#braincandy: Southern Gods, by John Hornor Jacobs

9781597802857
Night Shade Books, 2011
270 pp

paperback

Have you ever been so engrossed in a story only to be disappointed as it  falls apart at the end? That's what happens here in Southern Gods.  Evidently most of the readers of this book didn't notice -- I'm looking at a HUGE number of 4- and 5-star reader reviews  both at GR and at Amazon.  Here's the thing -- it's one thing to create a world where such things are possible, but it's another thing all together to at least try to make you story somewhat believable in the context of that world.

In a very brain-candyish sort of way (which I'll admit, I need every so often to unwind) I was hooked on this book, which my pulp fiction group chose as its November group reading choice.  It starts with a brief but powerful prologue in 1878, then flashes forward to 1951.  There are two main strands of narrative here that will eventually come together -- the first is the story of Bull Ingram, a giant of a man and WWII vet who sees visions; the second that of Sarah (nee Rheinhart), who is fleeing an abusive husband, leaving him for the old family home in Arkansas to take care of her mother who is dying from lupus.  Ingram is a collector for a loan shark type of guy, but he is hired by another man,  a record producer who specializes in "black music,"  to look into the mysterious disappearance of his employee Earle Freeman.  Earle's job was to drive around to the small radio stations "peppering the countryside," deliver 45s & payola to get the music played.  Now he's gone -- the last known sighting of him was in the small Arkansas town of Brinkley, where there are only two cops who were of no help at all.  Finding Earle is only one half of Ingram's job, however -- he is also tasked with discovering the location and owner of a pirate radio station, also in Arkansas. The station plays the music of one Ramblin' John Hastur, a blues artist whose music has terrible effects on anyone who listens to it.

The second thread picks up Sarah's story at the family home (Gethsemane), where she has gone with her small daughter Franny. Her dying mother provides her with the excuse she needs to get away from her PTSD-suffering husband who has become abusive since returning from the war.  Sarah has time on her hands so she begins exploring the family library, and decides it might be fun to translate a book written in Latin, a subject she enjoyed in school.  Unfortunately for Sarah she picks the wrong book -- struggling a bit, she turns to a local priest who, coincidentally, just happened to be in Arkansas after being banished from the Vatican, where he was one of the priests in charge of the occult books in the secret Vatican library.  It also just happens (there's so much coincidence in this book it boggles the mind) that the book Sarah is currently translating was one formerly housed in the Vatican library, and the priest tries to warn her away.  But, of course, this doesn't happen and some very strange things start happening, meriting another visit with the priest who tries to explain it all.

Eventually (as if one couldn't guess), the two main threads come together and all hell literally breaks loose. Sadly, it's at this juncture where things start to royally fall apart.  To be fair, up to this point, I was very much into this story up to chapter 20 and then it was like the author said "what the hell do I now, once I have my two main characters come together?"  The result isn't pretty -- there is the stupidest sex scene, a truly bad deus ex machina episode complete with divine intervention (super ouch), crappy dialogue and super huge plot holes that just made me crazy.  Oy! It was like another author took over and had no clue what to do to bring this book to a decent close.  And as I noted up front, even in the context of the world Jacobs has created here where such things can happen, the ending was just badly done -- to the point where I wanted to toss the book across the room.  For me, even in a book like this that I consider major brain candy, there's really no excuse for that sort of thing -- and it was incredibly frustrating.  Jacobs could have done so much more with this story; as it is, it was disappointing to say the least.

a huge  aarrghhh from me....

Mysteries of the Worm, by Robert Bloch, ed. Robert M. Price

1568820127
Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu Fiction), 1993
263 pp
paperback

"This world is but a tiny island in the dark sea of Infinity, and there are horrors swirling all around us. Around us? Rather let us say amongst us. I know for I have seen then in my dreams, and there are more things in this world than sanity can ever see."  --The Soul of Chaos, Edgar Henquist Gordon

When I was a kid, aside from any and all mystery books I could get my hands on,  I  pretty much eschewed the standard kid-reading fare and spent hours in the library devouring the pulpy and the strange.  The more far out there it was, the better for me. Mysteries of the Worm made me think back to a lot of the strange Egyptian stories I read and loved -- mummies returning for vengeance, strange curses that fell on people who opened tombs, etc. Not that this sort of thing encompasses all of Bloch's writing in this book, but what is there, even though maybe not the best examples of his work, left me with inner squeals of delight, as did the rest of the book.  Robert Bloch was not just the author of Psycho, the book most people would associate with him, but early on in his career, he joined the ranks of the "Lovecraft Circle," which as Lin Carter notes was a

"band of aspiring or season writers scattered across the country whose common links were their enthusiasm for macabre fiction in general and Weird Tales in particular, and their friendship with Lovecraft." 

Judging by what I've just finished reading, and by books I've already read, there is  no doubt that he made sufficient contributions to the "tales that define the mythos," as the cover blurb notes about this entire series of books.  While perhaps they're not the most bone-chilling of stories as a whole, a) they're fun and b) it's really interesting to watch the development of Bloch's writing over time in this volume from being a producer of Lovecraftian pastiche to coming more into his own both in terms of story and style.  A big thumbs up on this book.

Exploring the table of contents, there are sixteen short stories that make up this volume, as well as an introduction by Robert M. Price, an afterword, and a short piece by Lin Carter, "Demon-Dreaded Lore."  Here we go:

"The Secret in the Tomb" finds the eldest son of the current generation of a family of "sorcerers and wizards" from the olden days in the "nitrous-fungus bearded portals of the family vault." He is determined to be the one who finally thwarts the curse of the long line of eldest sons, by meeting whatever is behind the iron tomb door.  Here, that "pinnacle of literary madness, Ludvig Prinn's Mysteries of the Worm makes its first appearance.  Next up is "The Suicide in the Study," the story of  James Allington, whose library consists in part of such tomes as the Necronomicon, the Mysteries of the Worm, "the Black Rites of mad Luveh-Keraph, priest of Bast," and the Cultes des Goules, by the Comte d'Erlette.  Allington undertakes the "greatest experiment man has ever known," trying to manifest his dual personality in physical form.  Not one of Bloch's best, but still fun.  In tale number three, The Shambler from the Stars," a writer of weird fiction wants to write a "real work of art" with "new subject matter, truly unusual plot material." He settles on Prinn's "Mysteries of the Worm" as inspiration, and decides to test it out on a friend in Providence.  Bad idea.  There's a fun bit of info about the back-and-forth that this story created between Bloch and Lovecraft.  "The Faceless God" is the first of Bloch's Egyptian stories in this volume,  which when all is said and done is great fun.  Here, an unscrupulous smuggler of antiques stops at nothing to discover the location of a statue buried in the sands of the Egyptian desert. Sadly for him, the native crew he hires to help him find it and bring it home knows that the idol of the "Old God" Nyarlathotep is bad business -- and he is left to suffer the consequences.  Memo to self: when the natives try to convince you of something, you should probably listen. Moving on, "The Grinning Ghoul" finds a helpful psychiatrist trying to help a college professor whose dreams not only were the cause of "uncontrollable melancholia," but were also interfering with his work. After some time, the patient finds the physical locale upon which his dreams are based, and the shrink, thinking of the monograph he'll write afterwards, follows him into a cemetery and into a mausoleum. What he finds there will explain why he's writing this tale from a sanatorium for mental cases.  "The Dark Demon" also deals in dreams, this time those of  an author whose writing is based on them. Things start to get weird when he tells a friend  that he has been designated as a Messiah for the Dark One  who dictates what's in the books through his dreams; they get even weirder on May-Eve when the friend finds Edgar Henquist Gordon dreaming on his couch.  

