Searchers After Horror, ed. S.T. Joshi -- a big meh

9781878252265
Fedogan & Bremer, 2014
352 pp

hardcover

"There are hidden pockets on this globe, sinister and uninhabited. How one thrills to find them, to listen to their sinister secrets whispered to one's imagination." 

     --- W.H. Pugmire, "An Element of Nightmare

According to Joshi's introduction to this book, once a reader picks up this book, he or she can look forward to discovering the "weirdness of landscape," "the careful etching of the complexities of human character," and the "evocation of terror in a multiplicity of themes, motifs and images" that run through this story collection.  He also states that "readers will find themselves inexorably becoming the denizens of bizarre realms of fantasy and terror beyond anything they could have envisioned."  The "weirdness of landscape" is well represented here, for the most part; as for the rest, well,  not so much. Out of the twenty-one stories in this volume, I really struggled to find more than a handful that evoked the promised terror beyond anything I could have envisioned.  I truly do not like being a negative nellie, but it's unavoidable here.  

Here's the post-introduction table of contents:

"Iced In" by Melanie Tem

"At Home with Azathoth"  by John Shirley

"The Girl Between the Slats" by Michael Aronovitz

"The Patter of Tiny Feet" by Richard Gavin

"At Lorn Hall" by Ramsey Campbell

"Blind Fish" by Caitlín R. Kiernan

"An Element of Nightmare" by W. H. Pugmire

"The Reeds" by Gary Fry

"Crawldaddies" by Steve Rasnic Tem

"Three Dreams of Ys" by Jonathan Thomas

"Willie the Protector"  by Lois H. Gresh

"Miranda’s Tree"  by Hannes Bok

"The Beautiful Fog Ascending"  by Simon Strantzas

" Exit Through the Gift Shop"  by Nick Mamatas

"Going to Ground"  by Darrell Schweitzer

"Dark Equinox" by Ann K. Schwader

"Et in Arcadia Ego" by Brian Stableford

"The Shadow of Heaven" by Jason V. Brock

"Flesh and Bones" by Nancy Kilpatrick

"The Sculptures in the House" by John D. Haefele

"Ice Fishing" by Donald Tyson

I won't go through every story here but instead just make a few observations.  First and foremost, my feeling is that when an editor compiles a horror anthology, he/she should make sure that the terror is laid on thick right out of the gate, and that's just not the case here.   If I'm not even mildly creeped after the first story, it's sort of a signal of what lies ahead. Second: if he/she is going to bring in Lovecraftian-type stories, do it right and leave out the pastiches.  Third: when description takes over the story, it's not scary - it's skimworthy.  

With  my biggest complaints out of the way, there are a few stories that I actually liked in this book: Richard Gavin's "The Patter of Tiny Feet" delivers on not only the landscape end, but also the horror side. "Blind Fish" by Caitlin Kiernan, set in the future, was incredibly disquieting the entire way through.  "The Beautiful Fog Ascending" wasn't so horrifying in a creep-filled way, but it was positively eerie considering what's happening here. Another one that had a nice twist at the end was Darrell Schweitzer's "Going to Ground." It wasn't all that frightening, but that twist made me gasp out loud.  I  liked Ann K. Schwader's "Dark Equinox" very much -- it is positively dark, is very much reflective of the "weird landscape theme," and it made me want to  read more of her work. She does slow horror buildup very nicely. 

So, that's five, with two honorable mentions: first Campbell's "At Lorn Hall" for constant racheting of my curiosity level, but in the end I just didn't find it all that frightening. Second,  "The Shadow of Heaven" by Jason V. Brock also managed to give me a chill, even though I read something sort of similar earlier.  Sadly, the stomach knots really began at the end of the story with (trust me, this is no spoiler here) a ship captain's realization of the horrors that are about to be unleashed on the world. 

 I always expect to find a mix of good and not-so-good stories in an anthology, but with this one, I remember thinking "when is something frightening going to happen?" If readers are promised that they will be sucked into "terror beyond anything they could have envisioned," the editor should absolutely deliver. And that just didn't happen. 

AAAAIIIIEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Michael McDowell's The Elementals

9781941147177
Valancourt Books, 2014
218 pp

Over the last few nights as I've been reading The Elementals, nature has provided the perfect backdrop -- hard rain, thunder, and lightning so bright it flashed through the closed blinds.   And while this is the ultimate perfect atmosphere for reading a horror novel (or short stories for that matter),  as it turns out, in this case it was totally unnecessary: the eerie atmosphere that McDowell infuses into The Elementals holds its own without any help.

The novel focuses on two Alabama families, the Savages and the McCrays. They're linked together through marriage and the fact that both families have for years spent their summers at Beldame, "a long spit of land, no more than fifty yards wide," where there are three tall gray Victorian homes,  "large, eccentric old houses such as appeared in coffee table books on outré American architecture."  Back now at Beldame after the strange funeral of Marian Savage is her son Dauphin, who is married to Leigh McCray and  has inherited the family fortune; Leigh's brother Luker and his too-wise-for-her-years thirteen-year-old daughter India McCray from New York City; Big Barbara McCray, Leigh and Luker's mother, married to Lawton McCray, a candidate for US congressional representative, and the faithful Odessa, who's worked with the Savages for as long as anyone can remember.  

One one side of this narrow piece of land is St. Elmo's Lagoon; on the other is the Gulf of Mexico.  At high tide, Beldame is cut off, becoming a virtual island when the Gulf flows into the lagoon.  The McCrays have a house on the gulf side; just opposite their house on the lagoon side is the house belonging to the Savages.  The third house nobody lives in. No one can: the sand dune at the end of the spit has been encroaching on that house so much so that,  as India  notices on first seeing it, it "did not merely encroach upon the house, it had actually begin to swallow it." The third house holds its secrets, as do the McCrays and the Savages regarding their own childhood experiences with the third house.  All anyone will tell India is that she should stay away from it, but India has a mind of her own, and off she goes exploring. And then ..., well, to say more would be to wreck the experience for someone else.

There are so many excellent things about The Elementals -- the characters, the quiet beginning moving slowly toward an ever-growing anticipation of dread and then headlong into the horrors --  but one of the best features of this novel is  the author's ability to capture and evoke the sense of place in his writing. There are various schools of thought either yea or nay on  place as a character in a novel,  but here that's just how it is. The isolation of Beldame, the third house with the sand covering it both inside and out, the beautiful waters of the Gulf, St. Elmo's Lagoon, the channel, the sand, and above all, the paralyzing heat and humidity of a southern summer that sucks the energy right out of a person --  the way he brings all of this place to life allows it to act not only on the characters directly, but also on the reader.   He's captured the Southern summer heat with its god-awful humidity so perfectly that I could totally feel it while reading about it.  

Even better, by the last sections of the book, McDowell has perfectly combined those rising temperatures with the increasingly-growing horror, producing a kind of claustrophobic atmosphere that remains nearly up until the last moment of the story.

I loved this novel. If you're considering reading it, do not look at any reviews where they give away the whole shebang -- if I had known what was going to happen I wouldn't have enjoyed this book nearly as much. And speaking of that,  read this book very carefully if you are at all interested in trying to figure out the main mystery surrounding Beldame and the third house -- it's never overtly stated (which I thought was a good thing), but I think you'll find that there are answers there to dig out.  The one thing I didn't like about this book was that the pacing seemed kind of off at the very end -- much more rushed than I think it should have been given the tone of the rest of the novel. But what the heck.  It's one of the best supernatural horror stories I've read in a very long time.  Maybe modern readers of hack/slash gorefests will find it somewhat tame, but I certainly didn't.  Kudos to Valancourt Books for making this out-of-print book widely available and very affordable.

Here's an obscure one: Beyond the Pole and Other Weird Fantasies, by Philip Fisher

9781884449376
Black Dog Books, 2013
324 pp

paperback

"Damn peculiar -- cursed if it ain't!"

There are eleven very weird stories by Philip M. Fisher (1891-1973) in this book. I had never heard of Fisher before I stumbled across this title (and I still don't remember how I came to it), but now I think I'll have to find more of his work.

