"The Transition of Titus Crow"

by Brian Lumley
originally published by DAW books, 1978

Okay, gang - strap yourself in, cuz this is gonna be one nutty ride!

It's 10 years since Titus Crow and Henri Laurent DeMarigny disappeared as their house was blown away by minions of Ithaqua (all of this chronicled in 1974's The Burrowers Beneath).  Now DeMarigny has turned up, floating in the Thames with all his bones broken.  And his memory gone.  

DeMarigny gets himself put up in a private hospital by the Wilmarth Foundation, and Wingate Peaslee comes by to fill him in on the last ten years - especially their activities against "the CCD" (gawd, how I hate that).  The big reveal - they've discovered Cthulhu has a daughter!  Named Cthylla (innat cute?  It's even feminine sounding!!).  And they have a plan to open a can of whoop-ass on her!  (Peaslee says a lot more than this but all of it is tiresome so let's just skip it, okay?).

DeMarigny goes home and putters around periodically dreaming about flying through space or time or the void or some such, while Crow calls out to him.  One time he sees the clock flying through space being grabbed at by Cthulhu.

Finally, DeMarigny gets a visit from the psychic Eleanor Quarry, who turns out to be feisty and is (of course) working for the Wilmarth Foundation.  She tells him Crow is alive ... and trying to get back to earth.

And then one night - poof!  There he is - pulled back through time/space - big as live, 20 years younger, and dressed like a refugee from a Sinbad movie.  

And still a pompous ass.

So where's he been?  What happened?  What - you think he won't tell us?  You obviously don't know Titus Crow!!

So, it seems the Clock has the ability to travel through space and time, without limits.  Poor DeMarigny fell out of it when Crow, not being an experienced driver, had to "hit the brakes" when Ithaqua popped up to menace them (he also discovered that the clock is equipped with an Anti-Cthulhu-Thingy Death Ray, which he used to drive off Ithy-baby).

So, after that, Crow found himself, first on a dying earth millenium in the future, inhabited by friendly giant fuzzy caterpillars. And statues of giant beetle-people.  Then he ends up back in the Cretaceous period, where he gets chased around by pteranodons and newly-born volcanoes.  He leaves, but not before starting a shell collection.

Then he blasts off into the future.  Or something.  In any case, here's where things get truly weird.  A prologue explains that the next section of the book is transcribed from tapes recorded by DeMarigny of Crow describing his adventures, and that these tapes were damaged in some catastrophe, thus whole sections of them are cut off.  Thus Crow's stories are oddly disrupted, as he is cut off mid-sentence with a "..." and then returns discussing some other topic entirely.  This is bad writing, whether it was Lumley experimenting or simply being lazy.  The saddest part of it is that most of these breaks actually gave me pleasure, as it meant I was spared more of Crow's tiresome narrative; by which I mean to say the missing parts don't matter since the tales he was relating weren't very interesting anyway.  But here's what happened:

• Crow got chased by the Hounds of Tindalos, or, as he likes to call them, the Tindslosi Hounds.  Turns out the Hounds are basically flying stingray/bat/moths - didja know that?  Anyway they chase him a bunch.
• Crow apparently crashes and ends up all but killing himself, but he crashes on a planet of friendly robots who rebuild him a cyborg body, thus his youthfulness and several other new, ahem, features.
• Crow periodically dreams of a smokin' hot babe named Tiania and her mentor, something called Kthanid which is always hidden behind a curtain.
• Crow ends up in Roman Britain, where a local noble takes him to be the reincarnation of his long-lost son.  They keep him away from the time clock for a long time so he can't leave.  This problem is conveniently solved when the Great Race of Yith snag his brain into one of their cone bodies.
• That problem is conveniently solved when the Great Race find out Crow can operate the clock, which was made by the Elder Gods, which means Crow must be "kin" to them, and they might be watching now, so - zing!  Crow's back in Roman Britain, where he wows the Romans into letting him go.
• Crow falls into a black hole but gets out of it
• Crow meets numerous different types of aliens
• Crow flies over the Lake of Hali and is grabbed at by a tentacle belonging to Hastur
• Crow sees the sinking of Atlantis
• Crow meets Yog-Sothoth and zaps him with his Anti-Cthulhu-Thingy Ray.

And then, the saddest part, because the "fragmentary" section ends ... and what follows next, the nadir of the book, is relayed in its entirety....

