This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on September 18, 2025.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

By Stephen Graham Jones – S&S/Saga Press – March 18, 2025

Review by Robin Marx

As The Buffalo Hunter Hunter begins, Etsy Beaucarne is struggling with an undistinguished academic career. A surprising opportunity falls in her lap, however, after a distant relative’s crumbling journal is discovered hidden in the walls of a decrepit parsonage. Penned in 1912 by her great-great-grandfather Arthur, a Lutheran pastor posted in Montana, Etsy hopes to use the manuscript as the springboard for a new research project, ideally leading to publications and tenure. But as transcriptions of the brittle and faded pages are delivered, she discovers a much darker and more troubling narrative than expected.

The premise established, Etsy’s story fades into the background. The Beaucarne Manuscript makes up the bulk of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Arthur Beaucarne’s religious ministrations to the small town of Miles City are disrupted when an ominous stranger begins attending his sermons. Invariably seated in the rearmost pew, the visitor is a Native American man dressed incongruously in a black Jesuit robe, battered cavalry boots, and dark glasses. Disturbed by the man’s intense scrutiny, Arthur nevertheless finds himself fascinated by the visitor. Eventually the Indian approaches Arthur after a Sunday service, introducing himself as Good Stab of the Pikuni (Piegan Blackfeet tribe), and says that he has come to the church to confess his sins. Over a series of weekly visits—the chapel dimmed so as not to aggravate his unusual sensitivity to light—Good Stab unburdens his soul, and Arthur dutifully recounts the man’s anecdotes in his journal.

During his first visit, Good Stab describes encountering the scene of a bizarre massacre, with dead white men surrounding a wagon containing a caged and hissing chalk-white man with fangs. After a series of catastrophes, the so-called “Cat Man” escapes from his prison and Good Stab undergoes a traumatic metamorphosis.

Between Good Stab’s visits, mutilated and exsanguinated human bodies begin appearing outside Miles City, partially skinned in apparent imitation of the wasteful fashion of white hunters of buffalo. Arthur quickly draws a connection between the corpses and his unusual guest and begins to investigate. Over time he begins to suspect an ulterior motive underlying Good Stab’s visits.

As it makes clear surprisingly early on, this book is a vampire novel. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter shares some superficial elements with Anne Rice’s 1976 Interview with the Vampire, and fans of the latter are likely to enjoy Stephen Graham Jones’ novel. But it’s also simultaneously a compelling revenge tale that deals unflinchingly with the Native Americans’ genocide at the hands of white colonizers. Rage, guilt, and regret feature prominently, and Good Stab’s anguish is powerfully rendered. Jones is himself of Blackfeet heritage, and it felt like the historical setting gave the author license to write about his ancestors’ plight in a more unfiltered and immediate way than his works set in the modern day.

Literary weightiness aside, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a particularly original vampire story. The Old West setting is fresh, as is the fact that—in Jones’ world—vampires literally are what they eat. Vampires begin to take on characteristics of the creatures they habitually consume. Too much deer blood and stubby antlers begin to sprout, for example. The same principle extends to human prey; when Good Stab subsists on white victims, he grows to resemble them, gaining a pale skin tone and scraggly beard. If he is to maintain his original form, he’s forced to devour his own people. It could be argued that this is a metaphor for cultural assimilation: associate too much with the white man and Good Stab begins to become one, but isolating himself among his fellow Pikuni is likewise harmful and unsustainable in the long term.

Beyond this novel depiction of vampirism, the book also boasts an abundance of chilling moments. With unlimited time at their disposal, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter repeatedly demonstrates that a sufficiently patient and motivated vampire can concoct tortures of breathtaking malice. Fates literally worse than death.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter benefits from the strong and distinct voices of its two primary narrators, Good Stab and Arthur Beaucarne. Both are unreliable narrators in their own way. Good Stab is fond of using colorfully literal translations of his people’s words for animals (big mouth, blackhorn, real-bear, prairie-runner, etc.), but he occasionally slips and betrays a more fluent command of American English than the disarming Indian stereotype he playacts as. Arthur, on the other hand, reveals a tendency to dance around sensitive topics, to avoid examining or grappling with the uncomfortable until it’s too late.

