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)

Why Rock Criticism Still Sucks

"...this essentially reactionary attitude became the prevailing orthodoxy in rock's critical establishment." And remains so to this day, I fear.

The dominant [critical] view came to be that of [Jon] Landau and Esquire's Robert Christgau, and it focused on two things: technical excellence and the primacy of the African American roots of the music. As Chrtistgau wrote, "the problem is that when poetry, musical complexity, and psychedelic basso-profundity come into the music, its original values - simplicity, directness, charm - are often obscured." This became code for limiting rock to three-minute songs with clever hooks, and the [Grateful] Dead clearly failed that test. That spring, Christgau wrote, "Most hippie rock and roll musicians exhibit the same in-group pretentiousness that characterized the folk and jazz purists who were their predecessors." Though Christgau himself would be more flexible in the future, Landau would not. In his defining critical manifesto, "Rock and Art," Landau declaimed, "Rock was not intended to be reflective or profound." Where this left Bob Dylan went unsaid, but this essentially reactionary attitude became the prevailing orthodoxy in rock's critical establishment.

- From A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally

(Art by Bob Thomas)

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.