Jonathan Carroll Mama Bruise

Jonathan Carroll is a writer I have read for many years and while he is not Lovecraftian, his stories might appeal to at least some of the same readers, and I will always plug his work. Plus anyone who has their own Weird Tales issue has a place here.

Tor is offering his short story "Mama Bruise" on their website. It is a great place to start.

https://www.tor.com/2019/04/17/mama-bruise-jonathan-carroll/

from my comment on Tor.com

  "Jonathan Carroll, wow, I have read him for years. His stories can be horrific, funny, thoughtful heartrending or all of the above in the same work. He transforms the mundane world into a place of magic and angels, tattoos that come alive, cancers, murders, myths and fairytales.  And there are dogs, when I started reading him with Land of Laughs I did not realize that Nails the bull terrier would only be the first of so many memorable dogs. There would be Friend, the Jack Russell, in Friend’s Best Man, Mailbox in My Zoondel. And of course there was another bull terrier, Big Top who appeared in both Sleeping in Flames and Outside the Dog Museum. And many more dogs, and now here is another. Carroll’s dogs are magic creatures, angels, guides, protectors and well, dogs. And here we have another dog, another role. Jonathan Carroll obviously loves dogs and understands them. One of my favourite of Carroll’s lines comes from his short story Waiting to Wave. 

“The wind is gusting, the dog runs full speed towards nothing but happiness…,” 

Because that is what dogs do, and Carroll knows that."

Ralph E. Vaughan; Sherlock Holmes in the Dreaming Detective

A few posts back I mentioned how much I enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories of  Ralph E. Vaughan. After reading both his Sherlock Holmes: The Cthulhu Mythos Tales and Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time and other stories, I purchased a used copy of  Sherlock Holmes in the Dreaming Detective.  I have included a quote from Ralph's post about the book and a link to his site below. The Dreaming Detective is set for the most part in Lovecraft's Dreamlands. The book itself is quite short, some 61 pages and that includes a second story, "The Adventure of the Laughing Moonbeast" which is also quite enjoyable.This post will include spoilers.  

  The Dreaming Detective begins in a New York City hotel room on January 2, 1943. Nikola Tesla is in bed close to death when he is visited by Albert Einstein. He has come to take Tesla to Washington D.C. to save Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is in a dream vault, a device designed by Tesla, which allows Holmes to remain in the Dreamlands without aging. Removing Holmes would mean that he would begin to age normally and given his advanced age, he would die. The machine monitoring Holmes indicates that he is in trouble and it has been decided that Tesla should travel to the Dreamlands to help Holmes. Tesla's relationship with Holmes is detailed in a series of flashbacks that occur on the journey. They first meet in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1899. Tesla is there to conduct a series of experiments in wireless power transmission. The night of the experiment Telsa is approached by Holmes with a warning, one of his technicians, Heinrich Grantz is actually Wilhelm Reisen, an evil scientist whose experiments have killed killed scores of people. Holmes intends to arrest Reisen later, but during the experiment Reisen wounds Tesla and increases the power levels in an attempt to break down the barriers between our Earth and the Dreamlands. Homes intervenes, Reisen is propelled into the Dreamlands and a large severed tentacle is left behind. Giant tentacle, hurrah!!

  Tesla and Holmes will meet again, Holmes explains that using a Heinsenberg pocket of uncertainty, Reisen was able to rescue Moriarty as he fell to his death. They have joined forces still hoping to break down the barriers between the two worlds. This would allow them to introduce magic into our world and gunpowder and internal combustion engines into the Dreamlands, conquering both worlds. Once in the still unfinished Pentagon, the site of the Dream Chamber, Tesla is brought up to speed. Reisen and Moriarty are in dream vaults in Berlin. The Dreamlands has been mapped by a number of Anglo-American expeditions and five agents have proceeded Tesla in attempts to rescue Holmes. Four have died and one is mad. Because of their friendship and because he has nothing to lose, he is dying anyway, Tesla uses the power of the dream chamber to project himself into the Dreamlands. During the course of his journey Tesla enters the Enchanted Wood of the Zoogs. Suddenly Tesla is captured by two Nazi stormtroopers, it seems Reisen has joined forces with Hitler. They have already killed a Zoog and intend to kill Tesla when, well the Zoogs's may or may not think it's okay to punch a Nazi, but they are quite happy to rip them apart and eat them. Tesla continues his journey to Dylath-Leen. Before he can locate Holmes he is captured by the strange creatures that serve the moonbeasts who of course make him drink wine, and yet more Nazi, who have replaced the moonbeast's flying galleries with airships pulled by frost worms. They then carry Telsa off to Plateau of Leng. I will leave it there. 