Unfortunately, the robust characterization on display with Good Stab and Arthur ends up making the novel’s primary flaw more visible. When the Beaucarne Manuscript concludes, the narrative returns to the present day, with Etsy left to deal with her great-great-grandfather’s disturbing legacy. But because readers have spent so little time with Etsy, she feels much less satisfying as a viewpoint character. Good Stab and Arthur’s words are given heft by a lightly archaic style and the weight of history, while Etsy is just a modern gal with modern job frustrations and a cute cat. Relatable, but underequipped for the task of carrying such a heavy story’s ending. Perhaps this issue could have been ameliorated by having Etsy resurface periodically during the middle portion of the book to share her reactions and own investigative footwork, rather than showing up for a few brief pages in the beginning and then reappearing only to shoulder the last tenth of the book. The violence depicted in the finale also felt tonally different than what readers had been presented with previously. Less gritty, more gonzo.

Despite the comparatively weak finish, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter remains the most original and exciting vampire novel in years. Stephen Graham Jones has released many strong books in a short span of time, but this one is particularly passionate and multidimensional. While I suspect Jones’ best work is still ahead of him, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter stands out even among an already robust catalog of work.

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on November 6, 2012.

The Collected Fiction, Vol. 2: The House on the Borderland and Other Works

By William Hope Hodgson – Night Shade Books – October 10, 2002

Review by Robin Marx

This second volume in Night Shade Books' excellent Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson contains The House on the Borderland, all of the “Carnacki, the Ghost Finder” tales, and some miscellaneous short stories. While the book begins on a very strong note, it loses steam towards the end

While I prefer The Night Land and The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', The House on the Borderland is an incredibly atmospheric work of weird horror. It chronicles the bizarre events experienced by a so-called “Recluse” living in an isolated home in Ireland. While there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason behind the supernatural incidents he experiences, they remain engrossing and filled with tension. Hodgson must have had a fear of pigs, as the “swine-things” that terrorize the Recluse are very effectively (and disturbingly!) rendered.

The “Carnacki, the Ghost Finder” stories are a much more conventional form of horror, but still fascinating. They take the form of what the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction editor John Clute calls a “club story.” Basically Carnacki, an Edwardian gentlemen, invites his (probably tweedy and pipe-smoking) friends over to his house to tell them of his encounters with ghosts and psychic phenomena. All of the stories share this framing device, but it didn't become monotonous.

The Carnacki stories were an interesting mix of traditional ghost stories with something closer to the type of otherworldly horror that Lovecraft would later popularize. While they're referred to as “ghosts”, these hauntings tend towards psychic phantasms and poltergeists more than conventional apparitions. Hodgson's terrifying swine make another welcome appearance in the delightfully creepy story “The Hog.” I liked that Hodgson mixed a few hoax stories in with the “authentic” haunts. Another reviewer said those stories had “Scooby Doo endings,” but I think that's a little too dismissive. The fakes were just as interesting as the supernatural stories

Unfortunately, the last portion of the book is fairly weak. The remaining stories don't have any particular theme to tie them together, and even the tales of the sea—Hodgson's specialty—included here are pretty unexceptional. The stories included in the first collected volume were all pretty great, perhaps some of those should have been reserved for this second book.

Weak conclusion aside, this book is still worthy of a place on weird fiction fans' bookshelves. Hopefully Night Shade Books will continue to champion overlooked classics like this.

★★★★☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Horror #CosmicHorror #CarnackiTheGhostFinder #TheHouseOnTheBorderland #WilliamHopeHodgson

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on July 4, 2012.

Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy

By Dennis Detwiller – Armitage House – March 1, 2004

Review by Robin Marx

This was an interesting book, but it has some issues. As a game tie-in it's not very friendly to newcomers, the main plot isn't as exciting as an early subplot, and it over-promises for such a slender volume. That being said, I enjoyed what Detwiller tried to accomplish, and both the beginning and ending were quite strong.

