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.

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.