Included in this particular volume are (* denotes a favorite):

Introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz
"The Recent Demise of Professor Manried" (1917)
  -- A well-loved friend of the late scientist Professor Manried feels he needs to speak out and tell the truth about the real cause of Manried's death, because the papers are labeling it a suicide and he knows that is not really how things went down.
"Queer" (1918) *
-- A former Indy 500 driver, now in the Army, is called upon to transport an Army captain to Croy in the middle of a German shelling attack.  He's crossed the road fifty times "and never a scratch." He's not about to break his record.  This one is positively eerie.
"The Strange Case of Lemuel Jenkins" (1919)
--Another science-based story. Here a group of friends decides to play a cruel joke on one of their number, with tragic consequences.
"The Ship of Silent Men" (1920) * 
-- One of my personal favorites in this volume. A cargo ship named the Lanoa finds itself in the middle of a strange atmospheric phenomenon. While they're busy trying to figure things out, another ship, the Karnak, sends out an SOS. Since the Lanoa is the closest ship in the region, they attempt to make rescue. When they arrive, they quickly discover the crew hard at work as if nothing had happened.  A closer look, however, reveals that all is not exactly well. 
"The Master of Black" (1920)
-- Of all of the stories in this book, this is probably the least satisfying for modern readers.  The basic concept is good, about a man who, through his work in science, is able to plunge the world into total darkness that absolutely no light can penetrate.  The telling is long and wordy, although the basic story is pretty good.
"The Man Who Put Himself Into His Work" (1920) [originally titled "Into His Work"]
-- A typing teacher really wants to give his all to his students -- and eventually succeeds.  This one is weird enough, but not really very satisfying.
"Worlds Within Worlds" (1922)
-- An overworked, overtired scientist has a sort of breakdown and his doctors want to try a very risky cure using potent drug cocktail combinations.  He wakes up refreshed, but things are very different when he does.   Actually, this is a very cool story with a great  premise, but  it's just so overwordy with a lot of exposition that made my interest wane.  The underlying concept is awesome -- it's the delivery that doesn't exactly translate to the 21st century.
"Lights" (1922)
-- Lt. junior grade Warren Carey is being court-martialed for his role in the wreck of his captain's ship on the Yangtze River. Is he guilty as charged, or is it, like he says, that maybe he was "befogged in vibrations of a different plane?" 
"The Devil of the Western Sea" (1922) *
-- Among my favorites in this book, "The Devil of the Western Sea" sort of  read like a cross between those   old 1980s movies "The Final Countdown" and "The Philadelphia Experiment." New technology is going live on a Navy ship and it looks like it's working just fine. Then, when the inventor steps in, something goes just a little awry.  I really liked this one, in spite all of the scientific jargon.

from http://www.ign.com/articles/2004/04/12/the-final-countdown

"Fungus Isle" (1923) *
-- As I was researching this author and his writing, I came across a website devoted to William Hope Hodgson  that pretty much says that Fisher's story "clearly owes so much to Hodgson as to come close to intellectual property theft." The blog author also writes that "Fungus Isle" is "a mash-up of “The Voice in the Night” and The Boats of the Glen Carrig” here to a degree that is virtually impossible to ignore."  I haven't read much Hodgson (but will now), so I can't say.  All I know is that this is one very weird tale that made me want to go take a shower.  After mining for fire opals that they hope will bring them riches, one group within the party sneaks away by boat. Going after them, the others encounter a fierce typhoon, landing them on a strange island the likes of which they've never seen before. Trying not to starve or die of thirst, they explore and run into a nightmare. Whether it's lifted from Hodgson or no, it's still a fine tale.

"Beyond the Pole"(1924), 
-- A secret government expedition aboard a repurposed enemy Zeppelin that actually never launched finds a crew heading for the North Pole. The brother of the skipper is left behind because of a broken leg and is extremely disappointed not to be going on this momentous expedition.  The ship sails away, and it doesn't take long before all contact is lost.  When the brother discovers why, his disappointment turns to utter horror.  Here's another one where the government is warned against sending help or repeating the experiment, yet fails to listen. How typical, I guess, even in 1924. 

