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.

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.

Black Wings of Cthulhu 4 (2015)

Black Wings [of Cthulhu] Volume 4 (2015) edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following stories:


Artifact by Fred Chappell
Half Lost in Shadow by W. H. Pugmire
The Rasping Absence  by Richard Gavin
Black Ships Seen South of Heaven  by Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Dark Sea Within  by Jason V Brock
Sealed by the Moon  by Gary Fry
Broken Sleep  by Cody Goodfellow
A Prism of Darkness  by Darrell Schweitzer
Night of the Piper by Ann K. Schwader
We Are Made of Stars  by Jonathan Thomas
Trophy  by Melanie Tem
Revival  by Stephen Woodworth
Contact  by John Pelan and Stephen Mark Rainey
Cult of the Dead  by Lois H. Gresh
Dark Redeemer  by Will Murray
In the Event of Death  by Simon Strantzas
The Wall of Asshur-sin  by Donald Tyson
Fear Lurks Atop Tempest Mount  by Charles Lovecraft 


Maybe not quite as good as previous installments in the Black Wings series ('of Cthulhu' is added in each case for the paperback publication; 'Black Wings' comes from a Lovecraft quotation about cosmic horror, a quotation that doesn't contain 'of Cthulhu,' whose wings I've always figured as being a dark, weird green, in case you were wondering). 

Or maybe I read too many new Cthulhu anthologies in too short a time.

There are stand-outs here from Kiernan, Brock, and Schweitzer. The latter's story features the real John Dee on the last day of his life, and it's a solid piece of cosmic quasi-history. The stories range from just this side of Lovecraftian pastiche to more elusive, allusive pieces of cosmic horror.

One thing I'll note again and again is that Lovecraft's literary children tend to be a lot more depressing than their progenitor. Several stories here feature the return of the Great Old Ones and the destruction of humanity, something Lovecraft never went through with. The depiction of these apocalypses never seems to equal what I imagine in my mind, leaving me a bit cold when it comes to the depiction of The Return of the Great Old Ones. Oh, well. Recommended.

A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi

A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following stories:

The House of the Worm  (1933) by Mearle Prout
Far Below  (1939) by Robert Barbour Johnson
Spawn of the Green Abyss  (1946) by C. Hall Thompson
The Deep Ones (1969) by James Wade
The Franklyn Paragraphs (1973) by Ramsey Campbell
Where Yidhra Walks  (1976) by Walter C. DeBill, Jr.
Black Man with a Horn (1980) by T. E. D. Klein
The Last Feast of Harlequin (1990) by Thomas Ligotti
Only the End of the World Again  (1994) by Neil Gaiman
Mandelbrot Moldrot (2014) by Lois H. Gresh
The Black Brat of Dunwich (1997) by Stanley C. Sargent
The Phantom of Beguilement (2001) by W. H. Pugmire
 ...Hungry...Rats  (2014) by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Virgin's Island  (2014) by Donald Tyson
In the Shadow of Swords (2014) by Cody Goodfellow
Mobymart After Midnight  (2014) by Jonathan Thomas
A Gentleman from Mexico (2007) by Mark Samuels
The Man with the Horn  (2014) by Jason V Brock
John Four  (2014) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Sigma Octantis (2014) by Rhys Hughes
[Anasazi]  (2014) by Gemma Files
The Wreck of the Aurora  (2014) by Patrick McGrath
Beneath the Beardmore (2014) by Michael Shea 

Omnipresent anthologist S.T. Joshi offers what seems to be his 19th Lovecraftian-themed anthology of the past five years. This one combines new material solicited for this anthology with little-reprinted stories of the past 86 (!!!) years of Lovecraft's influence.

"The House of the Worm"  (1933) by Mearle Prout and "Far Below"  (1939) by Robert Barbour Johnson are both fine and essential texts that echo Lovecraft without necessarily occurring in 'his' universe. They're both stunners in different ways, stunners I don't want to spoil. "Spawn of the Green Abyss"  (1946) by C. Hall Thompson is a fascinating 'parallel' text seemingly inspired by Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth."

Of the later reprints, some are terrific and much-anthologized (pieces by Ligotti and Klein are all-timers). Some are terrific and under-anthologized ("The Franklyn Paragraphs" (1973) by Ramsey Campbell, though it really should be bundled with "The Truant" (1973)). Some are interesting, some are seriously wonky (I'm looking at you and your inter-species rape scene, "The Deep Ones" (1969) by James Wade). 