"The Mannikin" is one creepy story, albeit with a familiarish ending,  in which a teacher bumps into a former student named Simon Maglore while vacationing in a small rustic village on a lake.   Simon had left school some time back when his parents died, coming back to the small village to live in the family home. The teacher discovers that the villagers have very little to do with Simon, or indeed his entire family, who were all born with a  "physical malformation" of some sort and associated with the foulest evil.  Wanting Simon to leave the place because of its "unhealthful atmosphere," he pays him a call along with a doctor, but let's just say this isn't a case that medical science can help.  Next up is "The Brood of Bubastis," one of my favorites in this book.  This one is downright ghoulish and produced a little spine tingle or two while I read it. A man who has developed an abnormal feliphobia and taken himself away from everyone relates this tale of events during a visit to his college friend Malcolm Kent in Cornwall, in "a region of mystic mountains, cloud-haunted hilltops, and purple peaks that towered over wild forest glens and green-grottoed swamplands."  It seems that after reading Prinn's weighty tome and checking what he found there against other archaeological texts, he's discovered that the Egyptians had once colonized Cornwall.  But he's made another discovery that he wants to share with the narrator, one that can be found by entering a "sinister slit in the ageless rock."  This story is downright weird in a bizarre sense of the word. I loved it.  Moving from the Cornish countryside to Arkham, Massachusetts, "The Creeper in the Crypt" finds a handful of gangsters who unbeknownst to them, are trespassers in a beyond-haunted house with an iron door in the cellar. The spookiness here is in the house's story rather than in the tale. Next up is "The Secret of Sebek," another personal favorite that takes place during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. A writer working on a "series of Egyptian stories" during the day strolls through the partying crowds at night. On a quieter street, a man named Henricus Vanning dressed in an Egyptian priest costume stops him for a light and recognizes him.  Vanning, who professes an interest in the occult and in Egyptian lore, invites him back to his house where he is giving a costume ball which immediately reminds the narrator of Poe's Masque of the Red Death.  Stranger things are about to happen though, once Vanning takes him to meet his small, like-minded coterie of friends who call themselves The Coffin Club, who have something strange to show him. Aieee! This little tale really grabbed me, but "Fane of the Black Pharoah" was even better.  Retired Captain Carteret who served in Egypt during wartime is fascinated with secret lore, especially with the legend of Nephren-Ka, the Black Pharoah, who through Nyarlathotep, had been granted the gift of divination.  One night opportunity knocks on his door in the form of Arab holding the Seal of Nephren-Ka, and  the captain is given the chance to visit the Black Pharoah's secret crypt -- and watch his destiny unfold.  

"The Sorcerer's Jewel" finds a photographer looking to do something different in his work and his friend providing him with just the ticket in the form of a strange jewel.  This story was okay; as in "The Mannikin," the core of this tale has been done before.  Things take a slight turn toward the different with "The Unspeakable Betrothal," in which a young girl living with an aunt and uncle is drawn toward an open window resulting in what seems to be a mental breakdown. The relatives have it boarded up, and the girl is taken away for a rest cure.  As an adult, she returns to her childhood home, where she is watched over by her fiance. But the window is calling to her again, or rather, what's outside of it.  I liked this one -- very atmospheric with a very strange, bizarre ending.  Next up is "The Shadow from the Steeple," one of Bloch's better pieces, which as the intro to this tale notes, is a sequel to HPL's "The Haunter of the Dark" , which is in turn a sequel to Block's "Shambler from the Stars." The death of close friend Robert Blake (his fictional alter-ego created by HPL) prompts a 15-year arduous investigation by his friend Edmund Fiske, who was not satisfied with Lovecraft's explanation of events in his story and is determined to get to the truth. "Notebook Found in a Deserted House" reminded me a lot of Lovecraft's "Whisperer in Darkness," in a story set way out in the woods where a young boy grows up listening to his grandma's stories about "them ones" who hide in the swamps and make sacrifices.  Excellent creep factor in this piece. This is followed by "Terror in Cut-Throat Cove," set in the Caribbean. A treasure seeker anchors off the island of Santa Rita looking to locate and plunder an old Spanish ship that had sunk there hundreds of years earlier. The beauty of the man's girlfriend is enough to entice the local expat American to become part of the expedition, but they find much more than they bargain for. There's enough suspense and eeriness to this tale to make it work well, but the ending is simply outstanding. 

Once again, Chaosium has come through with an anthology of stories where the good tales far outweigh the not so great ones.  Definitely a no-miss not only for weird-fiction readers, but also for anyone who enjoys Bloch's writing in general.  What a great group of tales!

The Hastur Cycle, ed. Robert M. Price

0568820097
Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu Fiction #1), 1993
303 pp

paperback

"Close contact with the utterly bizarre is often more terrifying than inspiring..." --- HP Lovecraft in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (193) 



Some time ago, long before HBO's True Detective was even in the works, I read  S.T. Joshi's Chaosium collection of Robert W. Chambers'  The Yellow Sign and Other Stories.  It  was my  introduction to  King in Yellow, and I was so entranced that I had to have more.  Then I remembered that I had a copy of  The Hastur Cycle (and A Season in Carcosa, which I'll discuss after this book) somewhere among the jumble of books in my horror/weird fiction shelves. Score!

Robert M. Price notes about this collection that 

"The Hastur Cycle ... may be seen as a literary genealogy, a family tree in which Lovecraft's 'The Whisperer in Darkness' is a single branch, with other branches stemming from it and going in their own directions" 

and  that "the family tree begins with Ambrose Bierce."  With "The Whisperer in Darkness" at the center of this collection, the book focuses on the antecedents of this story (Bierce, Chambers, Wagner, Blish, Machen);  then, after Lovecraft's piece,   moves on to the works of writers inspired by HPL. But as I've discovered, Lovecraft only mentions Hastur as one among many terrible names, and moves his story into the realm of outer space and crustacean-like fungal creatures (Mi-Go), a theme which runs for a while before another author makes Hastur a participant in a battle of bad monsters, so  I don't think I quite got the connection.   If someone wants explain it to me, I would be grateful. I thought about this long and hard, believe me. 

 Just a note --I have the original version of The Hastur Cycle rather than the revised edition of 2006 so I'm missing "The Feaster from Afar," by Joseph Payne Brennan. Otherwise, it seems to be the same, although I don't know if Price's commentary has changed in the newer version. Another note: ignore the introductions to each story until the end -- I discovered after reading the intro to "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" that the editor needed to provide spoiler alerts, so I waited to read the introductions until after I'd read each story.