These eleven tales are by no means the sum total of Fisher's works. On another website I found while researching Fisher, I discovered another twelve titles which, along with some of the work in this book, seem to have been anthologized in a volume called Strange Ocean Vistas of Philip M. Fisher -- Lost Treasures From the Pulps #12. I wrote the author about the book ( it doesn't seem to have been published) so I'll see what happens. Anyway, back to Beyond the Pole.

  There are some very distinct ideas running through these stories. First, with the exception of "Queer," "Lights," and "Fungus Isle,"  his tales run more on the science fiction side of weird, focusing mainly on different forms and uses of physics. The author seems to be fascinated by the effects of "vibrations"  and electricity.  Secondly,  a lot of his tales have to do with the sea (as Dziemianowicz states in his introduction), likely based on the author's time in the Navy. Dziemianowicz notes that "these stories present the sea as a vast and alien world, where marvels and horrors await the vulnerable humans who sail upon it."  He includes "Beyond the Pole" in this particular set of stories -- even though it takes place in a dirigible, it's still a voyage.  

Beyond the Pole is basically a better-than-good, not great collection of strange tales. Some you have to use a mental machete to hack through the scientific jargon, making them a bit difficult and tedious in the reading, but even those are underpinned by cool storylines.  It seems like the author wanted to make sure that his readers understood the science, so he added long sections of exposition to make everything clear. When authors do that sort of thing, though, it has the opposite effect on me -- I just get bored. And that's my biggest critique of this book -- the author's style. It's not like that in all of the stories, just most of the ones that deal with the science behind whatever's going on at the moment. Some people may like that -- I am not a science person so it became monotonous after a while. Other than that, I'm very happy to have found this guy -- I love weird, I love pulp, science fiction is okay and when you throw all of that in the mix, that's what you get in this volume.

back to the anthology reading with The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Six, ed. Ellen Datlow

9781597805032
Night Shade Books, 2014
397 pp

paperback

Twenty-four stories make up this anthology, some from authors I know (meaning that I've read their stuff in the past), and some that are new to me.  As usual, it's a mixed bag, but I do have to say it's better than many of Ms. Datlow's previous Best Horror of the Year anthologies, and there were a few entries that actually sent shivers running up my spine. So -- without further ado, I give you

The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Six

First up is "Apports," by Stephen Bacon, proving that old adage that there is indeed no rest for the wicked.   In 2006, Mark Fisk's wife divorced him and got custody of their little son.  After the ex-Mrs. Fisk started seeing another man, Fisk tried to do himself in, jumping off of the top of a tower along with his little boy. The boy died, Fisk survived.  Not long after Fisk was sentenced to time in a mental institution, the ex-Mrs. Fisk commits suicide. Now a guy known as Cowan is looking for Fisk, for "Old times sake and all that."  I have to say that using "Apports" to start the collection was a great idea -- it's an awesome story.  I wasn't nearly as fond of the second story, Dale Bailey's "Mr. Splitfoot," as narrated by Maggie Fox, one of the infamous Fox sisters who became known far and wide for the rapping noises they produced with their joints and for ushering in the age of Modern Spiritualism here in the US. Now on her deathbed, she has a conversation with her dead sister Kate remembering a spirit named Mr. Splitfoot and all of the bad things it made her do. What happens in the story is creepy enough, but for some reason Maggie's persona just didn't do it for me. Moving on, Nathan Ballingrud's story "The Good Husband" was nice and weird, in which  a husband stops another of his wife's suicide attempts when he probably should have let her get on with it. Ewww.  Nina Allan wrote "The Tiger," another very different kind of horror story.  A photographer named Croft  serves ten years in prison for the sexual assault and murder of a child until a new witness comes forward and clears him. Unfortunately, he can't remember much about that time so he's not sure if he's really innocent or if he actually did it.  Now he's out, and meets up with Symes, who goes out of his way to help him, even handing him a new camera.  Hmmm.  Up next is a deliciously weird tale that would be a great film if someone could do it right. It's "The House on Cobb Street," by Lynda E. Rucker, and  my favorite story  in this collection. Vivian and Chris Crane buy a fixer-upper in Athens, Georgia. It isn't long until things start happening in their home, and after a while things start happening to the two of them. But that's not the worst of  what's going on in this house, Athens' own urban legend. If I spill what's in this story, it will totally kill it for anyone who wants to read it, so that's all I'll say except that  this is one ferociously creepy and nightmarish tale, kind of surreal and way out there. It's also probably the most well-written story in the book. I loved it.