Crow ends up in Elysia, home of the Elder Gods, which is more beautiful than beautiful (he informs of this endlessly).  There he finally hooks up with Tiania and spends his days laying around with her, learning to fly, being waited on by spider-people, and meeting up with several types of weird critters including, I kid you not, a race of dragons called "lithards" ... who lisp!

Yeah I'm not making this up.  "Ooth Neth", Crow's dragon buddy, is always saying crap like "Tituth Crow, Tituth Crow, come bathe with uth!"  

This however, is not how low the tale sinks...

No, I haven't mentioned Crow and Tiania and The Tree, which is just... unmentionable.

But finally, Crow is summoned to meet the mysterious Kthanid.  Who informs him (from behind the curtain) that:

• The Cthulhu things are just "fallen" Elder Gods, imprisoned because the Elder Gods just don't have the heart to kill `em
• The Elder Gods mated with human women in order to offset the Cthulooey's growing hold over mortal men - in other words to create mortal foes of the Cthulhu Gang
• And, hey - Crow himself is descended from one of those matings - thus he's part Elder God! (why this should surprise him, since Crow's seemingly unable to get through a conversation without reminding everyone how superior he is in every way, is a bit of a mystery

And then comes the Big Reveal, cuz, you see, Kthanid parts the curtain and - guess what?  He's a golden-eyed, friendly version of Cthulhu!

Yes, Good Cthulhu!

Cthulhu-buddy!

Fuck - what the hell was Lumley thinking with this one?  Oh well....

So, all goes well until Crow gets homesick and leaves a weeping Tiania behind while he goes buggering off back to Merrie Olde cuz he misses his tea and crumpets so damn much, which brings us back to him pigging out and couch surfing at DeMarigny's place.

He teaches DeMarigny how to use the clock, and some of his other handy-dandy artifacts, then one night bails, leaving a note that says (I paraphrase) "hey DeMarigny - I gotta bail cuz some big cosmic shit's going down even tho Kthanid won't say what.  I'm leaving the clock and some other goodies.  You should really use it and come visit.  It'll be great!  Of course, you'll have to find your own way here to Elysia and deal with a bunch of cosmic horrors and stuff, but hey - we'll be rootin' for ya!  Ciao!"

It would be nice to report that DeMarigny finally says "why the hell am I friends with this narcissistic, pompous, condescending asshole?!"  But no, of course he takes off in the clock, not before mailing all his notebooks and tapes to the Wilmarth Foundation.

Oh, the Wilmarth Foundation ... well it seems they tried to nuke Cthylla, and as a result, Cthulhu drove all the psychics crazy, had serial killers roaming the streets, caused terrible storms and quakes that destroyed Innsmouth, Arkham and Miskatonic U (at least Wingate Peaslee bit the dust, so it wasn't all bad).  

And thus endeth the book.

All I can say is - fucking hell what was this?

The first portion of the book - the build-up - is okay as far as that goes.  At least Lumely doesn't drag it out - instead kicking it into action just before you start wanting to skim ahead. After that, things go downhill fast.  The dying earth, evoking the last part of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine - which I happen to love, seems promising until the beetle statue got me laughing out loud.  Crow's trip to the cretaceous seems always to be on the brink of becoming exciting.  His time spent on the robot planet is simply un-engaging and I was glad to get through it.  Ditto for his trip to Roman Scotland.  

And then there's the Elysia sequence.  I mean, do I need to tear this apart?  Do I need to indulge in critical vitriol?  Isn't the synopsis damning enough!!!

I can't even bring myself to comment on Kthanid.  Yes I can.  Kthanid is a really, really, seriously stupid idea!  

Well, what can I say?  Crow is an asshole.  DeMarigny is a boob.  The story is disappointing or silly or borderline coherent.  Yeah, Transition has earned its rep as one of the all-time bummers.  Really earned it.

Now I gotta open the windows and let out the smell.  Whew!

"Nethescurial"

by Thomas Ligotti
originally published Weird Tales, Winter 1991/1992

A devotee of weird tales finds an obscure manuscript which relates such a tale - of an island-dwelling cult that discovered their deity was actually a thing of evil, and of how one member broke up their sacred idol and scattered it around the world, and how their island was renamed Nethescurial.

He is plagued by dreams about Nethescurial, and the cult, and their island, and their god.  And he comes to realize these are not just dreams.

Ligotti again.  If, like many horror fans, you think he's the cat's pajamas, then this tale may make you swoon.  If, like me, you think he's talented, an evocative and effective writer, but a bit of a one-note johnny, it may not do much for you.

