THE GODS OF H.P. LOVECRAFT Review

The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft by Aaron J. French (ed.)
JournalStone, 2015

An Above-Average Cthulhu Mythos Anthology 

 (I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)

 So... what we have here is an anthology of a dozen short stories by various authors, all set (more or less) in the shared universe created by the American writer H.P. Lovecraft and various literary friends of his that has come to be known as the "Cthulhu Mythos". Each story is keyed to a particular entity (the "gods" of the title) in said universe. Additionally, there is a brief description of each entity by writer Donald Tyson, as well as black-and-white illustrations (mostly quite good) by various artists. 

How are the stories? For the most part, they're pretty good, too. The only outright clunker, in this reviewer's humble opinion, is Martha Wells' "The Dark Gates", which apparently ties into an ongoing series of her own. If you're already a fan of her work, it's probably perfectly acceptable, but as I knew nothing about the universe it was set it, it mostly left me feeling unpleasantly bemused. On the other hand, the very next tale in the collection, "We Smoke the Northern Lights" by the gifted Laird Barron, is probably the most hugely entertaining story I've come across in recent memory in this or any other genre. My friend Randy Stafford informs me that this story comprises half of Barron's new novella X's For Eyes; as soon as I'm done writing this review, I'm gonna purchase myself a copy.

 Should you buy this book? If you're completely new to this type of writing, frankly, no. I would say your time is much better spent familiarizing yourself with the work of Lovecraft himself and his friends (Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, etc.) who created the Mythos universe. If you're already familiar with these writers and want to get to know the work of with contemporary writers working in this tradition, you could do better than this collection (Darrell Schweitzer's profoundly disturbing post-apocalyptic-themed Mythos collection Cthulhu's Reign springs to mind as an example). Having said that, and considering the large amount of dreck that out there in this sub-genre and the unusually consistency of this anthology, you could also do a whole hell of a lot worse.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)


H.P. Lovecraft, 1934 (source)

The Experts Pick The Best Robert E. Howard Conan Stories

Hi, folks. I've been spending the last few weeks getting re-acquainted with the work of Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and I thought it might be fun to surf around the Internets and see if I could find if there's any kind of consensus regarding what are the best of his Conan tales. Basically what I've done here compiled the selections from three main sources: the stories that John Clute selected for the Penguin Modern Classics anthology Heroes in the Wind: From Kull To Conan; the stories selected for the two Best of Robert E. Howard volumes, edited by noted REH scholar Rusty Burke; and the top five stories selected by forum posters at Conan.com, the official REH website.

Here are the results:

Stories selected for HEROES IN THE WIND: FROM KULL TO CONAN (Penguin; John Clute, ed.):
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT
QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST
A WITCH SHALL BE BORN
RED NAILS

Stories selected for THE BEST OF ROBERT E. HOWARD VOLUME 1: CRIMSON SHADOWS and VOLUME 2: GRIM LANDS (Del Rey; Rusty Burke, ed.):
PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE
BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT
RED NAILS

Top 5 REH Conan stories as selected by forum posters at Conan.com (and % of votes obtained):
1) BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER (19%)
2) HOUR OF THE DRAGON (12%)
3) RED NAILS (10%)
4) PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE (9.5%)
5) QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST (9.1%)

So the final tally is something like this -

On all 3 lists:
RED NAILS

Selected by Clute and Burke only:
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT

Selected by Clute and posters only:
QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST

Selected by Burke and posters only:
PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE
BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER

Selected by Clute only:
A WITCH SHALL BE BORN

Selected by posters only:
HOUR OF THE DRAGON

So what do you think, Howard fans? Is this a pretty good sample of the best of REH's Conan, or is there some glaring omission that newbies should be made aware of? Let me know.

PS If you're rarin' to start reading some of these Conan yarns, most of Howard's fiction (as well as a decent chunk of his letters, poetry, essays, etc.) can be found online here.

Heroes In The Wind - Robert E. Howard

I was just looking at the Wikipedia entry for Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan by Robert E.Howard, which I see is being put out under the Penguin Modern Classics imprint. Wow - the guys that my D & D-playing friends and I used to read in high school sure have moved up in the world. First Tolkien gets a multiple Academy Award-winning film made based on his work, then Lovecraft gets a volume of his fiction published by the Library of America, and now Howard has his own Penguin Modern Classics volume. I guess it really is respectable to be a geek these days.

Anyway, here's the book's table of contents, according to Wikipedia (the notes in brackets are mine).

Acknowledgements
Introduction (John Clute)

Prelude
"Recompense" [poem]

I Black Dawn
"The Shadow Kingdom" [a Kull story]
"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" [Kull]
"Kings of the Night" [Bran Mak Morn]
"Worms of the Earth" [Bran Mak Morn]
"The Dark Man" [Turlogh Dubh O'Brien/Bran Mak Morn]

II Dark Interlude
"The Footfalls Within" [Solomon Kane]
"Pigeons from Hell" [a Weird West story]
"Graveyard Rats" [a Steve Harrison story]
"Vultures of Wahpeton" [Western fiction]


III High Noon [all the stories in this section are Conan tales]
"The Tower of the Elephant"
"Queen of the Black Coast"
"A Witch Shall Be Born"
"Red Nails"

In Memoriam: Steve Tompkins

I just came across a great tribute to the late Robert E. Howard scholar Steve Tompkins over at the REH: Two-Gun Raconteur website and thought I'd post a link. Why? Simply put, it's because I believe that Tompkins was a great writer and amazing critical thinker whose work deserves to be more widely read than it is, which, outside of the Howard fandom community, it largely is not. Tompkins was an intellectual whirlwind whose essays slalomed breathlessly from topic to topic - he could veer from Quentin Tarantino to Stephen King to Herodotus and then back to his original subject (usually Howard, less often (but just as ably) J. R. R. Tolkien or Charles R. Saunders or Ian Fleming), leaving the reading's head spinning trying to keep up with him. If you care about great writing (and particularly if you are as dismayed about the ghettoization of genre fiction as I often am), you should check him out. Click on the link above, or, better yet, take a look at his archived posts at The Cimmerian, which remains some of the finest work of his I've seen on the net.