KJ Kabza's "The Soul in the Bell Jar" seems to be set in an alternate world somewhere. Lindsome Glass, a young girl, comes to stay with her great-uncle Dr. Dandridge at his home while her parents are vacationing around the world. Dandridge is a scientist and a "stitchman," so called because of his work with bodies with reanimated souls, or "vivifieds."  She is put under the charge of Dandridge's assistant Chaswick, who clearly specifies where Lindsome may and may not go.  Of course, that doesn't stop her from wandering around, stumbling upon things she probably shouldn't see, and getting Chaswick mad at her.  Unfortunately for all of them, her curiosity gets the better of her.  Aside from the weird science that seems normal in this story, it reads like a tale from the Victorian era; it was just okay.  Much, much better is "Call Out," by Steve Toase, another favorite. A country vet in Yorkshire is called out late at night to tend to a farmer's cow and newborn calf. According to the farmer, the cow had been "cooked"  from the inside out after giving birth to her calf, and the "birth waters" had "scorched the floor stone-white clean." Let's just put it this way -- the vet  probably should have stayed home. It's another that is wrecked in the telling, so I'll just mention after I read this story  I had to put some time and space between myself and this book, especially since I read this story around 2 a.m. all alone in the house. Moving back into less horror, more weird territory, next up is Robert Shearman's "That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love." This one was just plain bizarre, but in a really twisted kind of way, I liked it.  Two children grow up in a home where the dad shows little, if any affection for the boy.  The brother is ignored while the sister is doted on, getting dolls from her father after he returned from traveling all over the world.  Together they participate in a strange ritual of sorts, but first he makes sure she's come to really love her new doll.  Freaky. 

 
"Bones of Crow," by Ray Cluley, starts out rather tame then quickly moves  into the  bizzaro world. Maggie lives in a high block of flats, and whenever she can take a break from her chronically ill father with COPD, she sneaks up to the roof to sneak a smoke. On one such visit, she tosses a lit cigarette and then worries that it might have hit litter, so goes to investigate. She does find litter, but she finds something else on the roof -- four giant eggs.  I can't even begin to explain what happens afterwards. It wasn't up there on my top story list, but it was definitely well written.  There's a poem next, "Introduction to the Body in Fairy Tales," by Jeannine Hall Gailey, but I'm not a poetry person so I'll move on to another good one, "The Tin House," by Simon Clark.  The owner of this house, so named because it's completely "clad in corrugated tin sheets," went missing six months earlier. Not a clue turned up as to his location, so the case is going into the cold files.  A detective is assigned to go to the house and take photos of every room before handing over the keys to the owner's nephew.  The author takes his time getting to the meat of this story before we find out what happens next, but it's well worth it.  "The Fox" by Conrad Williams also gave me a nice case of spine tingles, as he tells the story of a family's camping vacation. This is another one I can't divulge much about, but it's bone-chillingly good.  I almost skipped the next story "Stemming the Tide," because of the word "zombies" in the first sentence (I cannot stand zombie stories whatsoever), but I read on.  A man takes his significant other to visit the Hopewell Rocks, a place where people can walk on the ocean floor when the tide goes out. The place is filled with people, which the man hates.  Before the tide comes back in, the lifeguard shoos everyone out and locks the gates. His girlfriend isn't sure what to expect, but he knows. Very strange, but also pretty good. 

