REVIEW: THE PROPHECY MACHINE

By Neal Barrett Jr.

Neal Barrett Jr. deserves to be in a special category of fantasist among writers like Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance. Like them, Barrett is a master of absurdist Sword & Sorcery. The protagonist of The Prophecy Machine, Finn, is s lizard maker, that is he crafts exquisite mechanical life-forms. Finn, along with his beloved is Leticia Louise (a Newbie, as humanized animals are called in Finn’s world) and Julia Jessica Slagg, the lizard to end all lizards, get stranded in Mahasar where everyone is more-or-less insane. Finn regards himself as eminently sane, and is increasingly (and comically) frustrated by the shenanigans of Mahasar.

Soon Finn is drawn into a bizarre mystery involving rival sects of madmen, his deranged host, bad food, and a machine of awesome, yet obscure power. The Prophecy Machine is rather like Skinny Annie Blues, a way of torturing the protagonist in a delightfully amusing way while putting a fresh twist on old genre standards like fantasy and mystery.

-Dave Hardy

THE WORM OUROBOROS

By E.R. Eddison

One might think there would be a revival of interest in epic fantasy written by scholarly Englishmen in the early 20th century. There might and it ought to include The Worm Ouroboros. Eric Rucker Eddison penned the tale of the Great War of the Witches and Demons back in 1922 and it is just as good today.

Unlike the reluctant and self-conscious heroes of Lord of the Rings, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, or even Harry Potter, the Lords Juss, Goldry Bluszco, Spitfire, and Brandoch Daha are bona fide sword-swinging adventurers. They are Conans who’ve been to Eton. They need every bit of their mighty sword arms and their wits to defeat the evil king Gorice of Witchland in his drive to build an empire.

As befits and epic, minor characters are not wanting. There is Corund, the witch nobleman who steers a course of loyalty to his king and self-defense against his rivals. We meet Lord Gro the Goblin who has betrayed so many masters he can’t remember which side he is on. Eddison’s idiosyncrasies lend the tale an off-kilter charm, kingdoms have names straight from fairy tales and characters write letters in Elizabethan English. The scene where Gorice performs black magic is truly bizarre and creepy. If you like high adventure in a fantasy world, read The Worm Ouroboros.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE WELL OF THE UNICORN

By Fletcher Pratt

Fletcher Pratt may be better known for his naval wargames than for his work in science fiction and sword and sorcery. If so it’s a pity. In The Well of the Unicorn Pratt created an epic fantasy with a hard-boiled attitude toward war, politics, and sex.

The tale concerns young Airar Alvarson, a Dalecarlesman dispossessed by the relentless taxation of the Vulkings. Airar joins the rebellion and we learn of his fortunes as he progresses from raw youth to hardened war-leader while trying to retain his innate decency in a world dominated by ruthless totalitarian fanatics and sleazy opportunists.

The supporting cast is rich and acts as Airar’s Greek chorus. Principal among them are the Star Captains of Carrhoene, a group of exiled mercenaries who join the Dalecarles’ revolt for their own ends. They are a violent, lusty lot and much of the novel’s conflict is about Airar’s struggle to keep a rein on his followers. Airar’s untrustworthy consigliere is Meliboe the Wizard, an outlaw by reason of his use of sorcerous arts. He and Airar have a series of agons where the nature of political power is dissected and found wanting.

The politics of sex get a look in too. Airar’s loves and friendships are repeatedly tested by the tendency of the powerful to exploit the weak. The Well of the Unicorn takes a politically incorrect view of pederasty in these instances. More than one of Pratt’s sword swinging warlords has a fondness for young men. To be fair heterosexuality is shown as scarcely less exploitive and Pratt ain’t depicting the kind of fellows you bring home to mama, unless mom organized slave auctions for the Roman army.

This is not to suggest that Well of the Unicorn is a series of dull conversations. There are battles by land and sea. Pratt has some excellent set-pieces of battles on siege works around a beleaguered castle.

Well of the Unicorn does not have the wide-eyed idealism of Lord of the Rings or the unbridled love of battle for its own sake found in The Worm Orobouros. What is does have is sweeping movement and a sharply defined character caught up in the tides of war and a lucid sense of what that means.

