Month: February 2021

Week 159 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Etchison, Lumley, Schweitzer, and Schwader

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Welcome to Week 159 of my horror short fiction review project! Lots of good stories to talk about this week, but my favorite was Ann Schwader’s “When the Stars Run Away.” This is bleak and melancholic and sad, and a must for fans of existential horror. Sometimes things just unravel and go away, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s even sadder when that’s happening to the entire universe.

The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, edited by Stephen Jones (Skyhorse, 2019)

“One of Us” by Dennis Etchison

Kind of nonsensical and not actually horror. A guy named Paul works for his friend’s limo service in Los Angeles; he is hired to take four teenagers to a music festival. It eventually becomes clear that Paul has also been hired as a hitman to kill a music executive who is backstage at the same festival. Paul kills his target and the teenagers also get into a knife fight with some rivals, perhaps killing someone at the festival as well. What was the point of any of this?

Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)

“The Night Sea-Maid Went Down”

A letter describing the last days of a North Atlantic deepsea oil drilling platform by the rig’s sole survivor. As it turns out, the rig accidentally drilled into the body of a Great Old One/monstrous ancient being trapped under the sea and, well, this being did not like its precious bodily fluids being extracted, so it writhed around a bit as it was being exsanguinated. This was one of those excellent doomed stories, a la a Greek tragedy, in which the reader knows the outcome of the tale at the outset, but you read on to see how it all plays out.

Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (DAW, 2010)

[previously reviewed] “The New Pauline Corpus” by Matt Cardin

“Ghost Dancing” by Darrell Schweitzer

A man is driving from Boston to Maine, having already lost his wife and child, as the world is destroyed by the Cthulhu Mythos. Wonderfully evocative images of kaiju-esque Mythos creatures wiping out cities. He is traveling to meet his old childhood friend Robert Tillinghast, with whom he has not spoken to in decades. He arrives at Tillinghast’s estate where the pair once sacrificed a girl in an occult ritual before going their separate ways. Tillinghast has now surrounded himself by a new cult, which seeks to repeat the sacrifice and secure a privileged position for themselves in the new world. The narrator resists that. Not a deep story, per se, but well done for what it is, and a highly enjoyable read.

Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, by Ann K. Schwader (Hippocampus Press, 2015)

“When the Stars Run Away”

Megan is a little girl who lives with her father, a astronomy professor, who struggles to care for her after his wife/Megan’s mother deserts them. Megan’s world is figuratively, and then eventually literally tearing apart. Strange astronomical phenomena emerge, and discussions of dark matter and the Big Rip, a cosmological model/theory I had to look up, that suggests the ultimate fate of the universe may be getting torn apart as everything continues to expand. Dark stuff. Stars and whole galaxies begin shifting positions and strange, liquid shadows begin appearing on Earth, moving through rooms and people, leaving cold spots behind. People begin disappearing. The universe is clearly in the midst of unraveling. Chilling and melancholic existential horror.


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Week 158 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Lebbon, Lumley, Murray, and Schwader

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Welcome to Week 158 of my horror short fiction review project! This week, all the stories were good to very good–a slightly unusual treat (in the sense that when I read four random stories, I have found that it is unusual that I will like all of them; guess I’m a little on the picky side, but then again I’ve read more than 600 stories just for the current project alone….). I’d have to say that my favorite of the week was Tim Lebbon’s “The Unfortunate.” This is a long novella, but an interesting reflection on the role that luck plays in all of our lives–we’re all one terrible, unlucky day from having our lives destroyed.

The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, edited by Stephen Jones (Skyhorse, 2019)

“The Unfortunate” by Tim Lebbon

A good if slightly too long novella (it’s super, super long). Adam is the sole survivor of a horrific plane crash in the ocean. While underwater, Adam is saved by the Amaranth, beings who may be angels, demons, fairies, or something else. They have decided to intervene by altering his luck, and will continue to do so, bringing him great success in life, but they warn him that his good fortune will always come with a price—a price that will be paid by everyone around him. If he ever refuses their aid, terrible things will befall him. Eventually, Adam does, of course, resist their “gifts.” Tragic and menacing and evocative. Very good stuff.

Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)

“The House of Cthulhu”

Notionally, an excerpt from an ancient text, this is a brief description of the pirate king Zar-thule’s raid on the city of R’lyeh, the tomb-city in which the Great Old One Cthulhu lies slumbering. This goes about as well as one would expect. A nice bit of body horror, in which one of Cthulhu’s priest-guardians is inflicted with a horrific parasitic fungus. Nothing fancy here, it’s all pretty straight-forward, but still enjoyable.

Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (DAW, 2010)

“What Brings the Void” by Will Murray

An anonymous human remote viewer working for the U.S. intelligence community is asked to embark on a suicide mission: he must travel to and investigate a converted factory in Richmond, Virginia, that is being used to process large numbers of humans who have been somehow brainwashed or mind-altered by the unspeakable monsters that are in the process of wiping out human civilization. Some of the techno-thriller aspects reminded me of Stross’ “A Colder War” (in a good way). Not bad at all—very interesting depiction of the monstrous entities and Murray’s depiction of Shub-Niggurath, which seems to devour human souls.

Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, by Ann K. Schwader (Hippocampus Press, 2015)

“The Sweetness of Your Heart”

A gothic. The narrator is a plain woman who has married a man who clearly only valued her for her money. Now he lies dying, and the narrator has discovered that he had three previous wives who now seem to be she-ghouls inhabiting his family’s ancestral crypt. The narrator joins them in exacting a final bit of revenge against her husband. Short but sweet.


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Week 157 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Brite, Lumley, Asamatsu, and Schwader

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Welcome to Week 157 (and the start of year four) of my horror short fiction review project! Today we read the first story in Ann K. Schwader’s Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror. While I found “Nothing of Him That Doth Fade” by Poppy Z. Brite to be extremely sad and poignant (I mean that as a compliment), I’d have to say that my favorite of the week was Schwader’s “Dark Equinox.” That’s a terrific tale of cosmic horror, and a very good sign of greatness to come in this collection.

The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, edited by Stephen Jones (Skyhorse, 2019)

“Nothing of Him That Doth Fade” by Poppy Z. Brite

Very sad and melancholic. Two gay lovers, Theo and Jack, are diving at the Great Barrier Reef with a tour group, but are accidentally left behind by their group—it is clear that without a rescue, the men will die. The pair have been living together for more than a decade and were on this vacation to revive their flagging relationship, which has mostly devolved into sniping at each other constantly. Very poignant story.

Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)

“Cement Surroundings”

A tale narrated by Paul, whose uncle Sir Amery is one of those iconic British explorers. Amery has become obsessed with finding the origins of the mysterious ancient city of G’harne, hidden in deepest, darkest Africa. Upon his return from G’harne, his mind shattered and paranoid, Amery has become obsessed with seismology and begins tracking a series of localized earthquakes that begin occurring closer and closer to England. He has also brought back two small pearlescent spheres. These are, as it turns out, the eggs of the Cthonians, a race of vast wormlike beings that tunnel deep beneath the Earth and seek to bring about the end of humanity and usher in the age of Cthulhu. They also do not appreciate that Amery has stolen two of their eggs. Nice resolution on this one.

Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (DAW, 2010)

“Spherical Trigonometry” by Ken Asamatsu

Set in Japan. The narrator is the artist husband of an architect who has been hired by an eccentric businessman-occultist to create “the Womb,” which is intended to be an underground sanctuary/bunker complex—built entirely without angles—to save him and some of humanity from an impending occult doom he believes is coming. Before the Womb can be completed, this doom arrives. The narrator, his wife, the billionaire, and his trophy wife are the only ones to arrive at the Womb. The architect is slaughtered by monsters before they can enter, and the three survivors live for a time in the Womb. Eventually the trophy wife and the narrator begin an affair, thereby creating a kind of human triangle, which is, at least conceptually, enough of an angle through which the reality-warping entities outside can enter the Womb. Pretty good.

Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, by Ann K. Schwader (Hippocampus Press, 2015)

“Dark Equinox”

Jen Maxwell has a master’s in art history, specializing in photography, and is trying to further develop her master’s thesis into a publishable project that will help get her into a PhD program. She is fascinated (perhaps obsessed) with the work of the late eerie photographer Leonie Gerard. Jen finds and purchases Gerard’s final print, a piece titled “Vernal Ascension.” Jen then gets in touch with Leonie’s brother Sebastian, who both encourages and discourages her research, and attempts to purchase the print from her. It becomes clear that Leonie tapped into something, a kind of interconnectedness of places around the world and a gradual remaking of it (the world) by some monstrous being; Jen becomes this thing’s conduit. Very well-written piece, even if the exact nature of the final remaking/cataclysm is unclear.


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Weekly Horror Short Story Review Project – Year 3 in Review

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I began this project on February 16, 2017 and it’s been going strong ever since. Because I typically schedule these posts in advance, I have the luxury of taking a week or two off every now and then but no one ever notices. I’m still enjoying reading and reviewing the tremendous body of horror-themed short fiction in my library and have lots left to go. Perhaps the biggest announcement I have to make in this post is that there will be (at least!) a Year Four of Reviews! As I’ve noted previously, this project has given me the excuse to really sit down and read it all systematically, working my way through a number of single-author collections and anthologies featuring stories by a wide variety of authors I probably should have read before now. It’s been a lot of fun.