"The Shallows"

by John Langan
originally published Cthulhu's Reign, 2010

A day in the life of a man living after the return of the Great Old Ones.

Not much of a synopsis and not much to say here, because, though very well-written, the story doesn't make much of an impression.  It echoes a bit with I Am Legend and Stephen King's "The Mist", but there's nothing terribly exciting going on here.

 

"The Big Fish"

by Jack Yeovil (aka Kim Newman)
originally published Interzone No. 76, October 1993

Bay City (a fictionalized Santa Monica, CA, courtesy of Raymond Chandler), 1941.  Amidst fears of a Japanese invasion, an unnamed hard-boiled detective is hired by film star Janey Wilde to investigate the disappearance of gangster Lair Brunette, and of her baby, Franklin.

The case leads him to a murder scene, the local chapter of The Esoteric Order of Dagon, and finally a disaster aboard an abandoned floating casino that turns out to be not-so abandoned.

This is a truly fun story and one of the most enjoyable HPLommages I've come across.  Newman knows his Lovecraft, and he also knows his Chandler, affecting an effective Chandler voice throughout the tale.  If there's a drawback, it's that once again, the payoff isn't as good as the buildup.  The introduction of Delta Green-ish underground operation doesn't help, and the finale has an unavoidable tongue-in-cheekiness to it.

The temptation to marry Lovecraft to Chandler seems irresistible to imaginative authors - it's been done numerous times.  Newman almost nails it here.  Fun, but minor.

 

"Jeroboam Henley's Debt"

by Charles R. Saunders
originally published Innsmouth Free Press, 2010


Ohio, 1933.  Theotis Nedeau, a professor, former football player and boxer, visits his friend Jeremiah Henley.  Henley is having quite a problem.

It seems Henley's grandfather ran an underground railroad in the slavery days.  He also practiced black magic.  And, he was double-crosser.  Certain of the refugee slaves - specifically African natives - he would drug and sell off to a white plantation owner who was involved in the worship of Shub-Niggurath.  He drugged and captured a witch doctor named Gbomi, who set a curse on him.  When Henley, who lives in his grandfather's house, learns the truth, he burns grandpa's journal and his portrait.  Since then, something's been stalking the house.

Nedeau is an expert in African magic.  He believes he knows how to solve the problem.  He performs a ritual and banishes the zomboid form of Jeroboam Henley, Jeremiah's grandfather.  However, it seems Nedeau was long ago taken over by the spirit of Gbomi, his own ancestor.  He takes revenge on Jeremiah.

Wow.  This is minor stuff.  It could be one of Robert Bloch's throwaways.  Not bad, but I wasn't terribly impressed (Saunders African sword-and-sorcery tales do interest me, though).

"Shoggoths in Bloom"

by Elizabeth Bear
originally published Asimov's March 2008

In this setting, shoggoths are a well-known aqauatic species, and no more feared than other dangerous sea creatures.  Prof. Harding is studying them.  They have an odd habit of sunning themselves on rocks, sprouting strange nodules.  Harding samples some. 

He begins to have strange dreams.  In them, he is "eaten" by a shoggoth and becomes one with their consciousness. He comes to understand them as a race that was created for slavery, without the ability to think for themselves.  They are looking for someone to be their master again. 

WWII is brewing in Europe.  Harding knows the shoggoths could be a terrible weapon against the Axis.  However, he chooses to give the shoggoths the command they've been asking him for.  He orders them to be free and learn to think for themselves. 

Well, its certainly a unique take on the shoggoths.  Beyond that, its a well-written sci-fi story.  But hardly a classic.

"The Watchers Out Of Time"

by August Derleth
originally published The Watchers Out Of Time, Arkham House, 1974

It's 1935.  Nicholas Walters, an Englishman, receives a letter (intended for his late father), informing of their inheritance of a large old house in Massachusetts, Springfield ... near Dunwich (dun-dun-dun-DUNNNN!!!!).

It turns out the last owner was Aberath Whateley, apparently Nicholas' father's stepbrother.  The "solictor" warns Nicholas that the surrounding village is backwards, and the people unfriendly.

Nicholas heads out to the Whateley house, with helpful directions from a grumpy old shopkeeper named Tobias Whateley, who warns him to "tek keer" out there. The house turns out to be big, old, in pretty good shape, and with "an ornate carved ornament" of glass set into the wall of the chimney of the main room, a tall triangle with a "convex glass circle" in the center.  Some ledgers on the table make some reference to the Whateley family of "The Dunwich Horror", and the events therein (which of course are lost on Nicholas, but not on us loyal Lovecraftians - heh heh heh).