  Another great tale, despite it's length Vaughan has created a tapestry that mixes real and fictional characters from the Edwardian or Victorian period through the two world wars. He is faithful to Lovecraft's creation while expanding the parameters just enough to allow for a new and imaginative approach to the story of the Dreamlands which never seems formulamatic. Without going into lengthy expostulations Vaughan stitches together a rich and interesting backstory of both the continuing feud between Moriarty and Reisen and Holmes and the ongoing efforts of various governments to deal with the potential problems that the Dreamlands might present should the barriers weaken. It seems the Zoogs have already broken through at least once.

Most importantly it is a fun story, Tesla is a great addition to the Holmes canon and I always enjoy another well-realized trip to the Dreamlands.

  

 "A few years ago I posted a blog about when I introduced Sherlock Holmes to HP Lovecraft in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods. If you're interested in reviewing it, you can click on the link in the title and be taken there. However, if you're interested in reading the story, you may have a bit of a problem. Copies of the original fanzine, Holmesian Federation #4 are very difficult to find and can be costly; copies of the chapbook published by Gary Lovisi's Gryphon Books are likewise hard to find and can be even more expensive, especially if it's the first edition with my name misspelled on the cover. Purchasing the book, along with any of my other Sherlock Holmes books published by Gryphon is no longer an option, thanks to a visit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. That incident led me to republish a later book, which introduced Sherlock Holmes to HG Wells' Time Traveler as Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories. The "other stories" in the book were all new ones I had written after 2005, all either about Holmes directly, in homage to Holmes, or about other characters in the Canon.'

for the full post;

http://bookscribbles.blogspot.com/2015/08/sherlock-holmes-vs-cthulhu.html"

All illustrations by Earl Geier, 

Gryphon Publications, 1992.

HPL in the movies; Aquaman and The Dunwich Horror

 
My wife and I watched the 2018 film Aquaman last night. We enjoyed the various special effects, especially the less human groups, like the fish-like merpeople (The Fishermen), the monsters of the Trench and the crustacean forces of the Kingdom of the Brine. Early in the film there is a shot of a snow globe resting on a copy of The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft. The film itself had no real elements of Lovecraftian horror, although it did deal with a Lovecraftian theme, the birth of a character, whose parents represented two very different groups. It is interesting that Lovecraft's work still seems to be part of such a strong cultural dialogue between artists of various mediums. Slate did a thoughtful piece on this element of the movie, the link is here;

"Aquaman Owes a Lot to H.P. Lovecraft. It’s Also His Worst Nightmare." by Keith Phipps

https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/aquaman-movie-hp-lovecraft-racism-miscegenation.html

Edition pictured, 1945 by Bartholomew House,
Cover artist uncredited.

The Dweller in Darkness, The Fisherman of Falcon Point, August Derleth

"The Dweller in Darkness" by August Derleth
Weird Tales, November 1944, Cover by Matt Fox, Image from ISFDB.

I mentioned over on Jagged Orbit, that I recently purchased a dvd of pdf's of some earlier issues of Weird Tales. While I would have liked more of the earliest issues, there was a good selection. One of the first stories I read was "The Dweller in Darkness" by August Derleth, I have read it before, a number of times but how could I resist this cover. Derleth occupies a strange position within the mythos. Derleth along with Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House in 1939, thus keeping alive not just Lovecraft's work but also his letters, and the work of many of his circle, including Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith. But he is also considered to have introduced some none Lovecraftian elements to the Mythos, including adding a somewhat Christian World View and the casting of the Old Ones as elementals that can be played off against each other. 

