Say what you will about H.P. Lovecraft – his elaborate Victorian prose, his cringeworthy racial biases – the man created a sandbox that horror writers love to play in. I’ve reviewed one story by Lovecraft in this column; compare that to, what, three separate posts about Lovecraft-inspired stories? Maybe four? There’s something irresistible about a modern take on the Cthulhu mythos, with just the right creepiness mixed in with the horror. I’m always willing to give a new Lovecraft compilation a try, even when I haven’t read anything by most of the authors included.
I needed something to keep me occupied for a long train ride, and I thought Children of Lovecraft would at least be interesting. And then I had to pace myself to keep myself from reading it too fast. Ellen Datlow’s latest compilation has fourteen stories by authors writing at the top of their game, and I feel like I could have eaten up the entire book in one sitting.
Lovecraft stories can have a lot in common with tales about the apocalypse: there’s usually not a lot of hope for the situation to get better. Sometimes that despair already exists at the start of the story. The main character in Siobhan Carrol’s 1930’s era story “Nesters” already had enough to deal with, what with her family members and livestock gradually being smothered by dust and drought. A meteor turning a neighboring farm into an impossible jungle filled with monsters just made things worse. And in “Little Ease” by Gemma Files, the narrator is working a dead-end job in a barely-legal pest control company, having to clear an apartment building owned by a landlord who views the tenants as little better than pests themselves. Needless to say, there are much worse things than roaches hiding in the crawlspaces.
And I don’t know how long I stood there, wavering, before I realized I wasn’t the only one I could hear breathing.
A couple of the authors nail Lovecraft’s style, with a hapless narrator telling a story they already know no one is ever going to believe. John Langan’s story “The Supplement” is about a book that’s the key to paradise…but there’s a price (isn’t there always?) It could be a fairly normal story about someone not being able to let a tragedy go, but then there’s some stunning imagery about what the pages of this poisonous book are made from. And writer Orrin Grey in “Mortensen’s Muse” has an aging starlet writing a tell-all about Hollywood’s golden age, including a photographer who’s reaching for something. By the time you get to the last sentence you find that things have been much stranger than the main character realized.
Then there were the stories that went the opposite direction and were written in a style that’s as far from Lovecraft’s prose as you can get. “Mr. Doornail” by Maria Dahvana Headley is a fairytale told in a sing-song voice – complete with phrases that repeat like the stanzas of a poem – and features an evil mother, her five wicked daughters, the monster chained behind the door, and the revenge of goats. And I don’t even know how to describe Laird Barron’s style in “Oblivion Mode”. The story is off the hook, disjointed and terrifying, with angelic space fairies versus feudal vampires from the endless void. I had to read the whole thing through a second time once I had a better idea of what Barron was trying to say, and I’m still not sure I know what was going on.
Sometimes the shortest stories packed the biggest punch. “Glasses” by Brian Evenson is short and simple, with a perfectly chilling final sentence. Richard Kadrey’s “The Secrets of Insects” takes place entirely during a lonely nighttime drive in a squad car. With too many grasshoppers appearing on the windshield. And the sky doesn’t look right anymore.
Where are you going to run when something overhead is moving the stars?
Not all of these completely worked for me. I think Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Excerpts for an Eschatology Quadrille” would have been better as a much longer story. There’s a lot of lead up, with an interesting format of leaping around in time from the 1950’s to way farther in the future. Eventually though the story goes nowhere, or at least it hints at something horrible happening without really tying it completely with what was going on in the earlier chapters. “Jules and Richard” had a similar problem; I kind of wish David Nickle had a follow-up to this one, since the story started somewhat innocently, got progressively darker, and then ended right when I was really getting interested.
Flawed or not, all of the above stories are excellent, but now we’re getting to the ones I liked the most. Stephen Gram Jones’s contribution “Eternal Troutland” feels like a fever dream, set from the point of view of a lonely protagonist who’s suffering from a deadly combination of a traumatic past, OCD, exobiology thought experiments, and a tangled mess of cause and effect (that traumatic past? Insert evil laughter here.) And the main character in “When the Stitches Come Undone” by A.C. Wise has that kind of madness that works so well in a Lovecraftian story, with some horrible memory that doesn’t exist for anyone else, and manic repeated phrases that make someone sound like they’re going crazy only because the truth is too insane to understand.
He heard the man raving about the dark coming up from under the ground and how he had to build a wall of flesh to stop it. That’s when my granddaddy ran.
“On These Blackened Shores of Time” by Brian Hodge is my favorite in the collection. The very first sentence pulls you right in, and there are all those nasty, tasty tidbits of history (with that horror trope that never fails: trouble in the mine) that make a story so fascinating to me. The ending actually made me tear up a little, and oddly enough, the monster from beyond time isn’t the main villain in this one. It’s the evil that humans do to each other that drives all the tragedy that follows.
It took a lot to appall me, but this managed it. Our neighborhood was built over the bones of men who’d boarded a train to take whatever job they could get, and died clawing at the dirt.
The story wraps up with “Bright Crown of Joy”. Written by Livia Llewellyn in dreamlike prose, it’s possibly the most upbeat story in the collection. At least until you take into account that it’s about the apocalypse, one that’s brought on mostly by humans. Like most of the stories in this book, the nameless monster here isn’t something we can ever understand, and there’s a very good chance it doesn’t spend enough time thinking about the billions of humans on the planet to have any malice about them. That’s not much comfort when it helps the ocean swallow the entire world for no reason, but at least humanity here is transformed into something unrecognizable, rather than being wiped out completely.