The table of contents is as follows:

Ambrose Bierce: 
---  "Haita the Shepherd," and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," both stories that  have no mention of a King in Yellow, but do mention Hali, Hastur and Carcosa. The first story is about a shepherd who worships a god named Hastur;  the second tells of a man who has awakened from an illness and makes a surprising discovery.

Robert W. Chambers:
--- Now we get into the really good stuff, first with "The Repairer of Reputations," which is one of my absolute favorite King in Yellow stories ever and then "The Yellow Sign," also excellent.  

Karl Edward Wagner:
--- "The River of Night's Dreaming" absolutely blew me away. Perfectly placed after the 2 pieces by Chambers, this story follows a passenger on a prison bus who sees her chance for escape and takes it.  This one story is so well written and so good that out of all of the stories in this collection it's the one I will never, ever forget.

James Blish:
--- "More Light" wherein a version of the play "The King in Yellow" is found. The story is revealed in the first person by a narrator who is invited to the home of one William Atheling, a literary critic.   It strikes me as a rather tongue-in-cheek kind of story (except for the play), since as I discovered after having finished this book, William Atheling Jr. is also a pen name of James Blish.  Atheling has a copy of the actual play "The King in Yellow," purported to be written by Chambers himself, but has received it from HP Lovecraft after a bit of badgering. Now he wants the narrator of the story to read it.  The play, of course, was never written by Chambers, only alluded to in his stories. Also a very good story, "More Light" allows the reader to judge for him/herself just how terrifying it might be, perhaps proving the point that by skirting around the play itself in his work, Chambers makes the play much more frightening in his readers' heads than it seems to be on paper.

Arthur Machen:
--- Machen is one of my favorite "weird" writers, although now I think I want to read the Best Weird Tales 3-volume set published by Chaosium again just to reconnect.  His contribution to this volume is the most excellent "The Novel of the Black Seal," the story of  Professor Gregg, an antiquarian whose research leads him to the discovery of a strange black rock on which are inscribed characters at least four thousand years old.  His curiosity also leads to the revelation of  the thin line that exists between the world we know and the darker reality that lies beneath.  The Professor says it best when he looks at a bridge, seeing in it "a mystical allegory of the passage from one world to another."

H.P. Lovecraft
--- The only Lovecraft entry in this book is "The Whisperer in Darkness," which comes together as a kind of horror meets sci-fi sort of thing, as   Price suggests that this story was not only inspired by Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal," but that in many ways, it is a  recasting of Machen's work moved from Wales to the "wild-domed hills of Vermont".  Professor Albert Wilmarth's story begins with something horrible he hasn't actually witnessed that causes him to experience a severe mental shock which causes him to flee.  A series of floods in 1927 leads to some pretty wild speculation about strange things floating in the rivers of Vermont as well as sightings of strange creatures. Wilmarth, who is an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University, relates the present sightings to old local myths and writes a series of letters to the local newspapers  supporting  his skepticism against the "romanticists who insisted on trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking 'little people' made popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen."   But Henry Akeley, also a scholar now living in a secluded farmhouse in these remote hills, begs to differ, and has firsthand evidence he would like Wilmarth to see that will ultimately lead to a challenge to Wilmarth's skepticism and will also challenge his rational mind as well.  Very enjoyable story.

Richard Lupoff
 --- picks up the Akeley story again in "Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley," moving it forward into 1979.  Henry Akeley's great-granddaugter Elizabeth is the leader of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, where she is known as the Radiant Mother. She holds regular sessions where she communes with the dead on behalf of her congregants. One day she picks up a "spirit" transmission from a voice with "the twang of a rural New Englander," who asks about Wilmarth.  I enjoyed the satire in this story and I liked it right up until the very end, when I think it got kind of silly and left me just a wee bit disappointed.

Next up is Ramsey Campbell with his "The Mine on Yuggoth," the tale of a young man who was into very "less orthodox practices," who got it into his head to see for himself the source of the "obscure process" of immortality practiced on "Tond, Yoggoth, and occasionally on Earth." Using the Revelations of Glaaki and the Necronomicon as his guide, he gets much more than he bargains for. I liked it, but not as much as the other stories in this book.

James Wade  also uses Yoggoth as the locale for his very short story, "Planetfall on Yuggoth."  Technology has advanced to the point where it is feasible to make a very short trip to Pluto, and an expedition is organized to make "planetfall."  As it turns out, this might not have been such a good idea, and worse, scientists don't seem to learn from their mistakes. This one was short, and okay.

We leave the lobster fungi and get back to the aptly-named "The Return of Hastur" (since Price seems to have gone a little Mi-Go happy for a while) , written by  August Derleth.  I read the story first, thinking that the ending sort of reminded me of a Japanese B-movie monster flick of the 1960s mixed with a familiar horror trope. It seems that the nephew of the dead Amos Tuttle (of Innsmouth)  not only failed to heed his uncle's warning and last request that the uncle's home be destroyed, but accidentally opened the way for Hastur, "He Who is not to be Named," and also a being as bad as Cthulhu, by playing around with forbidden books.  Then I read the introduction, and had to laugh, because Clark Ashton-Smith had given Derleth some advice he really should have taken.   

My edition  of this book ends with Lin Carter's "Tatters of the King," in three parts. First, "Litany to Hastur," a poem that re-situates Hastur in Carcosa and causes the narrator to warn others not "to seek to learn nor ever ask What horror hides behind ... The Pallid Mask!".  Next is "Carcosa Story About Hali," which finds a priest of the Elder Gods seeking the necromancer Hali the Wise who knows what dwells in the depths of the Black Lake. Finally, there's Lin Carter's version ("after James Blish") of the King in Yellow Play.

All in all, I liked the majority of these stories, but I'm still a little puzzled about the connection between the Hastur mythology of the pre-Lovecraft sections of the book and the Mi-Go portions of this collection.  I tried to keep notes but honestly, it probably went over my head along the way.  Either that, or Price didn't bring it out in his commentary.  In the long run, though, if you consider the authors represented here and the stories they have to tell, it's a pretty darn good book for readers of weird fiction.  Definitely recommended.

...and the saga continues: The Spawning, by Tim Curran (Book Two of The Hive Series)

9781934501191
Elder Signs Press, 2010
383 pp

paperback

"They didn't take the hint that the Kharkov Tragedy was the only warning this world was going to get.." 

Building on the events both in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and in Curran's previous novel in this series The Hive, The Spawning opens once again during the long, dark Antarctic winter.  It seems that in the meantime, what happened at Kharkov Station some years earlier has become fodder for conspiracy theorists, since the powers that be have covered up and put their own collective spins on the truth.  Unlike my experience while reading Hive, which was a little slow for me, I couldn't put this one down. It's weird (in the weird-fiction sense of the term), coolishly pulpy, and this time my tension level remained on high throughout most of the novel.  If you haven't read At the Mountains of Madness or The Hive, it's okay -- better if you have but The Spawning fills you in on the backstory enough so that you don't feel like you've missed too much.