-Dave Hardy

 

Well of the Unicorn 

THE DESERT OF SOULS

By Howard Andrew Jones

If you are a fan of Harold Lamb, Howard Andrew Jones should be a familiar name. Jones is the editor of the Bison Book series of Harold Lamb’s adventure tales of Cossacks, Crusaders, Mongols, Rajputs, and all manner of swashbucklers. One of the hallmarks of Lamb’s fiction is his sharply drawn historical Asian settings. As an author Jones follows in that tradition while treating his readers to a fantasy of generous proportions.

Desert of Souls’s narrator is Asim, a doughty warrior in Sword & Sorcery tradition. Asim’s comrade is Dabir, a scholar of arcane knowledge. A chance encounter in the Baghdad’s marketplace sends them on a quest for a lost city in order to prevent a wizard from utilizing the dangerous magical secrets hidden there.

Desert of Souls is a novel that isn’t exactly easily classified. It is a fantasy that takes its inspiration from the classic Arabian Nights, yet it is not a naïve fantasy for children that one might expect from source material that has been so relentlessly tamed and sugar-coated. Rather Jones crafts his own characters while staying true to the setting. Asim and Dabir serve in the household of Jaffar the Barmecide, the historical wazir of Harun al-Rashid (763-806) the third Abbasid caliph in Baghdad’s Golden Age. If Desert of Souls is rooted in history and traditional legend, it flowers in a modern manner. Betrayal and mistrust are at the heart of all relationships ever striving with friendship and loyalty. It is an if Jones layered in a 1950s noir crime film with the hard-charging adventure. Of course the old Arab storytellers understood human frailty very well, the original Arabian Nights are thick with every species of treachery, oppression, and kanvery ever practiced. The cinematic comparisons don’t end just there, Desert of Souls has the kind of wide-screen cinematic destruction that we expect from a good disaster movie. Finally, there is an echo of the 21st century in Desert of Souls, just as in the current world of terrorism and political violence, so too in Jones's tale personal motives—revenge, lust for power—mingle with religious and ethnic fanaticism.

Desert of Souls has a lot to offer, characters with depth, a setting that is at once believably real and filled with wonders, fast-paced adventure, and excellent story telling.

-Dave Hardy

THE SHIP OF ISHTAR

By A. Merritt

Did you ever wonder what heroic fantasy was like before Conan and Kull? It looked like The Ship of Ishtar, big, bold, and fantastic.

Abraham Merritt is perhaps best known as an sf writer, though like many early scientifictioneers, he could switch hit on the sword & sorcery side. He hit a homer with Ishtar. The tale is about John Kenton, a WW I vet who can no longer relate to the everyday world. When a friend sends him a mysterious inscribed stone unearthed at Uruk, Kenton releases an ancient curse that draws him into the world of Ishtar’s ship. The crew live under an age-old curse where they must forever fight the battles of Ishtar, goddess of Love and Life, against her hated rival, Nergal, Lord of Death.

Kenton proves a first class sword & sorcery hero, and has quite a match in Klaneth, the Black Priest of Nergal. The supporting characters include a beautiful priestess of Ishtar, a wayward Viking, a Persian from the time of Cyrus the Great, and Gigi, a bald dwarf from Nineveh who is one of the coolest sidekicks a hero could have.

I read the 1949 reprint with b/w illustration by Virgil Finlay. That in itself was a treat as Finlay was one of the greats of magazine illustration from the ‘30s on. Yes, some of his magic girls look a bit more like pinups from the hanger of an Army Air Corps base than Sumerian priestesses, but hey where you gonna get a Sumerian to model for ya?

The Ship of Ishtar is a neglected sword & sorcery classic. Give it some attention, it misses you.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

OTHER DIMENSIONS

By Clark Ashton Smith

This collection from Arkham House showcases short stories by Clark Ashton Smith over a period ranging from the 1910s to the 1950s. The tales are apparently arranged by length with some long space opera yarns up front and shorter Oriental fantasies in the back.