the Hopewell Rocks, taken from Canadian Roadstories

Priya Sharma's story "The Anatomist's Mnemonic" about a man who has an obsession with hands, starts out fine, but to be really blunt, I figured out what was going to happen well before I got to the ending.  I don't like when this happens. Meh.  I also didn't particularly love Steve Rasnic Tem's contribution, "The Monster Makers," about a "special" family where the kids learn more than they should from their grandfather.  And while I have an on-again/off-again relationship with Kim Newman's work, his "The Only Ending We Have," featuring a Janet Leigh stand in for  "Psycho" who gets entangled with a real-life mother-son combo, just didn't do it for me.  Three not so hots in a row didn't bother me though...the next story picked up the weird thread quite nicely: Derek Künksken's story, "The Dog's Paw" about a new guy in the diplomatic service in Africa learning how things work and how to get along there  is beyond eerie.  "Fine in the Fire," by Lee Thomas, is a rather poignant and ultimately sad story, in which a young boy is left in the dark about his older brother's predilections until he stumbles in on a family secret. Oh my gosh -- the terrible implications left me very unsettled.  Moving on,  I wasn't overly keen on Jane Jakeman's "Majorlena," either, about an army Major who shows up out of nowhere in Iraq and leaves the same way.  "The Withering" by Tim Casson is much better fare. Set in 1891, a reporter named Cresswell teams up with a Miss Appleby in Wales to try to save a poor young man named Tobias from the gallows.  He is accused of murdering the woman he loved; it is a relationship Dad wasn't happy about because of the class difference. Let's just say Miss Appleby has a very unique talent for getting to the truth. Aside from the satisfying eeriness of this tale, the author keeps it nicely grounded in time and place. In Neil Gaiman's very short piece, "Down to a Sunless Sea," a mother learns the fate of her son who ran away from home to be a sailor at the age of 12. Short, but truly horrific.

welsh graveyard, 1867, from 123RF

Now entering the final stretch, the last three stories in this book are all pretty darn good.    Laird Barron also has a nice story here, "The Jaws of Saturn," which I came across in his The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All  .  Barron is a modern master of weird, and this is one of the stories that showcases why I believe so.   With his infamous Broadsword Hotel as the setting for this piece, Barron's story concerns a hitman who doesn't like the aftereffects of the hypnosis his girlfriend is undergoing for quitting smoking and decides to confront the hypnotist. Very bad mistake. As I'm fond of saying, Laird Barron could write copy for cereal boxes and it would be good.   Linda Nagata's entry "Halfway Home"  is one I'm glad I didn't read while I was on my long airplane flights over the ocean earlier this month.  An American passenger on a overseas flight to LAX meets the passenger next to her from the Philippines, who seems to be faring poorly, but says it's just an allergy to nickel. Their topic of conversation turns to exit strategies  and the safety card in the seat pocket, a strange topic of discussion indeed. No one can be prepared for what happens next, though.  I have to say that this story turned out to be not at all what I thought it was going to be -- kudos. And last, but not least, a very Lovecraftian piece comes from Brian Hodge with "The Same Deep Water as You."  In a bizarre but very different take on the normal Innsmouth-based  story, the Department of Homeland Security hires an "animal whisperer" for a very special purpose at a detainment center where the inmates have been housed since 1928. For people like me who like all things Innsmouth, it's a good one.

I will repeat what I said at the outset ... this installment of Best Horror of the Year is probably the best one so far. I know that horror is in the eye of the beholder, but a majority of the stories in this collection worked well to satisfy my hunger for growing creepiness.  In previous installments, that definitely was not the case.  This time around Ms. Datlow's anthology is one I can definitely recommend to readers of horror -- most especially those who enjoy more cerebral frights than the kind that are in your face and splattered across pages in an ongoing gore fest.  I quite enjoyed this one!

Pulpy goodness with a big touch of weird! The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman

9781893887596
Haffner Press, 2012
646 pp

hardcover

"Sic pereant omnes inimici tui"

John Thunstone describes himself as a "truth teller and a truth seeker" whose life's work has been to "seek the nature of reality."  Sometimes "that nature seems to be beyond nature, beyond the nature we know and recognize."  He's also been known as an "explorer of strange occurrences," strange being the operative word.  He is never without his cane, complete with silver blade that was supposedly forged by St. Dunstan and comes in very handy.  His story most fully comes out in What Dreams May Come, a novel included in this collection, and there are clues throughout as to who John Thunstone really is and what he really does.