With a prologue that's bound to get your rapt attention as twenty-five British scientists disappear from Mount Hobb station, it doesn't take long until you're in the middle of a lot of gut-twisting action, beginning at US/NSF station Polar Clime.  It starts when a helicopter crashes from nearby Colony Station, a top secret, hush-hush area "with armed guards and motion detectors," like "Area 51 or something" where "they had to keep people away."  Teams from Polar Clime are sent to the crash site, and right away one of the men, Slim, notices something odd about the crash itself.  Trying to extricate bodies from the wreckage, Slim happens to see something under a tarp, which right away, his friend Coyle realizes is "more than just a charred body...Something bad."  It isn't long until the "spooks" from Colony Station appear; their leader, Dayton orders the Polar Clime teams to leave. Coyle realizes something's off -- and not just with the crash. As he notes:

"The whole scenario was spooky and strange. First Mount Hobb and then this crash and now Dayton with his James Bond shit."

But "spooky and strange" will turn out to be an understatement.  After returning to Polar Clime, Coyle decides he'll join some of the others in viewing a live NASA feed of the historic landing of the Cassini 3 spacecraft as it lands on Jupiter's moon Callisto.  As they're watching, the craft's camera records "a series of interconnected megaliths" that will set off a chain of events that will eventually affect the entire world as we know it. Add to this horrific occasion a number of strange doings at  the NOAA Field Lab Polaris and Emperor Ice Station on the Beardmore Glacier, and it will be all Coyle and his companions can do to maintain their sanity and stay alive in the process.  


The tension builds from the novel's beginning and rarely lets up.  The chapters are short, the action moves around from place to place but never lingers too long in one spot, keeping the reader hooked.  Once again, as in Hive, Curran builds on the work of Lovecraft without copying his tone or style, letting his own writer voice come through.  Thematically, one of the main themes reveals that in their zeal to maintain secrecy, the government and other powers that be keep too many secrets and ignore lessons from the past that probably should have been heeded -- in this case, to the detriment of the world's population.  Once again though the characters seem a little bit too pat, often bordering on stereotypical; the whole us vs. them (the common man vs. the government and the scientists) is also very obvious. Also, while the story moves along at a good pace, Curran sometimes spends a little too much time with his characters pondering what all of this means.  However, I enjoyed The Spawning much more than its predecessor -- and the cliffhanger ending left me wanting much more.  So come on, Tim Curran -- it's been four years already -- time for the next installment!

Hive, by Tim Curran

9780975922941
Elder Signs Press, Inc, 2009
269 pp

paper (first ed.)

"Nothing stays buried forever at the Pole."

Hive is the first in a series of two books, followed by The Spawning, which I haven't yet read.  I own both books in their original paperback editions; a good thing since the prices of these two books have gone way up since their original publication dates.  Billed as a sequel to HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Hive takes its readers back to Antarctica decades after the original Pabodie expedition; if you've read Lovecraft's work, you'll remember that at the end (without giving away the show if you haven't) of that story, the narrator and expedition leader William Dyer clearly warned any future expeditions to stay away from Antarctica.  Obviously, the warning went unheeded. While I liked the overall story, the premise and especially the claustrophic Antarctic setting, in truth, this was a book I could read a while, put down, and wait to come back to. In the realm of weird fiction, that's unheard of for me.

Kharkov research station is the setting for this story -- Antarctica is in its winter which means total darkness, storms and for the crew at the station, isolation.  As the novel opens, paleobiologist and professor Gates is returning to Kharkov after his team discovered some frozen, mummified corpses buried in the ice.  He deposits his finds in Hut #6 where the mummies are definite objects of curiosity for the station's crew, creatures unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.  While Lind, the plumber is first in awe over how famous Gates' discovery is going to make everyone at Kharkov Station once the spring comes, Hayes, the mechanic is less enthused.  After seeing the mummies up close though, Lind  has second thoughts, warning everyone not to stay alone with these creatures.  The sense of dread and bizarre events that follow aren't helped by  NSF administrator  Dennis LaHune, who makes everything worse by cutting off the crew's contact with the outside world, setting himself up as an enemy to Hayes and eventually to Sharkey, station doctor.  Lind's sense of danger will turn out to be prophetic; it isn't long until the strange effects of having these creepy corpses at the station are experienced by all. But what are these things and what is the strange power they hold over everyone?

There is a very highly-developed atmosphere of isolation, darkness, and utter hopelessness that runs throughout this novel, and at times when that feeling of dread set in, it was all I could do sometimes to prevent myself from turning to the back to see if the main characters were still there at the end.  Sadly, the  hackle-raising sense of fear that exists in spots was overpowered by how many times the characters stop to expound on the nature of these creatures, often the same things over and over again. For me, this need to analyze things to death, along with the often-stereotypical characters, is what prevented this novel from being the gut puncher it could have been.  To his credit though, Curran has his own voice, unlike some authors who've taken Lovecraft's work and tried to turn it into theirs, all too often unsuccessfully.



Reader response varies -- some found it absolutely stunning, while others have kind of a middle-of-the-road reaction, and still others didn't care for it at all.  I am going to read the second book, and as a rule, I like Curran's fiction so despite my fault finding with Hive, I have no plans to stop reading his work.   I'd say read it, keeping in mind the caveats I've listed above.

Degrees of Fear and Others, by C.J. Henderson

9781888993578
Dark Regions Press, 2008
266 pp

trade paper, signed

"...there is no such thing as bravery; only degrees of fear"..."Find a degree you can live with, and carry on."

I recently discovered Dark Regions Press and in skimming titles, came across one of my favorite authors, C.J. Henderson.  I first encountered this writer in The Occult Detectives of C.J. Henderson at a time when I couldn't get enough of psychic investigators (and truth be told, I still love reading about them).  From there it was on to the Teddy London series -- I read the first one and bought the entire set. Then I got my hands on his The Tales of Inspector Legrasse, a host of stories featuring the character from Lovecraft's original Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.  The Supernatural Tales of C.J. Henderson also sits on the shelves, and whenever his work showed up in anthologies,  those books made it into my home library as well.  I also recently bought book 1 of the Piers Knight series, Brooklyn Knight.  I have yet to try the Kolchak stories, but I foresee that series making its way to my house here shortly.  I also love his take on Lin Carter's character Anton Zarnak.  In short -- I  like this guy's work.

picture from Wicca Girl

Now to get down to business. While not every story was to my exact taste, the case in any anthology, there are a number of good ones in this collection. While a number of these tales are Lovecraft inspired, there are others that are more original in nature.

Listing out the stories in this anthology, the book begins with "The Gardener," where a wealthy and powerful business man comes on his yearly visit to help out his "aged and frail and withered"  parents in Kingsport, RI.  This year he decides to stay an extra week -- and all hell breaks loose. Literally.

2. "Admission of Weakness," which gives the impression of being Henderson's first Anton Zarnak tale, is a good one. The psychic investigator, who literally holds the weight of the world's survival on his shoulders, comes to New York with an aura of "smug self-satisfaction" then becomes quickly chastened by his first case in the Big Apple once he gets to work.

3. "Hope," which is one of the non-Lovecraftian tales, is set in "the Stygian depths" and  follows a damned soul who finds a little glimmer of hope in his eternal suffering -- with a nasty, mean-spirited twist.