A few odd bits of info surface, such as Aberath had a caretaker named Increase Brown, who no one liked.  That Aberath's body was never found.  The whippoorwills make a lot of noise at night, and sometimes Walters hears strange animal noises as well.  While developing photographs he's made of the house, two faces are visible in his short of the fireplace ornament.  Going to have another look at said ornament, Walters has a weird, hypnotic experience. 

Walters does some investigating which yields the usual odd rumors re: witchcraft, etc.  On returning to the house, she finds furniture rearranged and an envelope with a note left for "Charles, or the Son of Charles, or the Grandson of Charles or Who Comes After" (that's you, Walter!)

And that's all she wrote, folks.  Derleth never finished the story.  It was published, as found among his papers in `71.

In such a fragmentary state, it's well-nigh impossible to honestly judge the story, or how it might have played out.  What's left is pretty much boilerplate Derleth posthumous collaboration stuff.  The night scenes in the house are moderately evocative, but nothing AD hadn't done a few million times before.  The hallucination scene with the fireplace ornament, too, is somewhat evocative, but also a little unclear.  One assumes Derleth would have revised it had he lived. 

"Bulldozer"

by Laird Barron
Published SCIFICTION, 2004

Some time in the 1860's or 1870's.  Jonah Koenig, a Pinkerton detective has arrived in Purdon, a California frontier town, looking for a man named Iron Man Hicks, (or Mullen).  Wanted as a suspect in a series of ritual murders, and by no less than P.T. Barnum for stealing valuables while working as a circus strongman. Among them at least one occult book (the real life Dictionnaire Infernal).

After proving himself tough by shooting a local troublemaker and making it with local hookers, Koenig gets an interview with a man named Langston Butler, holed up in a work camp outside town. He and Hicks have had some adventures involving hallucinogenics and occult rituals.  Hicks is barbaric and corrupt, but possessed of strange powers, including being able to open holes in space.  He's also being devoured by a parasitic fungus. But not exactly.  According to Butler, Hicks is in the process of changing or evolving, into something else.

He directs Koenig to "The House of Belphegor", a cave not far from the camp, made by the hands of an extinct race "before the continents split and the ice came over the world."

Koenig finds animal skeletons and bizarre symbols scratched onto boulders (many of them faded with time).

Something happens to him in the cave.  He remembers it being large inside than expected; gargantuan statues, being weightless.  He comes back in bad shape. He dynamites the cave.  He hears that Butler has died.  Mullen (Hicks?) has been seen.  He finds Hicks in his hotel room and shoots him, to no effect.  Hicks grabs his arm, leans toward him - "his face split apart at the seams, a terrible flower....:"

This is an effective story and I like Barron's writing a lot.  It manages to invoke Lovecraft cliches without wallowing in them - a nice touch.

"The Men from Porlock"

by Laird Barron
originally published The Book of Cthulhu, Night Shade Press, 2011

Miller is a lumberjack, working at Slango, a small, hellish lumber camp in the Pacific Northwest.  It is 1923.  Miller is a WWI vet, still suffering from his experiences.

McGrath, the straw boss, sends Miller, Horn, Ruark, Bane, Stevens, Calhoun, and Ma out into the woods to bag a couple deer to serve when a photographer comes to visit the camp.  Miller reluctantly accepts.

They head off into the woods.  Camping in a hollow, Bane regales them with hints of old legends of burial mounds and demons dwelling in the earth, and a black-bound book with a strange symbol on it that his grandfather, a preacher, was in possession of.

The next days hunt is a mixed success.  Ma, Horn and Calhoun are left in the woods pursuing a wounded buck.  Miller and Ruark are to head back to Slango, while Stevens and Bane round up the other three.  Then things go sour.  

They find Horn, knocked out and bruised and a little unsure what happened to him.  Thinking they're up against bushwhackers, the men brace for trouble.  Horn can't tell them where Calhoun and Ma are, only that he heard them talking to someone.  They search.  They find a tree with a symbol carved into it - a symbol Bane recognizes as the same one that appeared on his grandfather's black book.  The tree also has a hinged door carved into it.  Inside they find something that "squirmed and uncoiled".  They flee.

