Priestess, by Justine Geoffrey (Martian Migraine Press) | review

My first taste of Cthulhu erotica, and I wasn’t left with a shadow over Innsmouth, if you know what I mean. My Dunwich was not fully horrored. The thing remained on the doorstep. Doom did not come to Sarnath. This 2013 ebook brings together four previously published titles: Anicka and Kamil, Red Monolith Frenzy, Yvette’s Interview and Green Fever Dream. It starts with a dedication to “Ramsey Campbell, the first man to render my veils” (sic). Anicka, “teen witch of Stregoicavar and High Priestess of the Black Stone”, is trying to summon Daoloth, from Campbell’s story The Render of the Veils, and she goes about that by having sex with her brother and anyone else she can lay her hands (and inhumanly long tongue) on. Favourite phrase here: “Daoloth activates your hyper-chakras”! The Render puts her on the trail of Justine herself, who might become the next priestess, and does become the protagonist for the rest of the book. The sex is usually gross but consensual, except when Justine breaks out “the Triple Word of Power”; the descriptions of unfortunate people like “the pinheaded mongrel freak” are much more offputting. The dialogue all appears in italics rather than within speech marks, which is a bit distancing, and a lot of apostrophes are missing, which is not at all sexy. The synonyms used for relevant body parts (“dripping vacancy”, “orgone-sheathed cockmeat”) can be quite amusing. Not my kind of thing, but I’m glad I gave it a try, and people in the market for Lovecraftian erotica may well find that it calls their Cthulhu. Stephen Theaker **

Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961–1971, edited by S.T. Joshi (PS Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

This book collects the correspondence (or so much of it as remains) from the 1960s between the prolific writer and editor August Derleth and the young Ramsey Campbell. The latter would go on to be a titan of the horror world, and the former already was, his publishing of H.P. Lovecraft’s work in hardback having done a great deal to cement that writer’s reputation. The letters are often fascinating. Campbell, fifteen at first, is importunate, full of questions – reminding us that this was a time when you couldn’t simply look things up on the internet – a virgin, somewhat testy and defensive. August Derleth, much older, is sexually omnivorous, patronising, encouraging, and exceedingly free with his opinions. One thing I had noted reading Derleth’s pastoral Sac Prairie Journal immediately before this is that August Derleth’s romantic life is completely absent from its pages, and these letters make it obvious why: he was having it off with whoever he could! Given that the letters are remarkably revealing, it’s a credit to Ramsey Campbell and to the literary estate of August Derleth that their publication was allowed. That the book would be edited by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi must have helped in that regard, and he provides very useful footnotes to the letters, supplying information about everything from incorrect film titles (there is a great deal of film chat) to whether planned titles from both writers were ever published, and if so in what form and under what titles. One of their favourite topics of conversation is films, and reading the book now, when so much of cinema’s rich history is available for a few pounds and a couple of clicks, it’s almost shaming to see the lengths to which the two of them go to watch really good films, travelling for hours to get to a particular cinema on the one night that film would be shown. Since reading the book I’ve certainly been making more of an effort to watch better quality films. It’s essential reading for fans of either writer, and very interesting reading for everyone else. ****

I Am Providence, by Nick Mamatas (Night Shade Books) | review by Stephen Theaker

A horror book, or maybe literary horror fantasy. Lovecraftian fans, critics and writers gather in Providence, Rhode Island, at a hotel for a convention, the Summer Tentacular. To me it sounded very reminiscent of the first FantasyCons I attended (i.e. lots of blokes, lots of names familiar from the internet, and lots of people trying to sell their books; here, we almost immediately meet a chap hawking Madness of the Death Sun – which sounds great), while to newcomer Colleen Danzig it resembles a large Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, “except instead of alcoholism the attendees had all sorts of other, subtler problems”. Some of those people feel very familiar, but even if you aren’t well enough acquainted with that particular scene to identify the people being parodied, you get the gist of why someone would want to parody them. We have two point of view characters – Panossian, an older writer who gets himself murdered, and Colleen, who wants to investigate his murder – and chapters alternate between them. The dead (or “posthumously conscious” as he puts it) man tells his story in the first person, and his view of this environment soured long before he was killed there. Fandom is the social network of last resort, he says. Lovecraftians are a bunch of misfits and social defectives. Literary critics and fans are two of the more ridiculous sets of people in the world. Ambition is a hell. And he admits to having been a jerk to a lot of people – a lot of very mentally unstable people. Asked for his thoughts on writing, his answer is, “Generally, I’m against it.” He’s rather brilliant and very entertaining, much like the book itself. ****

The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove (Titan Books) | review by Rafe McGregor