4. "Misery and Pity. " Jhong, a man who spent some time in America "chasing and banishing" vampires   meets his friend for dim sum in a restaurant in Hong Kong, and takes on a Chinese vampire known as the "Ch'iang Shich" (jiangshi in modern Chinese -- 彊屍).  The character of Jhong also appeared in Some Things Never Die (1993) from the Teddy London series.

5. "Incident on Highway 19",  chronicles the slow undoing of a highway worker whose job it is to keep the roads clean of road kill.  This one is downright creepy, as the guy's strange obsession unfolds.

6. "That's the One!" probably my least favorite story in the book -- a strange twist on Lewis Carroll in the realm of the weird.

7.  "A Happy Mother Takes Away Pain," featuring another character from the Teddy London series, Lai Wan, who also is the featured heroine of Lai Wan: The Dreamwalker.  Lai Wan takes on the case of ridding a dying mother of a demon -- a pretty good story that makes you think about yourself when all is said and done.

8. "Body and Soul," a Lovecraft-inspired tale if ever there was one.  Re-animator Herbert West returns in a rather strange story where he meets up with  Thomas Malone, the erstwhile police detective from HPL's "Horror at Red Hook."  I won't say more -- this one I found to be a little so-so.

9. "The Horror,"  - a very short story about one man's particular horror that no one else seems to take too seriously. Again, not one of my favorites. 

10. "A Forty Share in Innsmouth," written in 1997 but extremely relevant in today's reality TV-crazy society .  If you've read Brian Lumley's "The Kiss of Bugg-Shash," you'll recollect an earlier ritual that went somewhat awry.  In this story, a reality-TV host decides to fill a stadium and repeat the procedure.  Possibly not a good idea.

11. "Sacrifice,"  a bleak, disturbing  tale that I can only describe as gruesome.  How does one appease the gods of suffering in the world? One man takes it on. Thankfully, this one is very short.

12. "Pop Goes the Weasel."  The club Uproar will thrill and chill, and anyone can take center stage and do anything on their own, or with the props supplied by the management.  Pressure from the audience decides if one sinks or swims.  This was a cool, off-kilter little tale, and I loved the premise! 

13."The Questioning of the Azathothian Priest" I read this a long time ago in Hardboiled Cthulhu.  A man in custody for a series of extremely grotesque murders dies while being questioned by Zarnak and Captain Mark Thorner of the New York city police.  There are two reports of what happened: the truth, and the one that is safe for the public to know.  It's a good one.

14. "Pragmatic" is the story that prompted me to buy the first Piers Knight book -- not so much for the story itself (which all in all is just a little silly) but because of the character of Professor Piers Knight.  Knight travels to Munich to protect a baby that is about to be born from cosmic forces.  I won't say why, but it's a cool little tale.

15. "The Laughing Man" is one of those stories that could have been left out and I never would have noticed.  Set in 878 AD,  Vikings meet Valkyries in a rather ghostly tale. Meh.

16. "The Soul's Right Hand" is a  Teddy London story chock full of Halloween lore and more.  I liked this one not just for the story, but also because it calls attention to the media's habit of trying and convicting people in the public eye. I loved the ending!

17. "So Free We Seem" features Inspector Legrasse, and poses a tantalizing puzzle involving a dead man and a room full of traps.  Excellent.

18. "The Longest Pleasure" is a rather short but nasty tale of revenge out in the middle of the desert -- really, what some people won't do to get back at someone!

 19. "Juggernaut," another Teddy London story.  This time he's trying to help a human target of the Hounds of Tindalos.  While the message of the "greater good" is embedded here, the story itself is just a little rocky.  Not one of the best in the book.

and last, but by no means least, to the asylum for #20.  "Degrees of Fear." There are changes at the Derringol Asylum for the Hopeless,  "civilization's dumping ground for the absolute dregs of the world's nightmares."  The director, who'd been at the same job for decades,  is stepping down, and a younger,  ambitious new guy is taking his place. However,  before the incumbent leaves, he has something he really needs to show the new guy.  Creepy.

So there you have it... overall, a very good collection of stories.  For me out of 20 there were about three that I didn't really care for, a couple that were just in the so-so range, and several good ones, all dealing with the idea that "Our world touches upon other worlds, other realities."  I can recommend this anthology; it would be helpful if you've had some reading experience with Henderson's Teddy London or with HP Lovecraft's stories of cosmic horror before starting this one.

Lovecraft Unbound -- Ellen Datlow (ed.)

9781595821461
Dark Horse Books, 2009
420 pp

softcover

Having just finished four other books edited by Ellen Datlow, I have to say that this one has a wider range of good stories than the previous four volumes of The Best Horror of the Year do individually.  It's still a mixed bag though, with some stories much better than the rest, some following under the category of  "good and I'd probably look for more by their authors," and some that just didn't do it for me. In short, your typical anthology.  If you're considering reading this one,  keep in mind that the book was not intended to be a collection of Lovecraft pastiches but rather a collection of stories inspired by Lovecraft's work.  Even so, it comes out a bit unevenly and while the authors each offer a brief write-up on how Lovecraft inspired their work, some of the stories seem to be a bit off. 

So let's get down to business starting with the table of contents:

1. “The Crevasse” by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud
2. “The Office of Doom” by Richard Bowes
3. “Sincerely, Petrified” by Anna Tambour
4. “The Din of Celestial Birds” by Brian Evenson
5. “The Tenderness of Jackals” by Amanda Downum
6. “Sight Unseen” by Joel Lane
7. “Cold Water Survival” by Holly Phillips
8. “Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love” by William Browning Spencer
9. “Houses Under the Sea” by Caitlín R. Kiernan
10. “Machines of Concrete Light and Dark” by Michael Cisco
11. “Leng” by Marc Laidlaw
12. “In the Black Mill” by Michael Chabon
13. “One Day, Soon” by Lavie Tidhar
14. “Commencement” by Joyce Carol Oates
15. “Vernon, Driving” by Simon Kurt Unsworth
16. “The Recruiter” by Michael Shea
17. “Marya Nox” by Gemma Files
18. “Mongoose” by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear
19. “Catch Hell” by Laird Barron
20. “That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable” by Nick Mamatas

 There are six I really liked and five  that were good, not great, so that accounts for over half of the stories in this book.  The best story in this book is without question Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Houses Under the Sea," set in beautiful Monterey.  The story is seen through the eyes of a narrator who not only has no name but no gender either.  He/She has been assigned to write about Jacova Angevine, his/her former lover, who once had a promising career in academia but later became the head of a cult called "The Open Door," whose members she led into the ocean one day in a mass suicide. It's one a summary doesn't do justice, but my god ... this story is absolutely chilling and probably meets best the Lovecraft-inspiration criteria.   I have to give Ms. Datlow kudos for including it.   "The Crevasse,"  set in the Antarctic is also an excellent, Lovecraft-inspired story but one I've read before; also set in the Antarctic is Holly Phillips' "Cold Water Survival," another previously-read but excellent story.   Also clearly in the Lovecraftian zone is (believe it or not) Michael Chabon's "In the Black Mill," which I found to be outstanding; I did a double take when I got to this author's entry because well, he does horror & dread so nicely -- a side of Chabon I've never seen before!   "Marya Nox" by Gemma Files also caught my eye -- told in more or less epistolary format, it focuses on a strange church in Macedonia that was uncovered after having been purposely buried in its entirety.   "Catch Hell," by Laird Barron isn't exactly Lovecraftian so to speak, but there's definitely evil lurking in the woods around the Black Ram Lodge.  This one I've read before and while I really like this story, its inclusion in this particular volume is kind of a mystery. 