The original stories are mostly solid, though it's always a juggling act to combine a 'Best of' anthology with new material: it can sometimes seem like those old CD's and records that did so with 'Best of' material and 'Three new songs!', all of them sort of sucky. But there's nothing sucky here. 

I really like "Virgin's Island"  (2014) by Donald Tyson, a great slice of pseudo-documentarian horror that reminds one of Lovecraft without aping HPL's style. And it's set off the coast of the Atlantic Provinces of Canada! Gemma Files also adds some delicious CanCon, as Toronto rocks with an insidious alien attack. Michael Shea also delights with one of the hardest things to pull off -- a nod to HPL that's funny, revisionist, and sinister.

In all, a solid anthology with distinguished cuts from the past and present. The historical selections help push A Mountain Walked to highly recommended.

Haunted Legends (2010) edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas

Haunted Legends (2010) edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, containing the following stories:

Knickerbocker Holiday by Richard Bowes
That Girl by Kaaron Warren
Akbar by Kit Reed 
The Spring Heel by Steven Pirie
As Red as Red by Caitlín R. Kiernan 
Tin Cans by Ekaterina Sedia
Shoebox Train Wreck by John Mantooth
Fifteen Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai by Catherynne M. Valente
La Llorona by Carolyn Turgeon
Face Like a Monkey by Carrie Laben 
Down Atsion Road by Jeffrey Ford
Return to Mariabronn by Gary A. Braunbeck
Following Double-Face Woman by Erzebet YellowBoy
Oaks Park by M. K. Hobson
For Those in Peril on the Sea by Stephen Dedman
The Foxes by Lily Hoang
The Redfield Girls by Laird Barron
Between Heaven and Hull by Pat Cadigan
Chucky Comes to Liverpool by Ramsey Campbell
The Folding Man by Joe R. Lansdale 


An interesting idea for an anthology -- writers riff on personal, local, urban or even culture-wide legends -- yields mixed results. Many of the stories float away on New Weird tropes that include lack of closure, excessive cuteness, and excessive (indeed, obsessively so) obscurity. The best stories here offer up their legends, no matter how odd or obscure, straightforwardly. Some of the less successful stories remind one of Henry James' old dictum -- "Write a dream, lose a reader."

I inadvertently applied a 'Test to Destruction' protocol on this anthology as I set it aside for three months. Coming back to it, I soon discovered that I'd already read more stories than I believed: many of them had simply vanished from memory until I encountered them again. That's not an endorsement.

As to the good...

• "The Folding Man" by Joe R. Lansdale is brilliant, weird, gory, and absolutely of a piece with Lansdale's often brilliant, weird, and gory writing career. 
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• "Chucky Comes to Liverpool" by Ramsey Campbell takes on censorship in a riff on real-world events in his native Liverpool. 
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• "The Redfield Girls" by Laird Barron is a subtle and disturbing tale of a real lake in Washington State, with real events mixed in with the fictional ones. Caitlin Kiernan, Gary Braunbeck, and Jeffrey Ford also do commendable work here. 
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• "For Those in Peril on the Sea" by Stephen Dedman misses by that much -- that much being a developed ending rather than a sudden shift into a coy truncation of the story. 

For two bucks, Haunted Legends was a good buy. At full price, though, the book should be avoided -- the best stories are all available in other, better collections and anthologies now. Lightly recommended.

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.


I think this anthology, which consists of 16 new stories and 4 reprints, is the award-winning, veteran editor Datlow's finest anthology. It's not all killer, but there is no filler. Many of the stories that first appeared in this anthology have already been anthologized several more times since Lovecraft Unbound appeared in 2008. Highly recommended overall.