If you are a CAS fan, then this is a must read. The sf tales are fairly basic stuff. They are picaresque shoot-‘em-ups on strange planets. They don’t compare to his much more polished fantasy and horror, though "The Immeasurable Horror" is a good sf-action thriller.

The shorter works manage to pack a punch (not surprising since they lean and mean). The standouts in this collection are "Told in the Desert", "An Offering to the Moon", "Monsters in the Night", and "A Tale of Sir John Maundeville". CAS is rather hard to find these days and relatively little of his work is in print. That’s a pity, but as long as libraries still have copies of his books, you’ll be able to get ‘em on interlibrary loan.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

DARKER THAN YOU THINK

By Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson is a pioneer in science fiction, he was around before it was science fiction, they called it “scientifiction” back then. But like other pioneers he was not content with tilling the same fields, he had to pick up his musket and wander over where he couldn’t see the smoke from his neighbor’s cabin. His wanderings took him around to sword and sorcery, adventure tales, and horror. His most notable foray into the field of horror fiction was Darker than You Think, now a classic in the genre.

The story’s protagonist is Will Barbee, a hack journalist with a drinking problem and a sense of bitter longing in a New Mexico city (Williamson is nearly as dotty about his home state as Robert E. Howard was about Texas). When he meets a strange red-haired woman at a press conference held by his former professor, Barbee is launched into a nightmare world of murder and madness that rips apart everything he knows about himself and the human race itself!

This is some of Williamson’s best work, more polished than the often crude “scientifiction” he wrote in the ‘30s, but still with a naïve romance that gives the tale great power. Interestingly, Darker than You Think was a favorite of Jack Parsons, the rocket-scientist/occultist who helped found America’s missile program. Parsons’ may have been a grade-A nutjob, but he had very good taste in fiction if we may judge from this.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

BLOOD IS NOT ENOUGH

Edited by Ellen Datlow

This collection of vampire tales was issued by Berkley in 1990 and edited by Ellen Datlow. The goal here seems to be to cast as wide a net as possible and sample every possible variation on the vampire tale one can find. There are blood drinking vampires and emotion drinking vampires and time wasting vampires and kids who think they are vampires, etc…

Some of these tales just misfire for me. Tanith Lee’s “The Janitha Tree” is a good example of her subtle and enigmatic style of weird tale that is so subtle and enigmatic I’m not too sure what happened. Other tales here just aren’t my cup of tea, “A Child of Darkness” by Susan Casper is a decent portrait of a young woman who believes she is a vampire, but ultimately the character comes across as more a pathetic loony than someone interesting in her own right.  

On the other hand there are some true standouts. Fritz Leiber’s tale of blood-sucking advertising “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” appears here. It is subtle and enigmatic, but not too subtle. The best in the collection is Scott Baker’s “Varicose Worms”. This is a tale full of surprises! It tells of a Romanian immigrant in Paris who discovers the secret magic world of Shamanism and his epic battle to hold his place in it. Along the way Baker satirizes psychiatrists, politicians, Mircea Eliade, and homeless beggars, not necessarily in that order. I finished that one and was left begging for more, though I daresay Mr. Baker knows how to wrap up a yarn. If you ever run across this book, read “Varicose Worms”!

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE ANGEL OF THE WEST WINDOW

By Gustav Meyrink

Gustav Meyrink evoked the brooding spirit of Prague in novels rich with mystical symbolism, novels that might be coded with kabalistic messages themselves and capable of working a strange alchemy in their readers. Meyrink was a banker and man-about-town in fin de siecle Prague until series of duels and a false accusation of mishandling bank funds smashed the manacles of respectability that held him back. Thereafter he penned his odd novels mixing his Judeo-Buddhist mysticism with zestful fantasy yarns.

The Angel of the West Window relates the mystic quest of John Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist and secret agent, in parallel with the story of his modern descendant who finds his own life drawn onto the strange path his ancestor once trod. But the path to illumination is perilous and those who would pervert it to their own ends wait for the unwary.

Meyrink’s vision is a dizzying one. His work has been hidden behind a language barrier too long, and Meyrink deserves to take his place alongside Lovecraft, Tolkein, and Howard as a master of modern fantasy. First published in 1927, Angel and other Meyrink works were newly translated and reprinted by Daedelus in the 1990s.