This book is for established fans only. This book is billed as “A Cthulhu Mythos Novel of World War II,” and familiarity with the work of H.P. Lovecraft (particularly his Mythos stories “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” and “The Shadow Out of Time”) are effectively required to comprehend this story. Some knowledge of the Delta Green campaign setting for the Lovecraft-inspired Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game is also advisable if you want to get the most enjoyment out of the story.

After a cryptic prologue about an aged military officer contemplating suicide, the story gets very interesting, very quick. We're introduced to a member of the Ahnenerbe, a (historical) Nazi organization dedicated to occult study. It soon becomes clear that he's been left disaffected and not a little mentally unstable by his studies, and that he's just biding his time until he can defect to the Allies and throw a monkey wrench in the Axis's literal scorched earth strategy. The narrative takes him to a coastal town in occupied France, where he becomes an unwilling bystander to the Ahnenerbe's efforts to broker an alliance with the Deep Ones, mutant fish-men introduced in Lovecraft's “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The close encounters with the Deep Ones are very creepy and obliquely written, Detwiller does an excellent job portraying the characters' sanity leach away through close proximity with the unknowable. Here we had unhinged (yet sympathetic) people committing atrocities to curry favor with disturbing allies; this was the peak of the book for me, it's a shame it came so early.

Unfortunately, the Deep Ones section of the book comes to an abrupt end as the books' true protagonists arrive on the scene: Delta Green, a subdivision of the OSS tasked to deal with supernatural threats. The story to follow is still fun—particularly if you enjoy Delta Green—but after such an atmospheric build-up it felt like a vaguely disappointing bait-and-switch. The story's true antagonists are somewhat undefined, and the primary plot twist towards the end seemed poorly foreshadowed, with baffling motivations.

In the end, the story ends up being a Call of Cthulhu story set during World War II, rather than a “Cthulhu Mythos novel of World War II”. There are two slight distinctions here. One is that readers hoping for an grand reveal of the occult side of World War II will be disappointed; this book is nowhere near that epic in scope. The second distinction is that—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the origins of the Delta Green property—Denied to the Enemy leans more towards the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game's interpretation of the Cthulhu Mythos than Lovecraft. I counted about five different creature types appearing over the course of the story, while most literary Mythos authors tend to limit themselves to one or two. While monster-spotting is sort of fun for RPG fans, some of the cameos were a little gratuitous, like attempts at fan service. (Don't have the Tcho-Tchos show up if you're not going to do anything with them!)

If you're already a Delta Green fan, by all means give this book a shot. But if you're not, this book won't turn you into one.

★★★☆☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Horror #CosmicHorror #CthulhuMythos #HPLovecraft #DeltaGreen #DeniedToTheEnemy #DennisDetwiller

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on January 4, 2018.

The Collected Fiction, Vol. 3: The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea

By William Hope Hodgson – Night Shade Books – August 1, 2005

Review by Robin Marx

The third entry in Night Shade Books' series of superb William Hope Hodgson collections, this installment collects his novel The Ghost Pirates and 28 other sea-based stories. The stories are a mix of weird tales, mysteries, slice of life tales, and pulpy adventures.

The Ghost Pirates

As with his other ship-bound novel The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', Hodgson makes excellent use of his experience as a sailor, serving up an atmospheric ghost story. Apart from the nautical theme, however, The Ghost Pirates is a very different novel from The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', and in some ways an inferior one.

The highlights of this book are without a doubt the dialogue and the atmosphere. The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' lacked any spoken dialogue, so its inclusion here is a nice change. The jargon-sprinkled sea salt conversations are at times hard to follow, but they feel authentic and flavorful. Some reviewers bemoan the lack of a glossary of nautical terms—Hodgson doesn't go to any effort to explain capstans and binnacles to the reader—but I didn't feel as if missing out on a word here or there impacted my enjoyment of the overall story.

While the plot itself is quite sleight (a characteristic shared by all of the Hodgson novels I've read to date), its execution is well done. Hodgson was a master of atmosphere, setting up a number of strange occurrences that gradually build into a tense, unnerving scenario.