Here I am quoting from John Linwood Grant's somewhat (I assume ) tongue in cheek, THE CTHULHU MYTHOS FOR BEGINNERS, Because we don't want to be taking this to seriously.

"August Derleth, having worked in a canning factory, liked everything neatly packaged and labelled, so whilst he added his own beings, he also tried to sort the others into orderly groups which could be represented by elements, nature, and weight of contents when drained."

"Hence his identification of Cthulhu as a water deity, despite Cthulhu’s known dislike of its enforced holiday in the oceanic depths. And Derleth’s creation of Cthulhu’s bad-tempered brother-in-law, Cthugha, when it was pointed out that he’d missed Fire out."

http://greydogtales.com/blog/the-cthulhu-mythos-for-beginners/

I will try to do a more detailed post on Derleth in the future but in this post I want to look at only two works "The Dweller in Darkness" and "The Fisherman of Falcon Point". I plan to include spoilers for "The Dweller in Darkness" so I will look at "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" first. ISFDB indicated that "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" was first published in the Arkham House collection The Shuttered Room rather than making it's initial appearance in Weird Tales. 

I was surprised to find that "The Fisherman of Falcon Point". did not appear in several collections that purport to contain all Derleth's mythos stories.

     

 However it can be found in both of the collections below.

"The Fisherman of Falcon Point" is the story of Enoch Conger who lived on the Massachusetts coast not far from Innsmouth. He is not one of the Innsmouth folk, but a powerfully build man with a barrel chest and long arms. He wears his hair and beard long. He is not gregarious, though he will join the other men in the tavern after he sells his fish; 

"He was a taciturn man, given to living alone in a house of stone and driftwood which he himself had constructed on the windswept point of land, where he heard the voices of the gulls and terns, of wind and sea, and, in season, of migrants from far places passing by, sometimes invisibly high. It is said of him that he answered them, that he talked with the gulls and terns, with the wind and the pounding sea, and with others that could not be seen and were heard only in strange tones like the muted sounds made by great batrachian beasts unknown in the bogs and marshes of the mainland." 

And all is well, it seems with this strange solitary man, until one night he lifts the nets he cast off Devil's Reef and brings up a creature that pleads for her life. Not a mermaid, as he tells the tavern hangers on, because she has legs though her feet are webbed. But something else. Conger is of course mocked for this story, but more importantly haunted by this experience. I will leave this story here. I loved this story, perhaps because my enjoyment of Lovecraft's work is not limited to his more canonical stories, like The Call of Cthulhu, or the Dunwich Horror, but also extends to works from his Dunsany phase. "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" reminds me more of Lovecraft's "The Strange High House in the Mist" or even Dunsany himself with perhaps a nod to The Arabian Nights. Nothing momentous happens, no mountain walks, not deities are evoked to battle one another in an incandescent firestorm above Devils Reef. It is a story of mood and atmosphere, that evoked the sounds of the sea and the gulls above it, the feeling of wet sand and the smell of salt in the air.

To listen to the story you can try the link below, but the text contains spoilers. My rating for the story would be totally different because I really enjoyed it. Again it is probably one of my favourite of Derleth's contributions to the mythos, although perhaps very understated for some tastes.

https://sentinelhillpress.com/2016/04/01/derleth-country-5-the-fishermen-of-falcon-point/

"The Dweller in Darkness" is set in Derleth's native Wisconsin, perhaps he is following the advice he gave to a young Ramsey Campbell, to forgo setting his stories in Lovecraft's New England and instead pick a location he knew. This advice led Campbell to rewrite his earlier stores and launched his Severn Valley Tales, collected in the Arkham House collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964) (PS Publishing released a new edition with lots of additional material), https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/the-inhabitant-of-the-lake--other-unwelcome-tenants-paperback-by-ramsey-campbell-new-cover-1340-p.asp