-Dave Hardy

THE GHOST PIRATES

By William Hope Hodgson

The third of Hodgson’s trilogy of weird tales (Boats of the Glen Carrig and House on the Borderland were the first two), The Ghost Pirates is also about survival when the very boundaries of reality are under attack.

If you are expecting a stoned, metrosexual freebooter, be warned. Hodgson’s Ghost Pirates is more like H.P. Lovecraft as re-written by Joseph Conrad than Keith Richards meets Blackbeard. The narrator tells of how he shipped aboard the Mortzestus, trying to get back home from ‘Frisco to England. The Mortzestus is a Jonah, an unlucky ship that few man sail in twice. The narrator soon learns why. Shadow-men climb from the sea aboard the ship at night. Sailors report unexplainable and deadly happenings in the rigging. Soon the vessel is under siege.

Hodgson gives way to far more technical sea-jargon (perhaps necessarily) than in previous stories. However that artlessness gives the story a bit more verisimilitude: it is told as a sailor would tell it. The Mortzestus is essentially a haunted house at sea. The “ghosts” are no more explicable than the creatures that beset Hodgson’s other narrators. They come from somewhere else, wreak havoc and vanish.

While the story is slow paced, it does have much of Hodgson’s strange and creepy imagery. Perhaps the best image I retain is the glimpse of shadowy masts and a hull, seen backlit by a sinking sun at sea, slowly turning to stalk the doomed ship. Read this one when the lights are dim and the wind is howling off the sea.

-Dave Hardy

THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND

By William Hope Hodgson

Nowadays critics like to talk about the “New Weird”. Me, I’m still getting a handle on the Old Weird. A good place to grab it seems to be at The House on the Borderland.

The book is the second of William Hope Hodgson’s trilogy of dislocation, survival, and doom. The first was The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Like its predecessor, House on the Borderland also employs a first person narrator. But instead of being castaway in a boat at sea, the narrator is trapped in his own home adrift in time itself.

The nameless narrator tells how he came tot he house to live with sister in a remote part of Ireland. He soon finds that he has terrifying experiences. Whether they are dreams, insane delusions, or real journeys is never quite clear, but the narrator finds himself hurled through space and time to an amphitheater under the last dying sun. Giant forms of animal headed gods watch as the narrator battles hideous pig-beings, the last human fighting for survival in front of his home which has traveled too.

Just as quickly the narrator is whirled back to his own time where the pig-beings have broken through to besiege his home. While his sister is mysteriously absent, the narrator and his faithful dog Pepper battle the pig-beings on our own plane. Then things get really weird.

The narrator explores the cellars of his home and a strange pit on his property, all the while he is subject to attacks of time-slippage where he lives millions of years seemingly in a moment. The end of the Earth becomes a familiar sight.

House on the Borderland is a very strange story. Often Hodgson’s love of bizarre imagery overwhelms the pace of the narrative. Critics will find a cornucopia of material for Freudian, Jungian or other forms of analysis. But readers do get to some memorably weird places, which is the point after all.

-Dave Hardy

THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG

By William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson was a sailor who left the sea to run a physical fitness and health food store before he took up writing. His stories are filled with deeds of action, physical courage, and adventures at sea.

Boats of the Glen Carrig tells the adventures of a boat of castaway sailors shipwrecked near the Sargasso Sea in 1757. The narrator is a passenger of the Glen Carrig. He gives a dead-pan recitation of the strange events that befell the unfortunate seafarers. They find a rotting hulk in a creek on a nameless island where strange and unnatural things roam at night. It’s a place to make a ship-wrecked sailor long for the sea.

The castaways escape only to find themselves trapped in a continent of floating seaweed locked tight about another island. They battle monsters that creep about the forests of fungi at night. Around the island are more hulks of vessels entombed in the seaweed. Led by the clever and courageous boatswain, sailors fight tooth and nail to survive the horrors the encounter.