• "The Crevasse" by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey: Antarctic setting recalls HPL's At the Mountains of Madness, but this effective and low-key (in a supernatural sense) story also riffs on "Who Goes There?," the basis for The Thing movies.
• "The Office of Doom" by Richard Bowes: Never order the Necronomicon on an Inter-Library Loan. Just don't.
• "Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour: Elliptical tale of fictional myths attached to... The Petrified Forest? Yes. Unusual and very enjoyable.
• "The Din of Celestial Birds" (1997) by Brian Evenson: Interesting but a bit too murky for my tastes.
• "The Tenderness of Jackals" by Amanda Downum: Writers really get entranced by the idea of making HPL's ghouls into a fully realized society. Not a bad story, but crippled by those tricky ghouls, who have frustrated many a writer.
• "Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane: Moody, low-key riff on HPL's "The Shadow Out of Time."
• "Cold Water Survival" by Holly Phillips: Very science fictiony and of-the-moment as Global Warming releases monsters. Nebulous, Swiss-Army-Knife monsters when it comes to their skill-sets, which are too vast and ill-defined to allow me to suspend disbelief beyond page 3.
• "Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" by William Browning Spencer: Another entry in Spencer's often serio-comic explorations of Lovecraftian themes and variations as seen in the terrific novels Resume with Monsters and Irrational Fears.
• "Houses Under the Sea" (2006) by Caitlin R. Kiernan: A solid mix of first-person narration and pseudo-documentary collage dissipates with the big reveal, which is amazingly underwhelming.
• "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" by Michael Cisco: Creepy bit of philosophical horror; slight but solid.
• "Leng" by Marc Laidlaw: Skirts the very edge of parody in its visit to Lovecraft's famous, infamous Plateau of Leng, which is not a place you want to visit. Hold the mushrooms.
• "In the Black Mill" (1997) by Michael Chabon: Chabon's story hammers on obvious parody during its first half, which is rife with winky, coy,  obvious shout-outs to various Lovecraftian names and places (a woman named Brown-Jenkin? Really?). The spell of HPL seems to overcome Chabon in the second half, as the story suddenly plays everything straight -- but the parody undoes any ability to take the story seriously while also being obvious and awfully thudding in its humour.
• "One Day, Soon" by Lavie Tidhar: Oblique, mysterious bit of cosmic horror involving a forbidden book.
• "Commencement" (2001) by Joyce Carol Oates: Deceptively light-hearted narration darkens throughout in a story that feels an awful lot like Oates doing a riff on Thomas Ligotti, who does this particular sort of thing better.
• "Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth: Relationship horror with a sorrowful cosmic twist.
• "The Recruiter" by Michael Shea: Light black comedy with serious undertones ties in to several other Shea stories involving Lovecraftian beings.
• "Marya Nox" by Gemma Files: Files nails the documentary aspect of Lovecraftian horror while offering an interesting geopolitical setting for a tale of a buried church that should have remained buried.
• "Mongoose" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette: Unusual space opera plays with Lovecraftian names while being tonally and thematically so far from HPL that the story (one of a series) could probably do without its space-traevling Arkhamites and reconfigured Hounds of Tindalos (now complete with Linnaean taxonomy -- Pseudocanis tindalosi).
• "Catch Hell" by Laird Barron: Oddly, one of Barron's least cosmic, least Lovecraftian stories. Good for Barron would be great for almost anyone else.
• "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas: Low-key, purposefully mundane slice-of-life from the days after the Great Old Ones rose to destroy humanity and reclaim Earth. 

A Book of Horrors (2011), edited by Stephen Jones

A Book of Horrors (2011), edited by Stephen Jones, containing the following stories, all original to this volume:

• A Child's Problem by Reggie Oliver: Brilliant English ghost story in the tradition of M.R. James, with a neat extrapolation from a real painting and real-world historical events during the Victorian era.
• Alice Through the Plastic Sheet by Robert Shearman: An increasingly surreal and perhaps a bit overlong tale of some very bad neighbours.
• Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint by Caitlin R. Kiernan: Almost a vignette or mood piece of a woman who's drawn to fires.
• Getting It Wrong by Ramsey Campbell: Black comedy about trivia contests and a lonely, misanthropic movie buff.
• Ghosts with Teeth by Peter Crowther: Enjoyable piece overstuffed with increasingly omnipotent ghosts. The flash-forward at the beginning negates much of the suspense.
• Last Words by Richard Christian Matheson: Short gross-out. Maybe it's supposed to be profound.
• Near Zennor by Elizabeth Hand: Absolutely brilliant, muted piece that sends a widower on a voyage into rural England in search of answers about a part of his wife's childhood that he was unaware of until she'd died. Both a lovely character study and a detailed, slowly building work of quiet but unmistakeable horror.
• Roots And All by Brian Hodge: The Wendigo vs. Breaking Bad: The Road to Victory.
• Sad, Dark Thing by Michael Marshall Smith: Sad, moving story of loss and depression.
• Tell Me I'll See You Again by Dennis Etchison: Typically excellent, under-stated, odd story from one of a handful of the greatest American horror writers of the last fifty years.
• The Coffin-Maker's Daughter by Angela Slatter: An interesting, unpleasant bit of dark fantasy set in an alternate world, or perhaps yet another world of The New Weird.
• The Little Green God of Agony by Stephen King: The supernatural elements are a complete dud; the sections on physical rehab after a horrifying accident are excellent: this would be a lot better as a non-supernatural story.
• The Man in the Ditch by Lisa Tuttle: Some very nice M.R. James-like supernatural events in a story that really lacks the sympathetic characters that can carry this sort of thing.
• The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer by John Ajvide Lindqvist: Disturbing tale with some fascinating, Sweden-specific supernatural elements from the writer of Let the Right One In is also Lindqvist's first story written expressly for English-language publication.