If so, however Derleth's resolve must have wavered because as far as I know he revisited his Wisconsin setting only once more in his mythos fiction with his 1941 story "Beyond the Threshold", which I will try to do another day. The "Dweller in Darkness" begins with a couple of introductory paragraphs describing the physical landscape where the story takes place. Standard stuff, not as well written as the landscapes described in the first paragraphs in Lovecraft's stories, "The Colour Out of Space", "The Picture in the House" or "The Dunwich Horror" but okay. The setting is the empty lodge on Rick's Lake, the lake is shunned because there are strange winds, unearthly music and a tendency for people to disappesar. sometimes they are just gone. Sometimes they reappear, alive but far away, sometimes dead with their bones broken as if they have fallen from great heights, well, you get the idea. Kind of a strange place. But the lodge attracts the attention of Prof Gardner, when he is summoned to the local museum to view a recently discovered mummified figure tentatively identified as Fr. Piregard, a missionary who disappeared in the area three centuries earlier. The problem was, the body was not mummified but frozen and it appeared to have been dead no more than five years. This piqued Gardner's interest and he was off to the lodge to see what he can find. And well, he disappears too.

  After a through search by the local sheriff the mystery of his disappearance is abandoned. Until two of the professor's graduate students, Laird and Dorgan (wonderful mythos name that) spurred on by some of Gardner's letters to Laird. decide to investigate. Equipped with a dictaphone to record any evidence, they travel to Rick's Lake. At the lodge the sheriff gives them some notes Gardner left behind and they also meet Old Pete, a "half breed" prospector who is familiar with the area. They hear spooky wind sounds and scary music and take a brief side trip to visit Professor Partier, who was retired from the university, because he was crazy. I guess they did not have tenure in those days. He fills them in on all the details of the Deleth/Cthulnu mythos and suggests they go home. Later, because that is how these things are done in the pulp magazines of the 1940's, they will ply Pete with "firewater" and force him to take them to see a strange carving of a giant figure accompanied by two smaller figure that is on a rock near the lodge. Pete is rightly, terrified to approach this location after dark and they return him to the highway. When they listen to the dictaphone there is a message from Gardner telling them to flee, but only after summoning Cthugha, remember we heard about him earlier. Then Gardner himself shows up, accidentally destroys the dictaphone recording and Laird and Dorgan visit the rock carving. 

This was an okay mythos tale, certainly better than Derleth's very repetitive adventures of Prof. Laban Shrewsbury in The Trail of Cthulhu. But I did have some quibbles, first off, even though I had read it before, I was convinced based on the hints that the creature would be Ithaqua, the setting and behaviour was consistent with his portrayal in other stories by Derleth, Lumley and others. That it was Nyarlathotep the crawling chaos, baffles me. I have always pictured him as a bit more urbane, it may be made up nonsense, but I have standards. 

"He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude." from Nyarlathotep by H.P. Lovecraft.

I also see shades of Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in the Darkness" in the resolution. While I enjoyed the cosmic bits of "The Whisperer in the Darkness"I find certain aspects of the plot very weak. The pussyfooting around that the Mi-Go go through with Wilmarth to get hold of the evidence for one, (and don't get me started on Basil Cooper's tribute The Great White Space) has always seemed unnecessary. In this case Nyarlathotep has even less to lose if exposed than the Mi-Go so why all the deception. Come to the point, pick them up, carry them off to Leng or R'lyeh and make them walk home. I do get a little frustrated when I feel people emulate the weakest rather than the strongest aspects of Lovecraft's work. Mythos tales have always been uneven, even some of Howard's so maybe i expect to much. The setting and atmosphere in this story are okay, the plot fairly standard. And I do like the rather silly cover from Weird Tales.