When you’re reviewing four stories a week, one from each of four books simultaneously, you end up working your way through a lot of books. I have now completed reading and reviewing 26 story collections and am partially finished with three more. Here’s the complete list (collections that we’re still working on are bolded below):

  • Weeks 1-55: The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1987)
  • Weeks 40-56: Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2015)
  • Weeks 48-78: The Yellow Sign and Other Stories, by Robert W. Chambers (Chaosium, 2004)
  • Weeks 51-76: The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Night Shade Books, 2011)
  • Weeks 56-91: Alone With the Horrors by Ramsey Campbell (Tor, 2004)
  • Weeks 57-74: Black Wings of Cthulhu 4, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2016)
  • Weeks 75-99: Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, edited by Paula Guran (Running Press, 2016)
  • Weeks 77-88: The Crawling Chaos and Others: The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft, Vol. 1, edited by S.T. Joshi (Arcane Wisdom, 2012)
  • Weeks 79-89: The Hastur Cycle, Second Edition, edited by Robert M. Price (Chaosium, 1997)
  • Weeks 89-106: Medusa’s Coil and Others: The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft, Vol. 2, edited by S.T. Joshi (Arcane Wisdom, 2012)
  • Weeks 90-114: The King in Yellow Tales, Volume 1, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Lovecraft eZine Press, 2015)
  • Weeks 92-95: Dark Feasts, by Ramsey Campbell (Robinson Publishing, 1987)
  • Weeks 96-106: Cold Print, by Ramsey Campbell (Tor Books, 1987)
  • Weeks 100-115: Madness on the Orient Express, edited by James Lowder (Chaosium, 2014)
  • Weeks 107-118: Demons by Daylight, by Ramsey Campbell (Carroll & Graf, 1990)
  • Weeks 107-126: A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2015)
  • Weeks 115-124: Legacy of the Reanimator, edited by Peter Rawlik and Brian M. Sammons (Chaosium, 2015)
  • Weeks 116-123: The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books, 2014)
  • Weeks 119-136: Made in Goatswood: New Tales of Horror in the Severn Valley, edited by Scott David Aniolowski (Chaosium, 1995)
  • Weeks 124-132: Behold the Void, by Philip Fracassi (Lovecraft eZine Press, 2018)
  • Weeks 125-126: The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants, by Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing, 2018)
  • Weeks 127-153: A Mythos Grimmly, edited by Jeremy Hochhalter (Wanderer’s Haven Publications, 2015)
  • Weeks 127-136: The Red Brain: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2017)
  • Weeks 133-154: The Madness of Dr. Caligari, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Fedogan & Bremer, 2016)
  • Weeks 137-152: To Rouse Leviathan, by Matt Cardin (Hippocampus Press, 2019)
  • Weeks 137-156: Degrees of Fear and Others, by C.J. Henderson (Dark Quest, 2011)
  • Weeks 153-ongoing: The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, edited by Stephen Jones (Skyhorse, 2019)
  • Weeks 154-ongoing: Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (DAW, 2010)
  • Weeks 155-ongoing: Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)

Some general thoughts and reflections on the reviews and collections from Year Three in no particular order:

  • I finished a TON of great collections this year, in part my numbers were inflated because I was finishing up most if not all of my Ramsey Campbell collections and many of those reprint stories from earlier collections I had already read. In no particular order, my favorite collections from this year were: A Mountain Walked and The Red Brain, both edited by S.T. Joshi; The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron; Behold the Void by Philip Fracassi; and To Rouse Leviathan by Matt Cardin (Hippocampus Press, 2019). That is not to slight the others in any way, those were just collections that I found unusually wonderful. Of those, the collection that most profoundly affected me was Matt Cardin’s To Rouse Leviathan. This is a mix of existential horror and body horror, often in the same story, and many are permeated with religious themes and elements. To say that some of Cardin’s stories had a deeper impact on me than almost anything I’ve read in the last decade would not be an exaggeration. If you have not yet read it, do yourself a favor and pick it up. Cardin has now become one of those very few authors whose work I will now acquire as soon as I learn of their availability.
  • As I noted last year, we very badly need an index of all the reviews done thus far, and that will be coming out this next year. I did a lot of work on it this year, indexing all the way through Week 130 or so; there will be an index organized by author and a second organized by collection. Expect an announcement when the first draft of those indices is available. My hope is that it will be finished, at least through now, in spring 2021.
  • I also noted last year that I need to start posting some reviews of Thomas Ligotti’s work, and works inspired by Ligotti. While I didn’t get to post those this past year, I still plan to begin this next year in a separate series of posts. I have read several of Ligotti’s collections and related anthologies, so the content does exist, I just haven’t started posting them yet.
  • As promised last year, I did a series of special Halloween story reviews this past year, all from the excellent collection The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories, edited by Stephen Jones. I hope to do something similar again in 2021. That’s a really strong collection, so check it out.