Boats of the Glen Carrig is a unique sort of book. It is crammed with Hodgson’s deep nautical lore and told in an Eighteenth-century style. The result is sometimes awkward and sometimes a bit overloaded with nautical terms. But for all that it may work a bit better, for it avoids the contrived style of a professional writer making up a crazy story and sounds like an old sailor telling a crazy story. At times I felt like I was hearing an echo of a Ray Harryhausen script channeled by an old salt. At other times I thought of the wildly improbably D&D scenarios of teenagers whose imaginations were fired with Coke and Doritos. The story has a naïve love of wonder and action that ranges from Lovecraftian horror to Howardian blood-lust.

Hodgson was a favorite of H.P. Lovecraft, I expect that Robert E. Howard would have liked his work too. Myself I truly enjoyed it. The story has a freshness that overcomes the occasional amateurishness. It is also part of a trilogy of sorts that includes The House on the Borderland and The Ghost Pirates. Boats of the Glen Carrig is a delightful, creepy, action-packed monster-story of a kind that you just don’t see anymore.

-Dave Hardy

NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES

By Cornell Woolrich

When you think of dark, Urban Fantasy, you might think of China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, or Charles de Lint. I would chose Cornell Woolrich as the creator of a unique form that blended elements of crime fiction, horror, noir, and fantasy. H.P. Lovecraft might not have known it, but Woolrich wove tales of cosmic horror.

The premise to Night Has a Thousand Eyes is pure Woolrich: the race to save a doomed man. A policeman hears a young woman’s story. To save this woman, he must save her father from certain doom. Only the doom is not so much physical, as spiritual. A psychic has predicted a wealthy industrialist will die. The psychic’s astonishing record of true predictions seems to confirm his powers of prophecy. But the NYPD doesn’t believe in ESP. As the protagonist’s colleagues race to prove the psychic to be false, the protagonist must battle the malignant forces of the unknown that are driving the marked man into lethal despair. Night is Woolrich at his best, creepy, suspenseful, and utterly unpredictable.

-Dave Hardy

JUDGE DEE: CSI MEDIEVAL CHINA?

THE CHINESE GOLD MURDERS
THE EMPEROR’S PEARL
By Robert van Gulik

Robert van Gulik is the translator of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. He found such a warm reception for a two-hundred year-old Chinese detective novel that he began to write new tales of Judge Dee.

The Chinese Gold Murders is situated in the early days of Dee’s service as a magistrate (c AD 690). The good judge takes up a post in a provincial town. The judge’s predecessor is literally a predecessor. The judge has to get to the bottom of the last judge’s death before he joins him. Along the way there are encounters with highwaymen, smugglers, Korean exiles, ghosts, and mysterious priests.

The Emperor’s Pearl is similarly fast-paced fare. At the height of the Dragon Boat races, a drummer drops dead. Dee is plunged into an investigation of the man’s death. It is somehow linked to a centuries-old theft from the imperial household itself. There is also a marvelous supporting character in the form of a Mongolian lady-wrestler (I am not making this up).

Van Gulik was an expert on Chinese culture. His books are a marvelous exploration of Medieval China without any tedious lecturing. Van Gulik also has an eye for fantasy. While there are no flying swordsman action-heroes in the Judge Dee mysteries, the supernatural is never far away. Van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries are highly entertaining, with superb settings and engaging characters.

-Dave Hardy

THE LECTURER’S TALE

By James Hynes

The Lecturer’s Tale is a satire on academia’s culture wars dressed up in the Horror Genre’s kit. Nelson Humbolt is a lowly lecturer in the literature department at a prestigious university. When he loses his job and his index finger on the same day, he seems to have hit rock bottom. But mysterious forces swirl about Nelson’s re-attached digit. He gains the power to control minds.

Nelson’s new found powers take him on an unlikely bulldozer ride through campus politics. Nelson’s principal object of interest, other than his own, is helping his office-mate Vita Deonne advance her career. But nice-guy Nelson has a running battle with angry son-of-a-bitch Nelson. Meanwhile, Vita’s dark secrets threaten to undo any altruistic good Nelson’s evil sorcery might provide.