I’ve recently made several comments on the evolution of Sherlock Holmes from the cold criminal investigator who calmly rejected supernatural explanations of even the most outré circumstances created by Conan Doyle to a character who is probably most accurately called an occult detective in the twenty-first century. In my review of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride in TQF55, I mentioned that Holmes and several others who cross the threshold of 221b Baker Street are more akin to superheroes and supervillains, giving the series very much of a fantasy feel, and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011) was served with a deliciously strong steampunk sauce. I recently responded to an article in The Conversation on the decline in the popularity of Doctor Who by noting that Doctor Who and Sherlock have become increasingly close in the last couple of decades and Steven Moffat is one of many writers who have written either official novels or screenplays for both the doctor and the detective. In my review of Simon Kurt Unsworth’s The Devil’s Detective in TQF56, I mentioned “the many failed and few successful attempts to combine Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos” of late, and the subject of this review is James Lovegrove’s contribution to precisely that subgenre – a contribution that is by and large successful. The subgenre was launched with Michael Reeves and John Pelan’s Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. Re-reading my somewhat scathing review in TQF24, I stand by most of what I wrote (though not my dismissal of Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”). One of my main criticisms of this volume was that there had been little or no effort to recreate the atmosphere of Victorian or Edwardian London in most of the stories. The shadows are, after all, over Baker Street, not Angell Street or Clinton Street. James Lovegrove’s shadows are, as his title suggests, in Shadwell (the district between Whitechapel and Limehouse), and he has paid close attention to both the historical setting and the original Holmes stories such that the few anachronistic turns of phrase he uses are insufficient to distract the reader. It’s the relationship between old and new where Lovegrove’s contribution to literary pastiche is revealed at its most ambitious and most promising.

Fall of Cthulhu Omnibus, by Michael Alan Nelson, Mateus Santolouco and chums (Boom! Studios) | review by Stephen Theaker

This huge book collects six trade paperbacks in one epic volume. The first five stories, from “The Fugue” through to “Apocalypse”, concern the plans of Nyarlathotep, the creeping chaos, who has taken human form and resurrected Abdul Alhazred to write a new chapter of the Necronomicon, a chapter concerning the fate of Cthulhu, who sleeps undying under the waves in R’lyeh. A saga that ends with gods clashing and the Dreamlands spilling their nightmares upon the earth begins in a more mundane setting, with Cy and his girlfriend Jordan at a cafe, where Cy’s uncle, Professor Walt McKinley of Miskatonic University, shows up, rambling about the blood on his hands before taking his own life, right there, al fresco. He leaves Cy a big bundle of mysteries and a knife ornamented with eyes that follow you around the room. It’s the start of a story that will take Cy to the traditional Lovecraftian edge of madness and a long way beyond. He will meet allies, like Sheriff Raymond Dirk, whose family have long tried to keep the craziness in Arkham from bubbling malevolently to the surface, and Luci Jenifer Inacio das Neves, or Lucifer for short, a teenage rascal with a pretty decent handle on what is going on. The three of them will encounter nightmares and gods, monsters of all kinds, most startlingly of all the Harlot, who summons unhappy men to the Dreamlands and gives them what they want, for a horrible price. A variety of artists take turns to portray this amazing colossal woman as we pass through the book’s six hundred pages, and each captures her horror in a differently spectacular way. The sixth section of the book is in part an ironic epilogue, but mostly a prequel, showing what went down (if you’ll forgive me) in Atlantis long ago. Overall, this is a good solid attempt at a Cthulhu mythos comic book, very much in the style of what you might expect from an official TV adaptation of Lovecraft’s work, rather than the glancing references and nods we so often get. The scenes in the Dreamlands are the high points, different artists and art styles used to render their strangeness. Cthulhu’s name is in the title, but this is about the Harlot and Nyarlathotep and the humans caught in the middle of their battle. You wouldn’t want to be in their shoes when R’lyeh starts to rise… ****

The Book of Iod: Ten Cthulhu Stories by Henry Kuttner | review by Stephen Theaker

What a surprise: if I ever knew that Henry Kuttner had written Cthulhu mythos stories, I had forgotten it long before seeing this book. What mad nightmares could spring from the imagination that brought us “The Last Mimzy”? Unfortunately, Book of Iod: Ten Cthulhu Stories (Diversion Books, ebook, 2187ll) is slightly mistitled, since Cthulhu (bless his name!) is only mentioned in passing twice. “The Invaders” is the most traditional mythos story, about a writer whose drug-assisted time-travelling for inspiration has opened the way for things that shouldn’t be here. Kuttner’s stories differ from Lovecraft’s, though: Cthulhu here is almost the hero of Earth, having fought off these things before, a bit like Godzilla. Not many mythos stories end with a human saying, “I felt a wave of reassurance. Suddenly all fear left me.”