Here, in The Complete John Thunstone, all of Wellman's John Thunstone's stories have been collected in one volume, and while they're not all spine-tingling extravaganzas, the book is amazing, providing me with hours of pure weird and pulpy pleasure.  First in this book comes all of the short stories, in some of which Thunstone takes on his arch-nemesis Rowley  Thorne, who Ramsey Campbell says in his introduction "Manly Remembered"  is Thunstone's Moriarty. In Wellman's introduction to the 1981 Carcosa Press put out Lone Vigils, a collection of Thunstone stories through 1951,  the author writes that

"In several of the Thunstone stories appears a wizard named Rowley Thorne, and I was seriously warned that I might be sued for libel by a certain actual diabolist, Aleister Crowley"

upon whom Rowley Thorne seems to be loosely based, and who is shown in this photo:

 Thorne also returns in Wellman's novel-length story "The School of Darkness," at the end of this volume.  Thunstone's love interest appears in these stories as well: Sharon, Countess Monteseco, although Thunstone does everything he can to prevent himself from getting deeply involved with her because of the threat to her from Rowley.

 Aside from Thorne, Thunstone finds himself doing battle with the Shonokins, who claim to have existed long before "the Indians," who "took this country from creatures too terrible...to imagine, even though they are dead and leave only their fossil bones." According to one of them, the Shonokins "allowed the Indians to come," and retained only a few limited domains.  When people trespass into these "limited domains," they meet with trouble -- and Thunstone is not far behind.  The Shonokins have a ring finger longer than all of the fingers on their hands; they also can't tolerate being in the presence of their own dead.

Thunstone meets up with strange magic and powers not just with the Shonokins or Rowley Thorne, but comes across an Eskimo wizard, a woman who won't stay dead and buried,  and regular people who somehow find themselves entangled in bad juju, usually because of their own greed.

After the short stories is Wellman's novel What Dreams May Come (not to be confused with the movie or Matheson's novel), where Thunstone, already in England, hears about a strange ritual in the village of Claines and decides to go and witness it for himself. The town is mainly owned and run by the local squire, whom, after discerning that Thunstone is not with the English equivalent of the IRS, welcomes him into his home, where Thunstone discovers that the man is fascinated with the past.   Back at his home in the local B&B, Thunstone turns out the light in his room and suddenly finds himself cast back thousands of years, where he witnesses some very strange phenomena. Intrigued, he decides to repeat the experiment, and comes back with proof of his journey.  The maid at the B&B, Connie Bailey, a self-proclaimed white witch, also has these bizarre experiences, but the people to whom she confides them brush them off as dreams. Not Thunstone, of course, who knows firsthand.

The collection ends with "The School of Darkness," which wasn't nearly as good as What Dreams May Come, but still fun.  Thunstone and three others participate in a symposium where they are to talk about their research and experiences, but of course, they get sidetracked with the return of who else? Rowley Thorne. The college where they are speaking has a long history involving witchcraft and diabolism, and Thorne becomes involved with the local coven whose leader and members have their own agenda for the future. Thunstone and his fellow participants have to combine their strengths to fight off a powerful enemy, whose tricks involve murder.  I liked this one, but parts read like a group of superheroes who come together, put their respective rings together that go "bzzzzt" and voila, their powers are strengthened. Here they all smoke a pipe filled with magically-protective materials rather than wear rings to touch together, but still.

There are also some very cool illustrations done by George Evans throughout the short-story sections, like this one,

that accurately portray what's going on in the story.


I'm very pressed for time today, so there's no time for me to delve further, but I have to say that The Complete John Thunstone has moved into the ranks of favorite books in my library, and I can most definitely recommend this work of pulpy goodness with just the right touch of weird. There are a couple of Lovecraft mentions as well as a reference to the Necronomicon included, the stories are good, old-fashioned cool pulpy delight, and when it comes down to it, this entire book is 600+ pages of fun.

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.