I rather liked The Lecturer’s Tale, but I freely admit I find French Theory a lot funnier than many other folks. The comedy is broad, at times a bit much. But the spirit of satire and the demolition of pomposity and folly works in any setting, even one as odd as the ‘90s Culture Wars. A special treat is the synopsis of Elvis Presley’s lost cinematic masterpiece Viva Vietnam!

-Dave Hardy

THE BLACK STRANGER AND OTHER AMERICAN TALES

By Robert E. Howard

Steve Tompkins has an unusual way of looking at Robert E. Howard’s tales of horror and adventure. Tompkins makes grand leaps that pull in unexpected connections, his appraisal of REH is as likely to include critical tools taken from D.H. Lawrence and Leslie Fiedler as from H.P. Lovecraft.

In this collection Tompkins looks for the essential American soul in REH. It makes for an eclectic collection. The work has about as much Gothic horror (“The Horror from the Mound”, “Pigeons from Hell”) as pure Sword & Sorcery fantasy (“Marchers of Vallhalla”, “The Thunder-Rider”). The settings are eclectic as well. This collection sometimes seems like a core sample of a hidden history of Texas: pre-historic (“Marchers”), pre-Spanish (“Nekht Sermerkeht”, high-Comanche (“Thunder-Rider), Reconstruction (“Black Canaan”), frontier-cowboy era (“The Valley of the Lost”), to Howard’s own day (“Pigeons”). The center-piece is a tale of pirates, curses, Indians, and treasure set on the California coast in the 1600s (why not Texas one wonders, given La Salle’s interest in this land at the same time as the setting of “Stranger”).

REH collectors may well have all these tales in other volumes, but Tompkins’ unique observations of REH and what it means to be an American writer are to found nowhere else. If I have a criticism of this set, it is that Tompkins did not at least make a nod to the corpus of REH’s tall-tale westerns. While they are ably represented in such volumes as The Riot at Bucksnort and A Gent from Bear Creek, a taste of the rip-snortin’, half-horse-half-alligator craziness of REH’s gigantic hillbillies coupled with Tompkins’ consciousness-expanding lit-crit would have made a fascinating combination. That aside, I’m very proud to have this volume in my collection.

-Dave Hardy

THE GOLEM

By Gustav Meyrink

Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel is one of the most evocative stories inspired by Prague’s Medieval Jewish Ghetto. It has a brooding, dreamlike quality that covers the story like a mist from the river Vltava hanging in the narrow pasažy that wind in strange configuration through the Stare Město. The Golem was praised by H.P. Lovecraft, it is long overdue for some more praise.

The protagonist is Athanasius Pernath, an amnesiac gem-cutter living in Josefov (the alternate name for the Jewish Ghetto). He is the focus of the complex intrigues of Aaron Wassertrum, the junk shop owner, Charousek, a Czech student, and Angelina, a young woman with a mysterious past. Above all the Golem has returned to the Ghetto, and its appearance is linked with Pernath’s quest for his own identity.

This barely scratches the surface of this complex story. There are puppeteers and prostitutes, gangsters and kabalists, quack doctors and meshugga musicians. Buddhist philosophy mixes with Jewish mysticism in Meyrink’s work. This is not a novel with a plot that is easily described, but it is a story of powerful and moving imagery as well as striking vignettes.

I give nothing away by adding that the great imperial urban renewal of the 1890s figures prominently. Much of the old Ghetto was razed to make way for new and highly ornate offices and homes. Praguers are still traumatized by it (one lady I knew gestured at the gorgeous Jugendstil buildings of Josefov and said dismissively, “This is all new. They got rid of the good stuff long ago.”).

While many people find the soul of Prague in the works of Franz Kafka, Gustav Meyrink carried a little bit of it away too. The Golem is a fantasy of remarkable power, like dreams rendered into life.

-Dave Hardy

THE BEST OF HP LOVECRAFT: BLOODCURDLING TALES OF HORROR AND THE MACABRE
By H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft is undoubtedly the most significant writer of horror fiction to come out of the pulps, if not the most significant horror writer of his generation. Even so, the magazines he wrote for rejected many of his best stories. Although he is often imitated, few have been able to create the cosmic fear his literary theory called for.