The six that were (imho) good/not great but still deserving of a mention are "The Din of Celestial Birds," by Brian Evenson, “Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love” by William Browning Spencer, "Leng," by Marc Laidlaw -- I'm a total sucker for anything set on the Plateau of Leng, and "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable” by Nick Mamatas. This one resonated with the idea that there's nothing one can do when confronted by cosmic forces beyond anyone's control and it appealed. And while  "The Office of Doom" was kind of  playful with its interlibrary loan of the Necronomicon, I'm still not quite sure about it. Ditto for "The Recruiter," which was dark enough for my weird tastes but kind of missing something there.

Obviously anyone reading this collection will have their own personal favorites, since as I've  noted before, horror is definitely in the eye of the beholder.  I'd recommend it -- there are many fine stories here. 

The Horror at Oakdeene and Others, by Brian Lumley

0870540785
Arkham House, 1977
229 pp

I have been an avid collector of Arkham House books for quite a long time now and luckily got this like-new edition of The Horror at Oakdeene and Others a while ago.  The book is an anthology of eight stories written by Brian Lumley, whose early horror writings are among my favorites in the world of weird fiction and cosmic horror.  As is true in many anthologies, you take the excellent with the good with the not so hot in this collection, but when all is said and done, it's a pretty good conglomerate of weird fiction.  Lovecraft's influence can be felt throughout, but there is plenty here to mark Lumley's own writing style as well.

author Brian Lumley

The eight stories in the book (with a brief intro to each) are:

"The Viking's Stone"  -- featuring Titus Crow, Lumley's very own creation, about whom Lumley writes:  

"he is one to whom, in his unending search for mysteries and discoveries of marvels, the occult has been simply a passage down which his wanderings have taken him; where he has learned, on more than one occasion, outre things unheard of in the more mundane world of ordinary men. Crow may, in that snese, be called an occultist -- but so is he a most knowledgeable man and something of an expert in many fields."

In this story, Crow and his partner de Marigny get involved with a fellow scholar who is messing about with things he shouldn't and removes the "bautastein" (tomb marker)  of a bloodthirsty Viking when the runes say not to;  "Aunt Hester" finds a  young man going to visit his black-sheep aunt shunned by the rest of his family and in the process and  to his detriment he discovers why no one even speaks of her any more;  "No Way Home" is an eerie tale of a man who has been trying to find his way home for 15 years; this one is somewhat marred by its ending and although it started out like a hackle-raising ghost story it lost me at the finish.   The title story "The Horror at Oakdeene," finds Martin Spellman, an aspiring author who wants to do a compilation of "rare or outstanding mental cases," soaking up atmosphere  in  training as a nurse at Oakdeene Sanatorium.  Spellman tries to avoid the basement ward known as "Hell," where a fellow nurse may or may not have had anything to do with a patient's bizarre death.  Burglar William "Spotty" Morton decides to go back and finish something he'd started a year ago in  "The Cleaner Woman," but the perfect crime may still be out of his reach.  Quite possibly my favorite in the entire collection is "The Statement of Henry Worthy," a little reminiscent of HPL's Innsmouth adventures but with a clever and spooky twist.  This one takes place in the moors of Scotland, when Matthew Worthy, Henry's nephew, comes down to visit his uncle and to also follow in the footsteps of a lost botanist who had disappeared after finding a very unusual species of plant.  "Darghud's Doll" is another Titus Crow story, where Crow is not really involved in the action but shares a bizarre story about the power and  long reach of supernatural revenge. Ending this collection of stories is "Born of the Winds," a rather long, drawn-out account of a determined woman seeking her son in the frozen Canadian north.  This story started out fine but got kind of bogged down as Lumley combines a mix of mythologies that imho didn't match the state of hovering horror as much as the other stories in this book were able to.

All in all -- a pretty good volume of tales of terror influenced largely by HP Lovecraft; a highly-recommended must for collectors  if you're into Lumley or Lovecraft or this brand of cosmic horror/weird fiction.  

The Laundry Files, by Charles Stross

There's something to be said about a guy who can combine HP Lovecraft, various writers of spy fiction, computer geekness and a little of the management nitwitnedness of Office Space and come up with a series of consistently good novels that incorporate all of the above.  After all, as he notes in the afterwords of his first series novel, there are a lot of similarities between Lovecraftian horror and spy fiction, especially the espionage novels set in the Cold War.  Along  the way he throws pointed barbs at iPhones, cults, Power Point presentations, evangelical Christians, handguns and other sources of irritation -- all of which come off as funny, but only because you realize that some of the things he pokes sarcastic fun at resonate with your own fears, peeves, and annoyances.  This guy is Charles Stross, who is the author of four books that comprise The Laundry Files, one of my favorite series of novels ever written.  If you'll pardon the expletive, I don't know he manages to keep coming up with this amazing shit -- each book is different, sending the main character Bob Howard, computational demonologist,  into perilous adventures as he and the Laundry, the super-secret civil service organization  Bob works for, prepare to save humanity from the onslaught of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN -- an apocalypse arriving from the multiverse.   The people at the Laundry have developed some very modern and secret technologies that combine the most high-tech electronics with the occult to keep Bob and others like him safe to defend the world -- all based on magic as a form of mathematics.  These novels remind me of old-time adventure stories with a hopped-up occult/geek/horror twist that for some reason unknown to myself I just can't seem to get enough of.

These books are perfect for someone like me -- I never did jump on the Twilight bandwagon, I don't do talking werewolves or other stuff like that, didn't swoon over the zombie phase and actually waited for it to die down before venturing back into the world of fantasy/horror because this kind of stuff seemed to dominate the bookstores forever.  Tons of people like that sort of urban fantasy/paranormal romance stuff -- and that's great, but it's just not my thing.  So I ran across my copy of Atrocity Archives at home while reorganizing my bookshelves and decided to give it read, and within a couple of weeks, completely finished the Laundry series, finishing one book and picking up the next right away.  I can definitely recommend each and every novel to anyone who is a) into HP Lovecraft; b) likes irreverent humor and sarcastic wit; c)  likes occult fiction; d) enjoys the old Cold War-type spy fiction and e) looking for something entirely different.   I'm hooked on these books now, and sadly, having just finished the last one, I am not looking forward to having to wait for a while to get back to the Laundry and Bob Howard's latest adventures. 

So now, to the books themselves: I loved them all, have very little in the way of negatives to say about any of them, so I'll just offer a barebones outline of each one in their publication order.   It goes without saying that you simply must read them in the same order or you'll be totally confused. 

The Atrocity Archives

9780441013654

Ace, 2006

originally published 2004

368 pp

paper

Take a helping of HP Lovecraft, toss in a layer of spy fiction, add a hefty dose of computer hackers & math nerds as well as the absurdity that can exist among bureaucrats who manage a cubicle-filled office, and you've got The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross. The title of the book covers not only the main story "The Atrocity Archive," but also "The Concrete Jungle," a novella that starts with one too many cow sculptures at Maynard Keynes, as well as an interesting essay by Stross entitled "Inside the Fear Factory."