I enjoyed The Ghost Pirates, but I think I would've liked it better had I read it before The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', rather than afterward. 'Glen Carrig' is filled with such bizarre fever dream imagery that the spirits of the dead, however spooky, seem rather conventional by comparison. That being said, The Ghost Pirates is an interesting traditional ghost story, and well told.

... and Other Revenants of the Sea

Making up the bulk of the book, the short stories that follow The Ghost Pirates are, inevitably, a mixed bag in terms of quality, but as a Hodgson enthusiast I appreciated the inclusion of even the lesser works (the posthumously published “Old Golly,” or “We murdered a black sailor because he was black and maybe he's haunting us now?”). The best of the stories are quite good, and the vast majority of them are at least interesting.

Fans of Hodgson's supernatural fiction will find a lot to like here. There are sea serpents, a were-shark, derelict ships overrun with carnivorous fungi and other bizarre horrors, fish men, even a ship made of stone.

The more conventional stories were also fascinating, however. “The Sharks of the St. Elmo” is a particularly tense story about a becalmed ship surrounded by thousands of thrashing sharks as far as the eye can see. The narrator finds himself pushed into a leadership role as the captain and First Mate drink themselves senseless and the crew begin searching about for a “Jonah,” a cursed shipmate who must be disposed of lest he damn the rest of the men. Jonahs are a recurring topic in many of the included stories.

Shipboard bullying is another recurring theme in this collection of stories. I suspect it's telling that, despite his prior career as a sailor, Hodgson refused a position in the Royal Navy when he enlisted in the first World War. Some of the brawlers featured here are presented in a favorable light (e.g., the eponymous “Jack Grey, Second Mate” is a badass who would be at home in a Robert E. Howard yarn), but most of the time they're vicious, drunk foes to be bested by the protagonists. “We Two and Bully Dunkan” is a clever shipboard heist in which two sailors get their revenge against their tormentors. Like a Boys' Life Magazine story gone horribly wrong, “The 'Prentices' Mutiny” is a harrowing tale of a ship's youngest crew members under siege by bullying shipmates turned murderous.

While I consider The Ghost Pirates to be the weakest of Hodgson's novels, it's still a worthwhile read, and the more than two dozen nautical stories that accompany it make this volume a particularly appealing package.

★★★★☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Horror #NauticalFiction #TheGhostPirates #WilliamHopeHodgson

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on July 3, 2022.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth

By Cassandra Khaw – Tor Nightfire – October 19, 2021

Review by Robin Marx

Hilarity ensues when five deeply unlikeable characters who barely tolerate each other spend the night in a haunted Japanese mansion.

While the prose had its moments, the characters and story were deeply disappointing. I don’t require books to have an appealing viewpoint character, but everyone presented here is obnoxious and tedious, with only thinly veiled contempt for each other. Animosity within a group can work in a longer piece of fiction, where there’s more time to explore both the ties that keep people together and not just the things that irk them about each other (Adam Nevill’s The Ritual), but there’s no room for that in this brief story, and the characters are at each other’s throats even before anything supernatural occurs. Irritating characters that the audience enjoy watching get killed off is a common horror movie trope, but there’s usually at least one appealing character to root for. This story has ZERO, and the body count is also lamentably low.

The Japanese setting details also had issues. The characters stay in a neglected mansion from the Heian period (c. 794-1185), but less than two dozen buildings remain from this era, most of them temples or shrines, and certainly none of them could be described as abandoned. Japan’s climate and seismic activity is unkind to old architecture.

The characters also come across a book with a ritual to solve their problems, but rather than be in the form of a period-appropriate scroll (written in ancient text that nobody but a specialist scholar would be able to read, anyway), it’s a leather-bound vellum book. There are other apparent missteps, and that’s even after ignoring odd details that could possibly have a spooky supernatural rationale.

The author also name-drops several yōkai (spirits/monsters) without elaborating on them for the audience. I speak Japanese and am familiar with the folklore, but this felt a bit ostentatious, like the author was showing off her research. But given the various false notes in the Japan-centric details, I wasn’t much impressed.

I love horror stories and Japan, so I had high hopes for this book. Not only was I crushed by the actual story, I am mystified as to how this had the full marketing might of TOR behind it. How many novellas get a hardcover release and a $20 cover price? The acknowledgements mention support and encouragement from Ellen Datlow, who is an editor that can usually be counted on to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Avoid this one, folks.

