Review: Shadows From Norwood

Crazy people aren’t crazy all the time, you just have to know how to handle them. I’ve spent worse evenings. I don’t think I’ve spent weirder ones.

I was a little confused at first when I found Shadows From Norwood in the science fiction section, since it’s very obviously horror. And like a lot of my favorite horror stories, the stories here are inspired by HP Lovecraft; the author is a dedicated fan. But as a fan, David Hambling wanted to bring attention to the fact that Lovecraft wasn’t just a horror writer, he also followed the latest discoveries in science (a lot of them controversial at the time), and used them in his writing. Mr. Hambling wanted to create something that was closer to a true Lovecraftian work, instead of just a monster story with Cthulhu and the other Great Old Ones acting the part as monsters. And I think he’s succeeded.

Probably the most critical thing I’ll say in this review is that the introduction is a bit irritating. The author gets a little Rule Britannia with his claim that the “true” home of American-born Lovecraft’s writing is in Great Britain. Mr. Hambling might want to read more history before making claims like “in America, history barely runs back more than a few centuries.” As my husband the history major pointed out, there were quite a few civilizations in the Americas that go back many centuries; some of them, like the Aztecs and the Incas, were doing quite well before European settlers came along and killed them. Fortunately, what follows the lackluster introduction are seven wonderfully creepy Lovecraft-inspired stories, each with its own science-fiction twist.

All the familiar Lovecraftian tropes are still here: the lurker from beyond the stars, the subterranean race, the human-spawned monster, and the human becoming the monster. But Hambling has updated the original themes nicely, adding a bit of science to the horror. In this collection you now have secret experiments funded by profit-minded businessmen (or stolen by quick-thinking con men), television broadcast signals that reach an era before humans, genetic transformations (willing or not), and mathematical attempts to explain an extra-dimensional creature reaching into our three-dimensional world. And each story has at least one section that stands out: a lonely post on the deck of a ship just before disaster, a stone pattern that…changes, the entire character of Sophie in the last chapter, and some truly awful deaths. My favorite stories also had one last little sting in the tail.

I understand Mr. Hambling has released some of these stories separately, but they’re definitely best read together in one collection; each of them act as a chapter in a loosely tied together larger story, with the final chapter (the strongest one in the book, in my opinion) wrapping up at least a few of the loose threads. If I have any complaint at all, it’s that I wanted more from some of these. There were a few sections where conclusions were jumped to just a little too quickly, leaving the reader flailing. And a couple of stories wrapped up VERY fast, almost as if the author had just run out of things to say. Although in the case of the story “Two Fingers” I ended up liking the ending all the more for that.

Brand new writers can occasionally tell too much in their first works, and not leave enough to the imagination. This collection is David Hambling’s first attempt at fiction, and he already seems to have learned when to talk, and when to cut the lights and leave the reader alone in the dark.