Excellent collection of innovative yet Old School tales in the Mighty H.P. Lovecraft Manner by way of August Derleth. Hambling sets many of his stories in and around Dulwich, a real suburb of London, England whose name resembles that of Lovecraft's fictional Dunwich, Massachusetts. The most Old School thing, I suppose, is Hambling's homage-oriented titling of his stories, as many play on HPL stories either specifically or in general syntax. Well, and a nod to Sherlock Holmes with "The Norwood Builder."
The stories range from the late 19th century (""The Devils in the Deep Blue Sea," a nod to William Hope Hodgson as well as HPL) to today (the bleakly satiric "Two Fingers," a story about the rich getting what they want regardless of the consequences for everyone else). Several stories share the idea of a secret society working against the Great Old Ones, while three stories form a connected narrative occurring over 11 years ("The Monsters in the Park," "The Dulwich Horror of 1927," and "Shadows of the Witch House"). The last of these also nods to Arthur Machen's seminal, pre-Lovecraftian work of cosmic horror, "The Great God Pan," incidentally one of Stephen King's favourites.
Hambling often spices up his speculations on cosmic horror with contemporary science and physics unavailable to Lovecraft in the 1920's and 1930's. Genetics, epigenetics, stem-cell therapy, quantum entanglement, and astrophysics rub shoulders with Deep Ones, shambling shoggoths, the rugose cones of the Great Race, the mysterious Others, and those lovable, space-faring, brain-collecting fungoid crustaceans the Mi-Go.
While there are deliberate invocations of specific Lovecraft stories in the titles and in the stories themselves (one story ends with a paraphrase of the ending of "The Dunwich Horror," for instance), these are very much Hambling's stories. They use the quasi-documentary narrative approach favoured by Lovecraft while expanding upon it in interesting ways, including a story which criticizes an earlier story in the volume for a lack of truthfulness at certain points.
There aren't any true misfires here. Hambling's greatest strengths lie in his creation of a malevolent, historically specific, British past. That simply means that the present-day stories ("Two Fingers" and "The Norwood Builder") are good but not as engaging as the historical tales. "The Thing In the Vault," playing with literary tropes associated with American hard-boiled detective fiction, also lacks the truthful sense of time and place of the other Britocentric historical stories, though it remains a fun piece of work.
The scientific explanations for certain events in certain stories sometimes gets in the way of the horror. The mysterious Others of HPL's "The Shadow Out of Time" are literalized into pesky sci-fi aliens in "The Monsters In the Park." The Mi-Go in "The Thing In the Vault" come across as a little too dumb to be cosmically menacing. These are minor points really, but they are more reminiscent of August Derleth's attempts to organize and codify Lovecraft's malign cosmos after HPL's death. To quote Ramsey Campbell, sometimes "explanation is the death of horror." But in all, highly recommended.
