morrow
Little Red's Tango by Peter Straub
The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet by Stephen King
20th Century Ghost by Joe Hill
The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
The Kiss by Tia V. Travis
Black Dust by Graham Joyce
October in the Chair by Neil Gaiman
Missolonghi 1824 by John Crowley
Insect Dreams by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

I'd like this anthology a lot better with 'horror' removed from the title, though what one would replace that word with could lead to some debate: several stories don't feature the supernatural, so that's out; ghosts don't appear in all the stories, so there goes 'ghost story.' Even The New Fabulists fails, despite the broad net of that term.

"The New Horror" seems to have started around 1980 for Straub, though several writers (Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and Straub himself, among others) have published careers that stretch back up to 15 years before that. Again, odd: there are at least two generations of writers here, maybe even three. 130 years after Poe, the title seems a bit odd as well, and unintentionally dismissive of those 130 years of horror between Poe's death and the appearance of the first story here.

And horror, no -- about half the stories here fail to horrify, terrify, gross out or (per S.T. Joshi) unnerve. And not just because I've read too much horror. Some of the choices -- maybe none moreso than Straub's choice for his own story -- simply aren't horror, though all the stories in this anthology are well written.

One of the strangely dominant modes here is the sort of dark, fantastical whimsy that John Collier and Roald Dahl, among others, were masters of -- perhaps the most acceptable literary form of the fantastic through much of the 20th century if one bases one's analysis on the slick magazines and what they tended to publish for decades on end. Neil Gaiman, Straub, Jonathan Carroll and a few others offer this sort of project, in which the whimsy can sometimes be smothered in twee, never moreso than in Kelly Link's "Louise's Ghost", a treacly, twinkly botch of a story.

King's uncharacteristic entry here -- I can't recall ever seeing it anthologized since its first appearance in 1984 -- is much better than I remember it, but still undercut by the sheer, well, whimsy of the basic premise. The fantastic element simply can't bear the weight of the story's exploration of madness and addiction. The story would be better without any nod to the fantastic.

I did enjoy many of the stories I'd never encountered before, even many of those that aren't really horror at all. But it's a darn peculiar anthology: peculiarly skimpy on contextual material, and peculiarly spotty in terms of satisfying the 'horror' portion of its title. Lightly recommended.

The Verdict on Satan: Quite a Guy!!!

Lucifer Volume 6: Mansions of the Silence, written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross, Ryan Kelly, Dean Ormston and David Hahn (2003; collected 2004); Lucifer Volume 7: Exodus, written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross and Ryan Kelly (2003-2004; collected 2005): Mike Carey's version of Lucifer, created by Neil Gaiman in his Sandman series, almost seems like a conscious upping of the ante with Gaiman's award-winning title about Dream of the Endless. Dream wasn't all that likeable. Indeed, he was something of a jerk. Indeed, the whole series was in part about Dream coming to terms with the fact that he was a jerk in the self-pitying Byronic mode.

And here we have Lucifer, who is even more of an anti-hero, though a fascinating and shaded one, and definitely not one to be burdened by guilt or self-pity. In such a situation, one's sympathies will be engaged not by the titular protagonist but by the supporting characters, though Lucifer occasionally comes across pretty well simply because so many of his opponents are such monsters and assholes by comparison.

Lucifer gave up his kingship of Hell fairly early in the Sandman series, wandering the Earth for awhile before opening a night-club (aptly named Lux) in Los Angeles. But his out-sized ambitions returned, and by the time of these volumes he's created his own universe, apparently hoping to learn from the mistakes of his Father -- that is, God, or the Presence as he is generally called herein.

Mansions of the Silence depicts Lucifer's repayment of a debt to the human/angel hybrid named Elaine Belloc, who saved Lucifer's life in a previous installment but whose soul was subsequently kidnapped and dragged off into the eponymous Mansions, a vast expanse inhabited by various supernatural beings who have no interest in living in any of the codified afterlifes of the spiritual universe.

Belloc's soul has been used to bait a trap for Lucifer; he despatches a ragtag group of allies into the Mansions both to reveal the extent of the threat and to preserve the integrity of this spiritual space, at least until he retrieves Elaine. Lucifer's power is too great for the Mansions to support his presence -- if he enters them, the entire realm will quickly disintegrate.

The quest is weird and wooly, with lots of mythical overtones, undertones, and shout-outs to a wide assortment of world religions. Exodus then follows Lucifer's subsequent moves, and the fall-out from God's big announcement at the beginning of Mansions. Lucifer plays the hero, to an extent, in both volumes, though always for his own reasons -- reasons which are not entirely revealed at the time. He's a right bastard, but less so than any of the gods (or God) we meet, and Lucifer's creation seems remarkably benign and pleasant under the circumstances.