Bob Howard works for a super-secret government agency called The Laundry. He's a computer guy who does stuff like fix sick Beowulf clusters, calibrates tarot permutators and does security audits of collecting card games to ensure that "stoned artists" in Austin Texas don't accidentally come up with a "great node." A year earlier he'd applied for a job in active service, and as the novel opens, he's getting his first crack at it. His assignment is to break into a company called Memetix (UK) Ltd., where a mathematician has succeeded in duplicating the Turing-Lovecraft theorem. It's in the world's best interest that the theorem is kept under wraps -- because certain mathematical computations can rip "honking great holes in spacetime," and once that happens, those things that live in the angles of different universes can make their way into ours. His mission is successful, and some three months after a mishap during a training class lands him a suspension he is sent back out into the field again. He ends up in Santa Cruz, where he is supposed to talk to a gorgeous scientist named Mo who is not allowed to leave the United States because of the nature of her work. When she is kidnapped and Bob intervenes to help her (which is against SOP) he ends up with a head injury and a flight back home. Shortly afterwards, Bob gets a new job in the Laundry under Angleton, his new boss -- and is assigned to accompany Mo (now back in the UK) to Amsterdam -- and all hell literally breaks loose.

"The Concrete Jungle" finds our hero once again wrapped up in a job for Angleton -- where he is ordered to go to Maynard Keynes and count the cows. His findings lead to the possibility that someone is playing around with "gorgonism," and may be planning to unleash its power via hacked CCTV networks.

Both "The Atrocity Archive" and "The Concrete Jungle" are great fun. Both make fun of the bureaucratic crap people in government jobs have to deal with -- budgets, paperwork for the sake of filling in paperwork, timekeeping and managers who have nothing better to do with their time than to make life tough on the employees and demand accurate paper clip counts in case of an audit. Bob's weird roommates at Chateau Cthulhu are also a good source of laughs. Beyond the humor of it all, Atrocity Archives combines spying, the occult and Lovecraftian horror into something very geeky and at the same time very original.

If you've got a geeky or irreverent sense of humor, this book should be just up your alley, especially if you also happen to be a fan of Lovecraftian-type horror, occult fiction and the occasional Cold War spy fiction novel.  Being in tune with geek culture is also a plus, although I have to admit that it's not one of my things. Looking at several  reviews, a lot of people have commented on the long time it takes to get into the story in "The Atrocity Archive," but I didn't care -- I was highly entertained; in all honesty, much more so by "The Atrocity Archive" than "The Concrete Jungle." Don't miss the essay at the end of the book -- it's well worth spending some time on.

The Jennifer Morgue
9781930846456
Golden Gryphon Press, 2006
313 pp
hardcover

Bob Howard and the Laundry return, this time in an adventure with a very James Bond flair. The geek culture and Lovecraft influence are still there, but this time Bob is lifted out of his office chair and smack into a case where once again the fate of the world hangs in the balance.  Back in the 1970s, the CIA was eager to retrieve a Soviet submarine that had gone down in the Pacific Ocean in a mission known as Operation Jennifer, located at Jennifer Morgue Site One.  They finally lock onto it, but as the sub begins to rise, suddenly something down below starts stirring; at 3,000 feet below the surface it is suddenly pulled back down. The CIA is in violation of the Benthic Treaties made with the Deep Ones (codename BLUE HADES), and in accordance with Article Five, Clause Four of the treaty, the Deep Ones decided to exercise their salvage rights and to claim the sub.  Flash forward to the 21st century:  Bob Howard, newly promoted,  is in Darmstadt, Germany after a harrowing ride on the autobahn.  He's supposed to attend a joint meeting with his international counterparts and he meets Ramona, an agent from the Black Chamber (America's "superblack agency dealing with occult intelligence.")   Together they are tasked with cozying up to  a rather nasty billionaire named Ellis Billington, who has acquired a CIA spy ship with plans on invading a section of disputed BLUE HADES and DEEP SEVEN (the Cthonians)  territory in the Caribbean at Jennifer Morgue Site Two.  Bob's boss, Angleton, wants to know what exactly Billington's going to do there, so that he can work necessary action to keep Billington from "pissing off" DEEP SEVEN and BLUE HADES.  If that happens, well, let's just say humanity is in for a load of trouble.  Angleton would prefer not having to worry about how he's going to have to tell the powers that be.   All of Britain is now depending on Bob, and Angleton warns him not to make his "usual hash of things."   From that moment on, our erstwhile hero (and Stross' novel) goes into James Bond mode, complete with weapons that would make even Q proud, the secret-agent car (here a Smartcar rather than an Aston Martin), casino action and Bond girls, and even code names like BROCCOLI-GOLDENEYE. 

What I love about this book (and the others as well)  is that it really doesn't take itself very seriously and it's hard to keep the laughs away.  There are so many jokes in here (Power Point presentations, bad-guy monologuing and suits are at the root of many) -- my only problem is that I'm not very much into geek culture so I'm probably missing a lot.   But the story is so much fun to read that it's really hard to stop until it's all over. Yet, with all of the positives, the thing I didn't like much about it is that Bob gets sort of lost in this one to the other characters -- there's a reason why but I can't spill it -- while the book loses something taking the route Stross decided on.  The second story in the book, "Pimpf",  is not nearly as good as Jennifer Morgue or its predecessor Atrocity Archives -- but it does introduce a character who will show up again in The Fuller Memorandum.  My advice -- try the Atrocity Archives; if you like it, you're going to like this one.

The Fuller Memorandum
9780441018673
Ace, 2010
310 pp
Hardcover

"It's Bob Howard vs. Evil -- and Evil cheats."

Third in the Laundry series, the story behind The Fuller Memorandum is related via Bob Howard's memoir of some pretty harrowing events.  Two years prior to the events of this book, his boss Angleton had suggested to Bob that he write his memoirs.  When Bob wonders why a 30 year-old should even start thinking about an autobiography, he discovers that it's in the book of rules that officers above a certain rank keep a classified journal or update their memoirs.  The info will be classified and used as a part of the Laundry's "institutional memory." If something ever goes awry while Bob is out keeping evil at bay, at least the knowledge in his "thick little skull" will have been preserved.  The Fuller Memorandum is one section of Bob's memoir that covers his story of "the beginning of the end of the world," among other things. 