They find an odd, Puritan-ish village, unknown from any maps.  There are only women there, dressed in Colonial style and speaking in affected Olde English.  But they say the men will be returning, presently.  There is a strange tower at the center of the village. Believing they must be hiding their missing men, they begin a house-to-house search. Miller notes that most of the women appear to be pregnant, but there are no children.  

In the tower, they find Ma, eviscerated.  The women, and the returning men, attack.  A bloody battle ensues, with the village quickly catching fire and the loggers holed up in a cave.  Horn begins babbling about "Ol' Leech", a slumbering entity that lives in the woods and is worshiped by the villagers, who offer their newborns to it.  During the night they hear Calhoun screaming for help. The others are carried off during the night, presumably into tunnels where the loggers have spied evidence of gruesome altars.  Finally Stevens and Miller are the only ones left.  They re-enter the village, but the surviving villagers only glare at them, and allow them to leave.

Returning to Slango, they find the logging camp obliterated without a trace, and a tall, finely-dressed man who identifies himself as Dr. Boris Kalamaov, who tells them they will come to live among the villagers.  They decline.  Kalamov kills Stevens, but allows Miller to live, telling him they will be watching.

Years later, Miller, now married and a father, cuts down a tree in his backyard and finds a slimy creature in the center of the stump.  He sets it on fire.

Laird Barron writes tuff, hard-boiled, gory, violent stories about brutal, damaged men.  And he writes them quite well.  This story is a winner - loaded with atmosphere, its eerie, powerful build-up is reminiscent of Blackwood's "The Willows", which I'm sure was intentional.  

"Medusa"

by E.H. Visiak
originally published 1929 by Victor Gollancz 

Medusa tells the strange story of a young boy who is hired onto a sea voyage by a man named Huxtable, who is searching for his son, missing at sea and thought to have been taken by pirates.

Not much happens at first, though there are reports by the crew of a man-like monster following the ship.  Eventually they find the pirate ship, but the only body on it is an old babbling madman.

Huxtable tells the boy a story of a once highly-advanced race that commanded incredible scientific and sorcerous knowledge.  However, their explorations led to their downfall, and the race degenerated into fish-men.  

The legend turns out to be real, when the fish men, who have powers over space and time, attack the ship and take the crew, Huxtable, and the boy, prisoner.  They are taken to an small rock island with a huge jutting obelisk and some ancient ruins.  There the crew are sacrificed to a giant, octopoid creature that uses hallucinatory powers (to which the boy is immune) to appear to be a smokin' hot babe.  The boy escapes.

This book probably doesn't strictly belong here.  It was not an influence on Lovecraft, nor likely influenced by him.  And yet only the latter is surprising.  But first, let's talk about how Medusa got into Lovecraft-ville in the first place.

First. In 1983, Twilight Zone magazine published two articles in which two major fantasy authors (Thomas M. Disch and Karl Edward Wagner) and one fantasy scholar (the mysterious R.S. Hadji - who may not have been a real person - and possibly the psuedonym of another author, possibly even then-TZ-editor T.E.D. Klein) - gave their annotated lists of the greatest horror/SF and fantasy books, stories, and authors.

To the surprise of many of us horror/fantasy nerd readers (including moi) who thought we knew a lot, there were quite a few titles/authors we'd never even heard of.  This sent many of us scrambling on wild chases to track down these titles/authors.  Which turned out to be a neat trick, because many of them were very, very rare and obscure and hard to find, and in those pre-internet days, tracking down a used book was entirely a luck-of-the-draw activity.

 And Medusa - well that made TWO of the lists - Wagner's "13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels" and Hadji's "13 Neglected Masterpieces of the Macabre".  And here's how they described it:

(Wagner): "If David Lindsay had written Treasure Island in the throes of a peyote-induced religious experience ... Well, if Coleridge had given Melville a hand on Moby Dick after a few pipes of opium."

(Hadji): "Subtitled "a story of mystery & ecstasy and strange horror," this is one of the most truly original fantastic novels in the English language. The prose is a joy to read, the vocabulary of Milton couched in the grammar of Stevenson, while the plot is a heady amalgam of a boy's pirate adventure and metaphysical romance. A voyage to the South Seas culminates in a rendezvous with the sunken demesne of the monstrous octopoid Medusa, last of a pre-human race that achieved inter-dimensional travel. It seems vaguely reminiscent, in this, of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," but is utterly unlike in spirit. Visiak achieved the terror and wonder, the sense of awe, that Lovecraft could only grasp at."