Illustrations and covers 

In Lovecraft's Shadow and directly above Stephen E. Fabian for Mycroft & Moran

A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos cover by Leo Grin

The Shuttered Room cover by John Holmes

The Watchers Out of Time and Others cover by (the great) Herb Arnold

Weird Studies Podcasts

"I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons — the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown." 

from Nyarlathotep by H.P. Lovecraft

A couple of days ago Helen mentioned a Podcast called Weird Studies. Great stuff the creators cover a variety of topics, including Lovecraft, Philip K Dick, David Lynch, Borges, David Cronenberg, and one I am really looking forward to William James's essay "Does Consciousness Exist"

Followers of this blog might especially enjoy episode 29: On Lovecraft. Ford and Martel are really well read and interweave a lot of their reading, no just in genre literature, but elements from literature, poetry, media studies, philosophy, anthropology, music and film into their podcasts. I have listened to three episodes and the discussion is so wide ranging and thoughtful that I want to listen to them again so I can take notes.

https://www.weirdstudies.com/29

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Phil and JF indulge their autumnal mood in this discussion of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's work, specifically the essay "Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction" and the prose piece "Nyarlathotep." Philip K. Dick, Algernon Blackwood, and David Foster Wallace make appearances as our fearsome hosts talk about how the weird story differs from conventional horror fiction, how Lovecraft gives voice to contemporary fears of physical, psychological and political infection, and how authors like Lovecraft and Dick can be seen as prophetic poets of the "great unbuffering of the Western self."

REFERENCES

H. P. Lovecraft, "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

1974 Rolling Stone feature on PKD
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Theodor Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition
Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo"
Algernon Blackwood, "The Willows"
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Music of Erich Zann"
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Weird Studies, Episode 2: Garmonbozia
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Ralph E. Vaughan; Sherlock Holmes vs Cthulhu

 When I buy an collection or anthology I normally flit through the table of contents looking for authors or titles that intrigue me. What I normally do not do is read it from front to back. Often I do not finish every story, intending to come back later, but I have lots of books so this may or may not happen. I have followed Ralph E. Vaughan's blog Book Scribbles for many years and when I saw the post concerning this collection I purchased the book. It came, I read a few stories, and mentioned the purchase here. 

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2016/03/more-new-eldritch-tomes.html

Then some time ago I picked it up, started at the beginning reading to the end, and immediately purchased Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time and other stories, (these are not Lovecraftian, but Holmes does meet Wells or his universe in several really enjoyable stories), read it and purchased his out of print work,  Sherlock Holmes, The Dreaming Detective from ABE. So I guess you can say I liked the first book.

I am not sure if kids still do, but when I began reading books from the library, the Doyle stories were among the first I read. "The Hound of the Baskervilles" I read while alone in the house and it was scary and atmospheric. A great discussion of the stories can be found in Michael Dirda fun and informative book On Conan Doyle, which covers all of Doyle's work, not just the Holmes Stories.

           

I loved the original stories, but as with Lovecraft I also got into the world of Holmes pastiches, a vast landscape. A number of years ago I decided to read all the Holmes pastiches, novels and collections held by the Calgary Public Library. It took many months, there were a lot, he went everywhere, some stories were good, some bad. I remember a particularly long and unhappy encounter with the Giant Rat of Sumatra. So I know my pseudo Holmes stories. And Holmes has meet the Lovecraft Mythos in a number of stories and anthologies. One of the most well known is probably Shadows over Baker Street, which contains the best ever Holmes Lovecraft mish mash "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman, I cannot describe it you must read it. But as always with works of this kind (Lovecraftian or not) the quality of the collection overall was uneven. Still a good read.

This is not to say that all Vaughan's stories are gems, some are better than others, but the quality is quite high and I like what he has done in both collections. To confuse the issue a few comments will relate to both collections, but there is no test later so whatever. I will not address each story, but rather highlight some of the reasons I enjoyed them so much. 