The Best of H.P. Lovecraft brings together his most developed stories of what is often called “the Mythos”. They range from the very simple and effective “Pickman’s Model” (a story about just where a certain artist derives his inspiration) to the complex and far-reaching implications of “The Call of Cthulhu” where all of the history of life on this planet is called into question.

“The Dunwich Horror” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” bring the nightmare of miscegenation with non-human entities home to the tidy New England countryside with chilling effect. “The Shadow Out of Time” is in some ways less a horror story than a science fiction “secret history” that reaches deep into pre-history to relate the rise and fall of undreamed of star-travelling races. “The Colour Out of Space” is also science fiction, but in a more truly horrific vein. It relates the strange doom that overtakes an isolated farm family when a meteor strikes their farm.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, not that any of these tales are a bit less than the best, it is simly that I think a few of his best works were left out. Only “The Silver Key” represents his Dreamlands tales. I’d put my money of “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” as not just one of Lovecraft’s best stories, but as one of the best fantasy short stories of all-time.

If you want to see just why Lovecraft is still remembered nearly seventy years after his passing, then read The Best of H.P. Lovecraft.

-Dave Hardy

THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH
By H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft’s fantasy is, in my opinion, a greatly underestimated area of his work. Surely if one were listing the best American fantasy stories, Lovecraft’s novelette, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath would surely rank high. Lovecraft’s fantasy was indebted to the work of Lord Dunsany, but Lovecraft sculpted his own vision of wonder and fear.

The tale is part of a cycle concerning Randolf Carter, a dreamy, New England gentleman of distinguished lineage and fantastic imaginings. He accesses the “Dream Lands”, a truly fantastic land that Lovecraft evokes with that overused and seldom merited epithet, dreamlike. Carter is searching for a beautiful city, glimpsed in dream, and now hidden by jealous gods. His quest takes him through the many realms, cities, and haunted ruins of the Dreamlands.

The ways of Ghouls and the nature of the cats of different planets are explored. Carter explores the mountain known as Ngranek and the Plateau of Leng. Strange battles between even stranger creatures are fought. In the process Carter discovers much about the Dreamlands, and somtething about himself.

This volume is ably rounded out by other Dreamlands short stories, “The Silver Key”, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, “Celephais”, “The White Ship”, and “The Strange High House in the Mist”.

Lovecraft’s output of fantasy (as opposed to his very closely related field of horror) was small compared to Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, or J.R.R. Tolkein. But Lovecraft’s fantasy was something distinct, and seldom imitated. It is all the more valuable for it.

-Dave Hardy

THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH
By H.P. Lovecraft

While H.P. Lovecraft’s name is indissolubly linked with tales of ancient, extraterrestrial races and the strange traces they left in antique New England towns, there was a bit more to his literary corpus. The Doom that Came To Sarnath collects a broad spectrum of Lovecraft tales, prose and poetry.

The title tale is a fantasy set in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, a world that takes its existence in the dreams of Earth-bound dreamers. But here it pulses with life as Lovecraft ignores the “dream” aspect to bring a slice of Dreamlands history to eldritch life. The Dreamlands tales are well represented: “The Cats of Ulthar”, “The Other Gods”, “Polaris”, “The Quest of Iranon” are present, though some of the best Lovecraft fantasies are to be found in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. “Cats” is a fantasy based on Lovecraft’s feline obsession. “Polaris” travels the borders of dreams to ask what reality truly is.

Many of the others, such as “The Festival”, may be considered as minor “Mythos” stories, with its delicious imagery of wonder and terror from the deeps of time in an old New England town. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” develops the science fiction element that marked the best-known of Lovecraft’s work.

There is also straight up sf, “In the Walls of Eryx”, a planetary adventure in the vein of early scinetifictioneers like Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, and Clark Ashton Smith. Brief vignettes and poetry round out the collection.

While few of these tales are well-known, they are a broad selection of Lovecraft work, a mosaic of HPL’s moods and interests. The Doom that Came to Sarnath is a must have for any collector of Lovecraft’s work, and worthy addition to the collection of any fan of fantasy and horror.

-Dave Hardy