Overall, this is a top-notch, all-original horror anthology. None of the stories are terrible, and several (Reggie Oliver's and Elizabeth Hand's entries, to name two) are absolutely top-notch all-timers. Highly 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.

H.P. Lovecraft's "One Froggy Evening"

Weird Shadows over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones (2005; this revised edition 2013), containing the following stories: Another Fish Story by Kim Newman; Brackish Waters by Richard A. Lupoff; Discarded Draft of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft; Eggs by Steve Rasnic Tem; Fair Exchange by Michael Marshall Smith; From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6 by Caitlin R. Kiernan; Raised by the Moon by Ramsey Campbell; Take Me to the River by Paul J. McAuley; The Coming by Hugh B. Cave; The Quest for Y'ha-nthlei by John S. Glasby; The Taint by Brian Lumley; Voices in the Water by Basil Copper.

England's Titan Books seems to have gotten into the H.P. Lovecraft business. Gratifyingly, their first two releases are the long-out-of-print tribute anthologies Shadows over Innsmouth and Weird Shadows over Innsmouth, both of which riff on Lovecraft's novella "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (which was retitled "The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth" for one American collection of the 1960's). A third anthology, Weirder Shadows over Innsmouth, came out in hardcover in late 2013, though Titan hasn't yet reprinted it in paperback.

I eagerly await Completely Normal Shadows over Innsmouth.

Most of the stories were original to the volume, with a couple of exceptions. Lovecraft's early 1930's novella about a New England coastal town inhabited by human/man-sized-frog hybrids really seems to strike a chord with a lot of writers. It's not my favourite Lovecraft novella, but it is a good time. And with the sea containing an awful lot of volume to contain multitudes of sinister, intelligent servants of the malign Great Old Ones, the novella offers a lot of avenues to explore. Or canals, to keep with the aquatic theme.

The Deep Ones are Lovecraft's ancient race of sentient amphibians, worshippers of Dagon, a demi-god-like lieutenant of the Great Old One Cthulhu, one of many beings with designs on Earth that don't include leaving humanity in charge. Or alive. The Deep Ones can produce viable offspring with human beings. Which is unusual, but so it goes. They apparently want some stuff they can only get from land-dwellers, so a pact is struck with a Yankee South Seas trader named Obed Marsh. He comes home to Innsmouth in the late 18th century having struck a pact with Deep Ones.

Consequently, Innsmouth goes to the frogs.

The stories riff in a fairly wide variety of ways on Innsmouthian horror and miscegenation. Some, like "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" by Caitlin R. Kiernan, cleverly offer stories seemingly set in the same universe as Lovecraft's original novella without slavishly imitating that novella in form or content (though Kiernan's non-linear approach to the narrative seems to me a bit of a mis-step). Others offer what could be called parallel situations, or variations on an aquatic theme -- Ramsey Campbell sends an English student-teacher on an ultimately unfortunate (though bleakly comic) detour into a mysteriously deserted village by the sea, while Paul McAuley offers up a terrifically entertaining story about a Bristol music festival where the bad drugs do a lot more damage than Woodstock's brown acid.

There are a couple of questionable inclusions here, but the problems are minimal compared to a lot of Lovecraft-themed anthologies. And the delights, whether a history-twisting, metafictionally tinged outing from Kim Newman or Brian Lumley's bleak "The Taint", are many. 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.