Carey deftly combines humour and pathos and the epic throughout both these volumes -- a 'mini-arc' about an odd and very sympathetic demon who spins webs out of emotions he steals from human souls is the stand-out in Exodus, a weird little heart-warmer about families and friendship. The art by Peter Gross and others is crisp throughout, expressively managing to convey menace, the Sublime and a pleasing level of cartoony humour at the appropriate moments with equal skill. Recommended.

Shelter from the Storm

The Graveyard Book, written by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean (2008): After a run of stinky book and comic-book projects, Gaiman returned to form with this riff on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book that won several major awards, including children's novel honours the Carnegie Medal and the Newbery. Rather than being raised by a forest of animals like Mowgli, young Nobody Owens is raised by the mostly dead inhabitants of an English graveyard.

He doesn't start off as Nobody Owens. Instead, an 18-month-old toddler fortuitously wanders into a no-longer-active graveyard on the same night his parents and sister are killed by a mysterious, knife-wielding man called only Jack. The ghosts of the graveyard and the mysterious Guardian we know only as Silas -- supernatural but not a ghost -- band together to protect and raise the baby they christen Nobody Owens (or 'Bod' for short) over the next 13 years or so. The killer continues to look for Bod, so the child remains for the most part inside the graveyard at all times.

Thankfully, being granted The Freedom of the Graveyard by its inhabitants also grants Bod a number of supernatural powers, though he does have to practice to perfect them. Eventually, he can walk through walls while in the graveyard, fade from sight almost anywhere, and induce a certain measure of fear in others if he concentrates.

Needless to say, all these powers will be needed by the end of the book. Jack's still out there, and he has friends. In a subtextual narrative reminiscent of Clive Barker's Nightbreed (though much, much more child-friendly), The Graveyard Book pits the mysterious supernatural "monsters" of horror fiction's long history against the knife-wielding maniacs of horror's more recent past.

The ghosts of the graveyard are a lively bunch from throughout history -- the graveyard has been active in one form or another for several thousand years. A mysterious but strangely pitiful magical being that calls itself a Sleer guards a treasure cache and a grave hidden within a mound; one of the tombstones is a "Ghoul Gate" (every cemetery has one) through which carrion-eating ghouls come and go from their strange, red-skied land; adjacent to one part of the graveyard is an unhallowed, unmarked grave area in which witches and others were interred. Bod's Guardian Silas has physical form outside the graveyard, and so he can fetch food, clothing and books when necessary.

Gaiman portrays Bod's journey to being a teenager with a lot of zing, sentiment, and cleverness. Homages and references to other works of the supernatural abound, either obliquely in the persons of Silas and the stern but helpful Miss Lupescu, or slightly more noticeably with the episode that involves the ghouls and pays homage to H.P. Lovecraft's odd, dream-like narrative The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. All in all, this is a jolly, engaging book from the writer of The Sandman and Stardust and Coraline, suitable for anyone above the age of 8 or thereabouts. Highly recommended.

Welcome to Perry Como's Nightmare

The Last Temptation, written by Neil Gaiman and Alice Cooper, illustrated by Michael Zulli (1994; this edition 2001): Neil Gaiman in a very minor key, collaborating with Alice Cooper on a comic-book tie-in to Cooper's 1994 concept album of the same name. It would probably help to own and listen to that album prior to, or contemporaneously with, this comic book. A 12-year-old boy gets tempted by a malign supernatural being called only the Showman (who looks like Alice Cooper in full make-up). Is the Showman a serial killer of children, the ghost of a serial killer of children, or the Devil himself? And what will happen on Hallowe'en?

Song lyrics are somewhat awkwardly wedged into various sequences in the comic. Both the Showman and David, the12-year-old protagonist, previously appeared in the 1970`s Cooper concept album Welcome to my Nightmare, which itself indirectly spawned a Marvel comic book starring Alice Cooper. Historically speaking, comic books and musical stars have never been a great fit, though the Superman comic book in which Lois Lane falls in love with Perry Como is hilarious.

The whole thing seems underwritten -- David, the protagonist, isn't so much unsympathetic as he is so sketchy a character as to be unidentifiable with on any but the most nebulous terms. Zulli's B&W art is lovely, but would look better reproduced at at least normal comic-book size, rather than the trade paperback size of the available Dark Horse reprint volume. Very lightly recommended for Cooper fans, Zulli fans, and Gaiman completists.