It all begins with Bob's assignment at RAF Cosford, where he is supposed to take a look at an aircraft that is the site of some strange incidents.  He's also supposed to try to stop these weird things from happening, and while he's there, he needs to take a look in Hangar Six, part of the RAF Museum annex. His contact is Hastings, who tells him that the plane is from Squadron 666, a plane that did duty for the Laundry, logging some 280 hours on the "other side, escorting the white elephants." Just what that means isn't clear at the moment; Angleton had said something about white elephants but now Bob needs to take care of the problems. A forgotten ward leads to an explosion, survived by both Bob & Hastings, but the lady at the front desk, now bringing tea to the hangar, is caught up and killed.  Under orders to take time off from the Laundry while he awaits any further action, Bob picks up his wife Mo (who also works for the Laundry) from the airport to find that Mo is in pretty bad shape, "two millimeters away from a nervous breakdown."   But because Bob is not yet cleared, Mo can't talk to him about what happened to her.  Expecting a messenger with a Letter of Release, what shows up at his doorstep instead has followed Mo home from Amsterdam, an Uncle Fester lookalike wearing the "mortal skin of a dead man walking," bringing Bob into CLUB ZERO, involving a cult called The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom, a nasty bunch of groupies of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the end of the world.  To make matters worse, Angleton has disappeared, and Bob is left to try to figure things out for himself. At the same time, The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom (oh! I just noticed their acronym would be FCUK!), the Americans and the Russians are all looking for something called the Teapot as well as  the Fuller Memorandum, a document that will help to awaken the "Sleeper," a first step toward a chain of events leading to the end of humanity.   As Bob's investigation proceeds, he enters into what may be the weirdest case in which he's ever been involved, one that could very well signal the beginning of the end.

According to Wikipedia, where The Jennifer Morgue was written as a sort of pastiche send up of Ian Fleming's James Bond, The Fuller Memorandum is written as an "homage of sorts" to the work of Anthony Price, author of a series of spy novels featuring Dr. David Audley and Coloner Jack Butler.   Lovecraft's influence is still alive and kicking in this book, along with occult conspiracies and some more earthly horrors.  The same cynical, sarcastic humor and asides  (this time directed at Iphones, cultists, workers' rights and handguns among other things) in the other two books are still here, as are the author's excellent characterizations.  Also in common with The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, while the action is definitely over the top,  I loved it -- I absolutely can't get enough of The Laundry or of Charles Stross' writing.   I hope this series lasts a good, long time.

The Apocalypse Codex
9781937007461
Ace, 2012
326 pp

 "Bob Howard may be humanity's last hope. Start praying..."

Still recovering from the hair-raising events of The Fuller Memorandum, Bob now finds himself on the Fast Stream track for promotion, and his superiors have decided that he needs to attend some Professional Development training with regular civil servants who don't work for the Laundry.  Bob of course, doesn't want to go -- he'd rather audit some courses at the Dunwich facility that would improve his prospects for survival for "when the tentacles hit the pentacle." But of course, he has no choice, and after the first "four hours of soul-destroyingly banal tedium," meets Gerald Lockhart, who is in charge of external assets.  Lockhart wants Bob to join forces with Persephone Hazard, code name BASHFUL INCENDIARY, who has been hired to investigate why an American televangelist has all of a sudden taken an intense interest in the people surrounding the Prime Minister.  The Laundry is not allowed to snoop on Number 10, but the activities of the televangelist, Ray Schiller, have whetted the organization's curiosity.  It's off to America for Bob, where he follows BASHFUL INCENDIARY to a retreat in the Rockies, where she will be poised to discover exactly what Schiller and his disciples are getting up to -- and it's definitely not pretty. 

According to Howard's own blog, he wrote The Apocalypse Codex with Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise in mind.  But you'll also find a lot of Lovecraft, as well as some "Wrath of Khan" moments as Bob tries to prevent a group of evil and somewhat misguided members of the Golden Promise Ministries from ushering in the Second Coming that could launch NIGHTMARE CASE GREEN before its time. That would be very, very bad indeed. 

In The Apocalypse Codex Stross has created a plot that starts out like a light tap on the gas pedal and then accelerates in increments to some stomach-tensing action as you wonder how the heck they're going to make out of this one before the apocalypse erupts. Although a great deal of the action is told from the perspectives of two of the other characters, it fits together well considering this story is coming from Bob Howard's memoirs. It also seems like the Laundry series is getting a bit more serious now as events are moving toward the inevitable fight between humanity and what's laying in wait inside the edges and angles of other universes, but I hope it doesn't ever lose its sense of humor and geekness that these books are noted for and that is part of the reason I love this series.   It's another excellent and fun installment of the Laundry series, but don't read this if you're a very religious Christian unless you have a sense of humor.  It's obvious that Howard has issues with fundamentalist Christians in the way he throws those pointed barbs around -- the arrows don't bother me, but some people might take his humor the wrong way.  If you can get past that, you'll be rewarded with a fun adventure that takes you deeper into the heart of the strange and mysterious Laundry. 

and now, the long wait before the next book....aaarrghh!

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, edited by Paula Guran

9781607012894
Prime Books, 2011
520 pp

"...I figure there's things I don't want to find out about. And if we go looking down there, we'll see things we don't want to know about."

In the introduction to this book, the editor quotes a statement from China Miéville's intro to Lovecraft's  The Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition, where he notes the following:

 "Traditional genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo -- one which the protagonist scrambles to preserve. By contrast, Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion, but of realization.  The world has always been impeccably bleak; the horror lies in us acknowledging the fact."

And for the most part, that's a great way to describe what's happening in most of the stories in this book, which I'd rate as an above-average collection of cosmic horror tales.  Some of the stories are very much geared toward true Lovecraft fans, while some are tinged with eldritch horror and updated for the modern reader.   There are others that are not as creepy and some that tend toward the humorous.  As I've noted previously, the problem with these sorts of anthologies is that sometimes you read through a number of stories and when all is said and done, there are a few really good ones that stand above the rest, leaving you with some that are okay, and some that you just plain don't like.  That also happens in this book.

There are some really good ones in here; the ones I like best include Cherie Priest's "Bad Sushi," about an 80 year-old sushi chef who susses out a bad smell and other horrors;   John Shirley's "Buried in the Sky" is also very well done, with appeal not only to the classic Lovecraft fan, but also to more modern readers of the weird.   "Take Me to the River," by Paul McAuley is set in Bristol, and is delightfully eerie; by far one of the more cerebrally-creepy stories comes from China Miéville in "Details," the story of a young boy who gets caught up in the madness of a woman who will not come out of her room.   I also had fun with "A Colder War," by Charles Stross, where the discoveries made in Antarctica in Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" become the ultimate war technology.   "The Oram County Whoosit," by Steve Duffy is also deliciously creepy, a story that takes the reader back to the gold rush days and should teach you not to play with things that are better left alone.  Michael Shea's "Tsathoggua" and Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Pickman's Other Model" are very well done, and  I also liked Don Webb's "The Great White Bed."  Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" is also found here, a Sherlockian tale that  takes place in an alternative Victorian world.  And although I liked Langan's "Mr. Gaunt," it seemed a bit out of place in the context of this collection.

There are other good ones as well, but there are also some that I could take or leave, among them "The Vicar of R'lyeh," which others will probably love due to its gamer setting; I wasn't all that impressed with Kim Newman's "Another Fish Story" where the Devil meets Charlie Manson and his family, and "Mongoose," by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette didn't do anything for me either.

 It's your usual collection of  yeah!, okay, and no; but within the first two categories, you will find hours of creepy entertainment. If you are a Lovecraft purist, I'd stick with the older stuff, but there is enough cosmic horror and modern weird in here for everyone else.  My overall assessment of this book is that it is really good, not great, but as good as you can hope for in such a wide range of authors and stories.