Cthulhu Everlasting

Black Wings of Cthulhu: 21 Tales of Lovecraftian Horror: edited by S.T. Joshi (2011) containing:

"Pickman’s Other Model (1929)" by Caitlin R. Kiernan
"Desert Dreams" by Donald R. Burleson
"Engravings" by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr.
"Copping Squid" by Michael Shea
"Passing Spirits" by Sam Gafford
"The Broadsword" by Laird Barron
"Usurped" by William Browning Spencer
"Denker’s Book" by David J. Schow
"Inhabitants of Wraithwood" W.H. Pugmire
"The Dome" by Millie L. Burleson
"Rotterdam" by Nicholas Royle
"Tempting Providence" by Jonathan Thomas
"Howling in the Dark" by Darrell Schweitzer
"The Truth about Pickman" by Brian Stableford
"Tunnels" by Philip Haldeman
"The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash" annotated by Ramsey Campbell
"Violence, Child of Trust" by Michael Cisco
"Lesser Demons" by Norman Partridge
"An Eldritch Matter" by Adam Niswander
"Substitution" by Michael Marshall Smith
"Susie" by Jason Van Hollander

An excellent anthology of all-new stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi. Joshi wisely didn't limit his writers to the Cthulhu Mythos, or even to explicit references to Lovecraft's work. Instead, there's a more general mandate of the weird and the cosmic (or 'cosmicism') at work here, though the explicitly Cthulhuesque is also welcome.

There really isn't a bad story in the bunch, and there are a number of standouts. Laird Barron's "The Broadsword" works within Barron's own Children of Old Leech mythology of terrible doings behind the walls of our world. Norman Partridge serves up a monstrous invasion within a narrative that works within the hardboiled parameters of the novels of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. Ramsey Campbell has some fun with Lovecraft's near-obsessive letter-writing, while the protagonist of Jonathan Thomas's "Tempting Providence" seems to meet the ghost of HPL...or is something much more cosmic and sinister going on? Oh, that three-lobed burning eye!

One of the interesting things about the collection is that three stories -- "Pickman’s Other Model (1929)" by Caitlin R. Kiernan, "Inhabitants of Wraithwood" W.H. Pugmire, and "The Truth about Pickman" by Brian Stableford -- all deal with Lovecraft's transitional-phase short story "Pickman's Model" in various ways. It's a story that was adapted in a mediocre fashion for Night Gallery, but it's also probably the Lovecraft story with the most-quoted final line. Hell, Joanna Russ turned that line into the title of a story!

HPL's original story is transitional in the sense that while it looks ahead to the Cthulhu universe in which horror is all around us, waiting to be discovered, it also uses beings -- Lovecraft's version of ghouls, to be specific -- which are treated in a somewhat more whimsical, less horrific fashion in Lovecraft's Dunsanian novel The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, in which they actually aid the narrator during his voyage through the Dream Lands. These stories offer radically different takes on the original material: the authors definitely don't think the same way about the stately ghouls of Boston.

In any case, Joshi offers a pip of an anthology here, complete with a useful introduction. At least five of these stories (by my count) have already been anthologized in various 'Best of' and Cthulhu compilation volumes, which is pretty good for a book that's barely a year old. And the cover of the paperback is sweet. Highly recommended.

Best New Horror 2010

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22 (2010), edited by Stephen Jones (2011), containing the following stories:

*What Will Come After by Scott Edelman
Substitutions by Michael Marshall Smith
A Revelation of Cormorants by Mark Valentine
*Out Back by Garry Kilworth
*Fort Clay, Louisiana: A Tragical History by Albert E. Cowdrey
Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls by Brian Hodge
*Fallen Boys by Mark Morris
The Lemon in the Pool by Simon Kurt Unsworth
The Pier by Thana Niveau
*Featherweight by Robert Shearman
Black Country by Joel Lane
*Lavender and Lychgates by Angela Slatter
*Christmas with the Dead by Joe R. Lansdale
*Losenef Express by Mark Samuels
Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside by Christopher Fowler
*We All Fall Down by Kirstyn McDermott
*Lesser Demons by Norman Partridge
*Telling by Steve Rasnic Tem
*As Red as Red by Caitlin R. Kiernan
*With the Angels by Ramsey Campbell
Autumn Chill by Richard L. Tierney
City of the Dog by John Langan
*When the Zombies Win by Karina Sumner-Smith

Series editor Stephen Jones gives us 23 stories this year, along with the lengthy annual 'Year in Horror' and encyclopedic 'Necrology' (the latter consisting of obituaries of writers, actors and others with some affiliation to horror, written by British horror expert Kim Newman).

I've starred the stories I think are really exceptional. The writing level is, as always for this series, high. Stories range from nouveau-Cthulhu by way of hardboiled Jim Thompson (Norman Partidge's "Lesser Demons") to the surreal ("Featherweight"), from zombies (three stories) through Lovecraftian ghouls ("City of the Dog") to unwanted, menacing fruits and vegetables ("The Lemon in the Pool"). Ramsey Campbell supplies a story about old family grievances and wounds that may or may not involve the supernatural. Caitlin Kiernan and Albert E. Cowdrey give us fine examples of closely observed historical horror -- or maybe historical-research horror would be a better moniker, as the protagonists dig deeply, too deeply, into the undead past.