Sherlock Holmes is definitely Doyle's Holmes but possibly a little less stiff, and when they are appear, Watson and Lestrade are a little brighter and a little less, cardboard cutout's. Vaughan has a perfectly good explanation that I accepted immediately. The characteristics of all of them have been exaggerated in Watson's stories to advance the plot. So in reality, and these stories are real, aren't they, they will be a little, (not much) more human. The stories are not based on the rigid Holmes and Watson have a client and solve a case formula. As has become typical of  Holmes pastiche's in general, they are narrated by a number of individuals, as Watson does not always appear. Sometimes Holmes barely appears. The stories cover Holmes for his entire career in one he is an old man on a tour of the United States, in another he is a student on a walking tour. Several of my favourites involve Lestrade and his rather clueless sidekick Sergeant Jacket, who is a big Holmes fan as you can imagine. 

But one of the things I enjoyed the most is that rather than one shambling Innsmouthian after another, Vaughan explores the entire mythos as well as various characters from the works of Doyle and Wells. Some of my favourites are "The Woods, The Watcher & The Warding", "Lestrade & the Damned Cultists", "The Terror out of Time", "The Adventure of the Shattered Men" and from  

Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time and other stories

"The Coils of Time", "Lestrade and the River Pirates", "The Adventure of the Counterfeit Martian" and "The Dog Who Loved Sherlock Holmes" To sum it up these are fun stories, hopefully you can enjoy them as much as I have. 

and let's let Ralph bring this post home. 

from Book Scribbles "Sherlock Holmes vs Cthulhu

A few years ago I posted a blog about when I introduced Sherlock Holmes to HP Lovecraft in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods. If you're interested in reviewing it, you can click on the link in the title and be taken there. However, if you're interested in reading the story, you may have a bit of a problem. Copies of the original fanzine, Holmesian Federation #4 are very difficult to find and can be costly; copies of the chapbook published by Gary Lovisi's Gryphon Books are likewise hard to find and can be even more expensive, especially if it's the first edition with my name misspelled on the cover. Purchasing the book, along with any of my other Sherlock Holmes books published by Gryphon is no longer an option, thanks to a visit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. That incident led me to republish a later book, which introduced Sherlock Holmes to HG Wells' Time Traveler as Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories. The "other stories" in the book were all new ones I had written after 2005, all either about Holmes directly, in homage to Holmes, or about other characters in the Canon.'

for the full post

http://bookscribbles.blogspot.com/2015/08/sherlock-holmes-vs-cthulhu.html

related posts on Book Scribbles

Sherlock Holmes & The Coils of Time (Redux)

http://bookscribbles.blogspot.com/2013/03/sherlock-holmes-coils-of-time-redux.html

When Sherlock Holmes first met H.P. Lovecraft

http://bookscribbles.blogspot.com/2011/02/when-sherlock-holmes-first-met-hp.html

The Story Behind "Sherlock Holmes, the Dreaming Detective"

http://bookscribbles.blogspot.com/2011/01/story-behind-holmes-dreaming-detective.html

2018? More of less Part 3 (Finally)

  I took some time choosing the last three stories that I read in the past year or so to recommend, because I wanted to select tales I thought about after reading them.  They may not be the best but they did standout to me for one reason or other. Two involve Lovecraft's Dreamland cycle. Lovecraft's Dunsany inspired work is not as significant to the genre as his Cthulhu mythos. Possibly because these works lean more to fantasy than gothic or cosmic horror. I am particularly fond of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and I enjoy seeing what people can do with this theme. 

Black Wings cover by Gregory Nemec and Jason Van Hollander.

That said, I never expected anything like Mark Howard Jones' short story "Red Walls" in Black Wings of Cthulhu 5 . It is definitely horrific. I may come back to this story in another post but for now a quick overview. 

It is a short and very effective story, we are propelled into the story and the traumatic events that befall the narrator with no build up.

"The air was too thick to breath. Or there was too much of it, and coming at him too fast. He has woken far too suddenly., Yet he doesn't remember even falling asleep.

To his horror , he is in mid-air. Flying along at an enormous speed, his mind races to match his velocity. He must have been in an air crash, he reasons. No, he hates flying. He has never flown-not until this moment. " 

And he is not alone, rather he is part of a storm of people shooting along in the air in the same direction, all crying and flailing around. Wow I will leave you there but this one struck with me especially, once I figured out how this fit into the Lovecraft universe.

