2016 fantasy/horror anthology, Lovecraftian stories that explore the
mythos in a positive way – celebrating rather than backing away from
the implications of minds greater than human.
Jones is also the author of When the Stars are Right: Towards An
Authentic R'lyehian Spirituality, so you can be fairly sure you'll be
going pretty deep here. These are stories of gods, and things beyond
human capacity, and a sense of wonder.
The Pearl in the Shadows (Bryan Thao Worra) is poetry; not
terrible but it doesn't do much for me.
We Three Kings (Don Raymond) revisits the Adoration of the Magi,
with a lot more tentacles.
Messages (John Linwood Grant) has a narrator whose job is to
gather all the books (and recordings, and everything else), for a
purpose which… makes a strange kind of sense.
Mother's Nature (Stefanie Elrick) never quite establishes its
ground rules; there's plenty of atmosphere but no real progression
or plot.
Mr Johnson and the Old Ones (Jamie Mason) has Robert Johnson
meeting Lovecraft… both of them conjure men. It relies perhaps too
much on that conceit, but works reasonably well all the same.
At the Left Hand of Nothing (Jayaprakash Satyamurthy) is a short
monologue, trying to explain (like many of the pieces here) why
madness is not madness but enlightenment.
That Most Foreign of Veils (Luke R. J. Maynard) has travel to the
far north of Canada, and the process of study outside formal
environments. It's very effective, but hard to describe without
spoiling details.
Emperor Eternal (Konstantine Paradias) combines gratuitous gore
with a drearily conventional "be careful what you wish for" story.
Antinomia (Erica Ruppert) visits the end of the world, but doesn't
talk enough about that, instead focusing on its people – who have
nothing to say.
Feeding the Abyss (Rhoads Brazos) is an excellent practical story
of sacrifice.
Keys in Stranger Deserts (Vrai Kaiser) has someone thrown out of
Miskatonic University – a gratuitous connection, really – and
travelling in search of things barely seen. More atmosphere than
story, a common problem here.
ἱερὸς γάμος (Hieros Gamos) (Gord Sellar) considers the Eleusinian
Mysteries, the Holy Marriage, and just how it might work in practice.
The Litany of Earth (Ruthanna Emrys) is the story that brought me
to this anthology: I was looking for places where it had been
published, and was intrigued by the title. But I've already
mentioned it in my review of Winter Tide.
The Wicked Shall Come Upon Him (Kristi DeMeester) has a bunch of
unsympathetic characters at the end of the world. Ooh, they're gay,
that makes it all more interesting.
After Randolph Carter (Noah Wareness) is another monologue, with
beautiful imagery.
There's very little here that takes a conventional story form, but
quite a bit of it is distinctly enjoyable even so. It's pleasing to
see material that engages with the core ideas rather than simply
saying "oh noes I have FURRIN BLUD panic panic".
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