Angela Slatter delivers a story that reminds me favourably of some of Tanith Lee's best work. Scott Edelman and Karina Sumner-Smith both deliver elegaic farewells to, well, zombies; Joe Lansdale gives us zombies and Christmas; Mark Samuels delivers a disturbing tale focused upon a character based on deceased horror writing and editing great Karl Edward Wagner. All in all, another good year. Highly recommended.

Book 'em, Cthulhu

The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (2011), containing:

Caitlin R. Kiernan - Andromeda among the Stones
Ramsey Campbell - The Tugging
Charles Stross - A Colder War
Bruce Sterling - The Unthinkable
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Flash Frame
W. H. Pugmire - Some Buried Memory
Molly Tanzer - The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins
Michael Shea - Fat Face
Elizabeth Bear - Shoggoths in Bloom
T. E. D. Klein - Black Man With A Horn
David Drake - Than Curse the Darkness
Charles R. Saunders - Jeroboam Henley's Debt
Thomas Ligotti - Nethescurial
Kage Baker - Calamari Curls
Edward Morris - Jihad over Innsmouth
Cherie Priest - Bad Sushi
John Hornor Jacobs - The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
Brian McNaughton - The Doom that Came to Innsmouth
Ann K. Schwader - Lost Stars
Steve Duffy - The Oram County Whoosit
Joe R. Lansdale - The Crawling Sky
Brian Lumley - The Fairground Horror
Tim Pratt - Cinderlands
Gene Wolfe - Lord of the Land
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. - To Live and Die in Arkham
John Langan - The Shallows
Laird Barron - The Men from Porlock

An excellent anthology of mostly reprinted Lovecraftian stories, all of them dating from 1976 onwards. The Book of Cthulhu is quite heavy on 21st-century Cthulhuiana, which is fine -- most of the stories are excellent, several are harrowing, and many come from relatively small-press magazines and anthologies I would otherwise not have encountered.

There's some thematic grouping here, noticeable from the titles of what I call the Innsmouth Dining section (starting with "Calamari Curls" and running through "The Doom that Came to Innsmouth"), but also apparent in sections devoted to shoggoths, historical Lovecraft, and invasion from space and other dimensions.

The original-to-this-anthology concluding story, Laird Barron's "The Men from Porlock" (Google the title -- it's a literary reference), is one hell of a capper; standouts from writers other than the old reliables like Ramsey Campbell, David Drake, Joe Lansdale, Caitlin Kiernan, TED Klein, and Michael Shea include "Cinderlands", "Flash Frame", "The Oram County Whoosit", "The Shallows", "Bad Sushi" and "A Colder War." Editor Ross Lockhart does a splendid job of selecting a very broad range of approaches to Lovecraftian themes and variations.

Many stories specifically reference the Cthulhu Mythos not at all, instead building upon what Ramsey Campbell has called the first principles of Lovecraft's approach to horror -- the accumulation of telling, often quasi-documentarian detail in service to an overarching concern with the sublimely horrific. Lovecraft's children include all those 'found footage' horror movies currently dominating the marketplace, and stories like "The Oram County Whoosit" present a similar approach, one that's both contemporary and emergent from similar Lovecraftian constructions like "The Colour Out of Space" or "The Whisperer in Darkness."

But we also get some brilliant new takes on familiar themes and creatures in "Shoggoths in Bloom" and "A Colder War", both of which provide a fascinating blend of the Mythos and a fairly 'hard' science fictional approach. The shoggoths in bloom become surprisingly sympathetic; the shoggoths in Michael Shea's nauseating (in a good way) "Fat Face" really aren't sympathetic at all -- but the humans may be worse. A nice juxtaposition of stories using everybody's favourite freight-train-car-sized slaves of the Great Old Ones.

I could quibble with the selection of the stories from some of the writers (I'd pick Gene Wolfe's "The Tree is my Hat" over the already-reprinted "Lord of the Land", which has a somewhat clunky exposition section towards the end; the Lumley story is too much of an early, Lovecraftian pastiche from a writer who improved remarkably over his long career). I could quibble with the selection of some of the stories, though there's really only one clunker here. I will quibble with the copy editing, which is strangely awful in a handful of stories and perfectly fine in others. Weird!!! Highly recommended.