Well, holy fuck -  if that doesn't send any Cthulhu fan scurrying for a copy, I don't know what would!!!

So, Medusa became the most sought-after obscure horror-fantasy novel among fans of obscure horror-fantasy.  This further complicated by the fact that, while many of the books listed were very rare, Medusa was perhaps the rarest - or at least one of the rarest.  

Me, it was 20 years before I finally managed to get my hands on a copy via interlibrary loan.

This leads me to: second.

See, a lot of us fans went searching and, over the years, found these things.   Many have been reprinted thanks to small press publishers.  But here's the thing: what we found was that Wagner/Hadji seemed to have been having a bit of fun at our expense. 

You see, out of 78 books listed by Wagner/Disch/Hadji, I have read 45 of them to date.  Out of which, there are 12 I would truly recommend (a couple of them outstanding - and guess what - neither of those are rare or obscure), most are moderately entertaining but in no way special, and many of which I truly disliked.

I know, mileage varies, but, based on what's been posted to forums over the years, my batting average is about the norm.

In other words, most of these books have been a disappointment.  And the biggest letdown, tentacles down, for most seekers, has been Medusa.

In truth - I like Medusa well enough.  It's a fast read, entertaining, very Robert Louis Stevenson.  And the fish-men's attack on the ship is actually scary and evocative as hell (the big octopus thing is a major anti-climax, though).  I'd say it's worth reading if you can borrow a copy.  But the damn thing now commands ridiculous prices in its original printings ($850 and more), and even the reprint from a few years back by Centipede is now going for $100.  

Medusa's problem is that it was built up by bullshit.  After reading Wagner/Hadji's comments, we expected an uber-Cthulhu, a work of cosmic sea-horror that would blow Lovecraft out of the water. "Visiak achieved the terror and wonder, the sense of awe, that Lovecraft could only grasp at" - my ass.  Visiak didn't even come close.

So is Medusa a bad book?  No.  Just a letdown thanks to its ridiculously built-up rep.

What IS interesting is how the last portion parallels "The Call of Cthulhu" and "Dagon", with it obelisk covered in strange hieroglyphics, its Deep One-like fish men, its octopoid mind-fucking monster.  The interesting part is this thing was published not long after "The Call of Cthulhu" - yet is unlikely Visiak ever saw Lovecraft's stories.  And it seems that Lovecraft, who surely would have been intrigued by aspects of Visiak's novel, never even heard of it - it is never mentioned in any of his writings or correspondence - nor is Visiak.  Multiple Discovery in action....

"To Live and Die in Arkham"

by Joseph S. Pulver Sr.
originally published SIN and Ashes, Hippocampus Press, 2010


Prof. Bergin hires Will, a low-life, to kill his enemy, Prof. Daniel Washington, and take something from him (a rare book).  However, when Will goes to carry out the task, he learns from Prof. Washington that he (Will), a child of a rape, is actually the son of Prof. Bergin.  Washington gives him the means of revenge.  As Bergin is devoured by a tentacled mist-thing, Will heads back to Prof. Washington to begin his further Cthuloid education.

Very minor stuff.  Pulver tries to write hard-boiled style, but just comes off weak.  The story is too flimsy to really hold water.

"The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins"

by Molly Tanzer
originally published Historical Lovecraft, 2011

To avoid being conscripted into the Seven Years War, Mr. Villein, a younger cousin, takes up residence at Calipash Manor.  

Mr. Villein is a creep who has studied black magic, and when Lord Calipash marries Alys Fellingworth, a local girl Villein himself fancies, he plots revenge.  Lord Calipash ends up conveniently dead, but not before knocking up Alys.  To Villein's regret, the children (twins) are born healthy.  But a little of his black magic and things go awry.  Rosemary (the girl twin) has tiny, needle-sharp teeth at birth - which she uses to bite off her wet-nurse's nipple. She's also prone to, once a month, turning into a fish-humanoid, comeplete with gills.  Her brother, Basil, is only slightly less weird.  

Both twins are precocious in every way (including sexually), morbid, and creepy.  As they grow to teen-hood, Villein realizes he may have a problem controlling them.  He tricks Basil into being press-ganged into the navy, and proposes marriage to Rosemary (she accepts).  Basil is believed to have run away and vanished.

One day, a mysterious stranger shows up and sways Rosemary into feeding him with a sob story about his being press-ganged and taken to sea and all his family gone.  Villein, realizing who he is, attempts to raise a stink but is promptly shot by Rosemary.  She and Basil live morbidly ever after.