As I mentioned last year, the life of a blogger is a sometimes lonely one, so let me know what you think of the reviews, or hit me with any other questions or comments you might have. As always, thanks for reading!

Week 156 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Gaiman, Lumley, Allen, and Henderson

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Welcome to Week 156 of my horror short fiction review project! This makes three solid years(!) of blog posts in which I review one story from each of four story collections every week, rain or shine. In a few days I’ll publish a Year 3 in review post. This week we say farewell to C.J. Henderson’s Degrees of Fear and Others; next week, that one will be replaced by Ann K. Schwader’s collection Dark Equinox & Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror. Several very good stories this week, but my favorite was Brian Lumley’s “Haggopian,” which reads a bit like Jacques Cousteau meets the Cthulhu Mythos. The oceans contains some genuine mysteries and freaky stuff, and we see a bit of that here.

The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, edited by Stephen Jones (Skyhorse, 2019)

“Feeders and Eaters” by Neil Gaiman

Good. The narrator meets a thin and wasted-looking Eddie Barrow in an all-night diner. They haven’t seen each other in many years, so Barrow tells his life story. Barrow was a lodger in a boarding house with an elderly woman, Mrs. Corvier. Barrow gets roped into bring Mrs. Corvier raw meat to eat. One night he finds her eating a cat, while, horribly, she has found some way to keep it alive. Barrow then reveals his hand, which is partially devoured. A young attractive woman, obviously a now rejuvenated Corvier, picks up the enthralled Barrow. Fun and ghoulish. Cannibal witch-women are always fun elements in a story.

Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)

“Haggopian”

Belton is a journalist who has been granted an interview with Richard Haggopian, a reclusive Jacque Cousteau-esque marine biologist on Haggopian’s private Greek island. Haggopian is a celebrated scientist, but his appearance and lifestyle are far stranger than Belton has expected. Haggopian reveals his personal history to Belton, including his various discoveries of the Deep Ones, various elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, and Earth’s prehistory. He also discovered a strange hagfish that doesn’t just prey on other species, it addicts them to its life force drains. And when Haggopian himself is bitten by the beast, he begins transforming into a hagfish-Deep One hybrid with the ability to drain people of their life force as well. As it turns out, Haggopian reveals that this will be his last interview, as he is heading out to sea, with plans to join his genetic comrades in their underwater civilization. Impressively researched in terms of the marine biology elements (at least the non-fictional parts). Fascinatingly written.

Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (DAW, 2010)

“Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” by Mike Allen

I didn’t really care for this one, though I do think it contains some intriguing elements that are worthy of mention. The narrator and his wife and daughter live an isolated existence on a small farm, seemingly in a small bubble of relative normalcy, surrounded by an impenetrable fog in which unspeakable entities dwell. His wife and daughter are no longer mentally functioning normally, and the wife’s body seems to be slowly transforming, Shoggoth-like, into something that is no longer human. It eventually becomes clear that the narrator has blocked his own memories of how this situation came about. We do learn that he is in the possession of a book—a grimoire of some sort—and that he used it to, seemingly, seal off the farm, and/or perhaps create this doom-laden scenario, precipitating the apocalypse. If the exact nature of what had transpired had been clearer, I likely would have loved this story. As is, it’s not a bad tale by any means, it’s just too unclear or ambiguous for me.

Degrees of Fear and Others, by C.J. Henderson (Dark Quest, 2011)

“Degrees of Fear”

Borrows its premise from HPL’s “From Beyond,” but an interesting twist. Thompson is a young, ambitious psychiatrist who convinces Hall, his boss and the head of the asylum he works at, to retire and cede leadership of the asylum to him. Hall is only too happy to accede to Thompson’s request. Before turning over responsibilities for the asylum to Thompson, Hall gets him extraordinarily drunk and then takes him down into one of the asylum’s wards, and reveals to him that inebriation allows him to see the extra-dimensional beings that have been drawn by the madness there, feeding on the patients and Hall. Now it is Thompson’s turn. Very good stuff.


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