Nightmare Realm is a collection of original nightmares edited by S.T. Joshi, cover by Samuel Araya. I have just begun delving into the stories but may of my favourite mythos authors are represented, including Ramsey Campbell, Caitlin R. Kieran, John Langan, and Darrell Schweitzer. 

But the story I want to discuss is "In the City of Sharp Edges" by Stephen Woolworth. Alan our narrator is on his first visit to Dr. Ingalls a psychiatrist, to discuss a recurring nightmare. In this nightmare, Alan is lost in a strange Escher-like city constructed of obsidian-like glass.  Alan does not think it is a place people have visited before.

" Because it makes no sense. Doorways that end in stone walls, hallways that seem to go on forever and lead nowhere. vast rooms with no floor." 

and he is not alone in this nightmare city.  

" Can you describe this being?" "It changes. Sometimes it's so cold, it burns, like dry ice. Sometimes it crackles and sparks. hot and stinging, like static on clothes fresh from the dryer. Sometimes it has skin: sometimes, scales." 

If Alan description seems a bit vague, it is because he is blind, experiencing both city and creature by sound, touch and especially smell. Woolworth has really provided us with a thought provoking tale. Even the details of Alan everyday life, like the fact he uses origami to distinguish the denomination of the bills in his wallet or his strategy for searching the internet are new to me and I think add to the otherness of his experience for me. And the story itself is great, well written, nicely paced and imaginative. And when Dr. Ingalls states that dreams cannot kill anyone, it is Alan's reply that seems spot on. 

"How do you know that if all the people who've died from dreams never wake up.?"

I have had the last story for years in my collection Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham House 1990, but did not read it until I noticed it in this 1977 World's Best, cover by Richard Corben.

"My Boat" by Joanna Russ is another Dreamland inspired tale. I am unsure if she has contributed any other Lovecraftean stories but this one is excellent. Russ is considered one of the top science fiction writers and you can certainly see her reputation is deserved. It is nice to see a really competent writer handle a pastiche, "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman is another story, where high level skill and imagination combine to create an outstanding tale. I love the history of both science fiction and the weird tale and "My Boat" while very much a modern story has a bit of an old fashioned feel, for me. The idea of passages between realities, reminds me of stories like The Blind Spot by Flint and Hall or "Through the Dragon Glass" by A. Merritt. 

The story is narrated by Jim a writer who is trying to sell his agent on ideas for a tv script. Desperate, he beings to tell him of something that actually happened when he was a teenager, something he now needs to tell someone, because something else happened recently that brought it to mind. It is 1952 and Jim and his friend Al Coppolino are seniors in a school on Long Island. Integration is just beginning and Cissie Jackson a small, very withdrawn black girl is placed in their drama class. Initially they object feeling that she has too many emotional problems, but the principle explains that her father was killed by the police in her presence, that she is a genus and that she is not going anywhere. Indeed both eventually befriend Cissie and she and Al become quite close, Al even lends Cissie his Lovecraft books, wow, that's love. Cissie eventually tells the boys that she and a cousin rent a marina slip and have a boat. When pressed, she describes it was a yacht. When they finally visit, Jim however see it is anything but "It is an old leaky rowboat with only one oar, and there were three inches of bilge in the bottom," Or was it, for Jim sees, but has trouble believing, that things and people seem to have changed. 

"I said. ''Cissie, you look like the Queen of Sheba,"

She smiled. She said to me. "Jim, Iss not Shee-bah as in thee Bible, but Shaba. Sha-bah. You mus' remember when we meet her."" 

But Jim never does  at least as far as we know. I was really impressed when I read this, the central concept, as I mentioned earlier is not new. But Russ takes it farther adding layer upon layer, creating a rich, visually  complex story that enchanted me. The plotting is excellent and even Jim, with his doubts and regrets grows and changes and becomes a more rounded character that we can root for.   

I am convinced that I need to read more by Joanna Russ.

So that was 2018, if anyone has read or reads the stories I have discussed, please leave a comment.

Guy 

Cover by Jeffery K. Potter