An amusing and stylish little oddity, actually quite funny, about an 18th-century Addams family.  I wouldn't mind reading more by Tanzer.

"The Unthinkable"

by Bruce Sterling
originally published The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1991

A boy - another Cthulhu cold war story....

This time its the US that has The Big One - namely Azathoth, ready to be released.  Dr. Tsyganov (Russian) and Dr. Doughty (Texan) sit around playing cards in Baba Yaga's hut.  The cold war is over, and tensions are easing, and their jobs are done.  Doughty gets a call from his wife.  Their baby son is "tainted" by Cthuloid whatsis.   

This is a fairly silly little vignette.  I wasn't impressed.  Except for including Godzilla in the Cthulhu Mythos.  That was a nice touch.

"Flash Frame"

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
originally published Cthulhurotica, Dagan Books, 2010

Our unnamed hero is a journalist trying to eke out a living in Mexico City.  He visits a dilapidated movie theater called El Tabu, where some sex cult rents out the establishment on a regular basis.  Spying on their activities, all he finds is them watching fragments of a 70's sword`n'sandal flick.  But he begins having nightmares and hallucinations, all related to the color yellow.

He burns down the theater, then a vault containing a pristine print of the film.  Now the Cineteca Nacional has found another copy, and he's planning on starting another fire.

I found this minor piece unimpressive.  Moreno-Garcia's authorial voice is unconvincing, and the idea is unformed and not that great to begin with.

"Some Buried Memory"

by W.H. Pugmire
originally published The Tangled Muse, Centipede Press, 2011

Charlotte Hund lives in the city of Gershon, which may be in the Dreamlands, and where new friend Sebastian Melmoth (a psuedonym once used by Oscar Wilde) is about to take her on a trip.  

Charlotte is apparently a ghoul, though she was raised as a human (albeit a deformed one) by a witch grandmother.

Sebastian takes her to a place where an underground tunnel reunites her with her ghoul-ish brethren.

Hard to know what to say about this story.  It's well-written, if florid, evocative, dreamlike, amusing, and pretty slight.  Plenty of atmosphere, though.

"Remnants"

by Fred Chappell
originally published Cthulhu's Reign, 2010

The star-headed old ones have revived and taken over the earth.  Most humans have been killed outright or experimented on, then killed.  Only scattered survivors remain.  Vern, a teenage boy, his autistic sister Echo, their mother, and their dog, Queenie, live as scavengers in the wilderness, eating and taking shelter when and where they can, and avoiding the star-heads and shoggoths.  The star-heads are busy terraforming the entire planet into something more to their liking.  Echo is a telepath, and "Moms" and Vern have to deal with her visions, which are confusing, sometimes helpful, sometimes dangerous.

In space, a small ship and crew searches for survivors on earth. They are from a different race, who have also been rescued from the old ones, who are taking over other planets as well.  They too have a telepath, who reaches out to Echo, though the girl's mind is difficult to read or communicate with.

Vern/Echo/Queenie/Moms take refuge in a cave, where Vern finds the remains of a previous group who apparently committed suicide rather than being taken by the old ones.  He is despairing, but Echo continues to receive messages from the rescuers, though it is almost impossible for her to communicate them coherently to her family.  Finally, they make contact with the rescuers and set out for a new life in the stars.

A memorable, slightly disturbing story with a positive outcome.  Chappel remains one of the most literate Lovecraftians.

 

"Rising With Surtsey"

Originally published Dark Things, Arkham House, 1971

Phillip Haughtree discovers his brother, Julian, is slowly going nuts - immersing himself in the usual Cthuloid literature, sleepwalking and babbling about Things of the Elder Deep.  For a time, Julian is committed to Oakdeene Sanitarium.  He returns, generally cured, but suffering a few oddments - even more obsessed with occult and Cthulhu thangs, secretive, and he never takes off his dark glasses.

Eventually, Phil has his diary, which is written in ancient heiroglyphs(!) translated.  He realizes Julian has either gone nuts, or something's up.  Julian finds that Phil's been snooping and confronts him.  Without his shades, his eyes are bulging and red.  He reveals himself to be Neptha, the servant of Cthulhu and Othuum.  He summons his true form, which is currently inhabited by Julian's mind.  Julian, trapped in the body of waving tentacles, begs for help.  A fight ensues.  Neptha/Julian is accidentally impaled on a fireplace poker.  The police haul Phil off to Oakdeene, not believing his claims of possession and the supernatural.

 What we have here, my friends, is a minor, though decent, Lumley pulper.  I can't think of a whole lot to say about it, since it's one of those stories that's neither bad enough nor good enough to inspire much comment.  Suffice it to say, it's an early Lumley work and not among his best.

" A Colder War"

by Charles Stross
originally published Spectrum 3 SF, 2000

(I am grateful to Wikipedia for having a detailed synopsis, thus saving me some typing)

Roger Jourgensen, is a CIA analyst who writes up a report on the state of both the US and Soviet governments' occult research for incoming president Reagan. This report attracts the attention of "the colonel" (Oliver North), who arranges for Jourgensen's transfer and for him to work on a variant of the Iran–Contra affair - secret dealings between the US and the Islamic Republic of Iran to counter Iran's rival Saddam Hussein, frustrate the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, as well as arrange the freeing of hostages in Lebanon.

In the Cold War, NATO and the United States lags the Soviet Union in mastery of the dark arts, and relies on nuclear missiles as their main countermeasure. The Soviets stole the bulk of useful material from Nazi Germany; the Nazis moved a sleeping entity from an underwater city in the Baltic Sea to East Germany, and the Soviets have since contained it at Chernobyl. Research and weapons from it are referred to as Project Koschei.[9] The Soviets have also deployed smaller weapons called servitors, unstoppable robot-like beings found from the original Antarctic Pabodie expedition and in the Kitab Al-Azif. Satellite reconnaissance shows that the servitors may have been deployed in Afghanistan, which would violate the Dresden Agreement - a secret multinational treaty signed in 1931 after the Pabodie expedition to a strange Antarctic plateau that appears on no maps. Even Adolf Hitler adhered to the treaty, which prohibits the use of these alien entities in war. The United States' countermeasures for Koschei include 300 megatons of nuclear weapons and a continuity of government base hundreds of light years from Earth, connected via a gate in Washington. The CIA also uses the gates to other planets as roundabout ways to transport arms to the Afghani mujahadeen, and drugs back.

Stephen Jay Gould briefs the CIA on the evolutionary implications of the alien life forms discovered on other planets and at Antarctica, confirming they come from no Earthly source. Other nations emulate the superpowers; Iran and Israel plan a nuclear defence against Iraq's attempts to open a gate to the stars. Eventually, the Colonel's dealings are leaked, and Jourgensen has to testify before a Congressional committee. A Congressman, horrified by the accounts of the Colonel's dabbling, inquires about the Great Filter: why no aliens have openly stopped by to visit humanity, and only relics and servants remain. He points out that meddling with with relics of the elder ones would be a good explanation for why other intelligent life has been exterminated before it could visit.

Saddam Hussein stabilises the gate of Yog-Sothoth, destroying opposing tribes in Iraq, which the Iranians respond by nuking Iraq. The timing unfortunately lines up with a joke by President Reagan; the Soviets and their leader Yegor Ligachev retaliate, with a nuclear war destroying the Middle East and much of the United States and Soviet Union. More worryingly, the entity behind Project Koschei, Cthulhu, has somehow been loosed, whether intentionally or not; the US nuclear strike does not appear to slow it down as it heads west across the Atlantic Ocean. Jourgensen and other U.S personnel retreat to a hidden constructed colony on a distant dying planet, codenamed XK Masada. There, riven by phantom voices; Jourgensen contemplates suicide. He decides against it, as death would be no escape if, as he suspects, he has been devoured by Yog-Sothoth already.

This story is highly thought of (it's been anthologized several times), and popular.  But I must go against the grain and note that I do not care for it.

 It's not that it's a bad story, mind you.  It's professionally written, and smart, and clever - though I will note that the "jump cut" structure of the story makes it hard to follow (or maybe I'm just dumB), and that it's one of those stories full of military tech jargon and acronyms and lots of name-dropping of different types of planes, tanks, and missiles, and where characters utter dialogue like: "For the past three decades, the B-39 Peacemaker force has been tasked by SIOP with maintaining an XK-PLUTO capability directed at ablating the ability of the Russians to activate Project Koschei, the dormant alien entity they captured from the Nazis at the end of the last war.”  --- but some folks love that kind of stuff (not me).  And Jourgensen I found a thoroughly unsympathetic (and uninteresting) character.

It's a novel updating of Lovecraft in the post-war/cold-war world.  It's just not my thing.  At all.