★☆☆☆☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Horror #Japan #NothingButBlackenedTeeth #CassandraKhaw

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on August 28, 2012.

The Collected Fiction, Vol. 1: The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” and Other Nautical Adventures

By William Hope Hodgson – Night Shade Books – August 1, 2005

Review by Robin Marx

While I missed out on the gorgeous Night Shade Books print volumes, the e-book edition is a worthy substitute for those unwilling to pay the high secondhand market prices.

This first volume includes the novel The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', followed by a host of short stories broken into the following thematically-related sections: the Sargasso Sea Stories, the Exploits of Captain Gault, the Adventures of Captain Jat, and the Stories of Cargunka.

The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' is a rather gripping survival horror story that follows the crew of a pair of lifeboats, sailors adrift after the sinking of the titular 'Glen Carrig.' Hodgson wastes no time getting into the action; the shipwreck itself is covered in basically a single perfunctory paragraph, and events start getting strange and deadly very quickly.

The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' is similar to his other novels, The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, in that they're basically a linear narrative following the protagonist through a number of bizarre episodes. They read more like travelogues than carefully plotted novels, but the events are interesting enough that this isn't much of a complaint.

The story is written in an intentionally archaic style, with no quoted dialogue and few named characters, but it's fast-paced and packed with engrossing imagery. Stylistically it's a much more approachable read than The Night Land, which—while challenging—I also enjoyed considerably.

The Sargasso Sea stories share a very similar tone with The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig'. From the “Tideless Sea Part 1” and “Tideless Sea Part 2: More News from the Homebird” are genuinely chilling. They're desolate and unnerving, like the very best of Hodgson's work. Unfortunately, the rest of the Sargasso Sea stories aren't quite as stellar, with Hodgson recycling basically the same core premise (a ship encounters a strangely-fortified derelict craft enmeshed in Sargasso weeds, and terror ensues).

While vastly different in tone from his supernatural fiction, the Captain Gault stories were an unexpected highlight in this volume. Captain Gault is a smuggler, and these humorous tales are all “howdunit” mysteries about him sneaking contraband past customs. Read consecutively (rather than periodically encountered in anthology magazines as they would have been originally), the formula they follow becomes a little apparent, but they're clever, punchy, and offer enough diversity to keep the reader engaged.

The Adventures of Captain Jat were intriguing, if perhaps not fully realized. There are only two stories in the cycle—perhaps a poor reception led to Hodgson abandoning the character—but both are interesting. Jat is an alcoholic, abusive sea captain with a taste for women and treasure, and the exquisitely named Pibby Tawles is his put-upon cabin boy and the only companion he trusts on his gold-seeking adventures. Though almost entirely unlikeable, Hodgson adds an interesting twist to the character of Jat by showing him act gruffly tender towards his young accomplice at surprising moments. Pibby, too, isn't simply a victim. He's equipped with a fair amount of sneaky cunning, often profiting at his master's expense. The dynamic between the characters is interesting and the stories themselves are fun supernaturally-tinged adventure. It reminds me a bit of Indiana Jones, if Indy was a boozer that beat on Short Round. It's unfortunate Hodgson didn't write any more stories featuring these two.

The two Stories of Cargunka are probably the weakest in the volume. D.C.O. Cargunka is a wealthy pub-owner that purchases ships and accompanies them on profit-seeking expeditions. While self-aggrandizing romanticist Cargunka himself is a fun character, the stories seemed overlong and plots weren't quite as appealing as the Gault or Jat stories. “The Bells of the Laughing Sally” has some nice ghostly moments, but except for some humorous dialogue, “The Adventure With the Claim Jumpers” is a mostly forgettable heist yarn.

While there are a few limp stories (inevitable in a collection of this size), Hodgson nevertheless maintained an incredibly high standard of quality throughout his brief but prolific career. I maintain that he's one of the more underrated figures in early 20th century horror fiction, and this collection also reveals how adept he was in other genres as well. Wholeheartedly recommended.

★★★★★

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Horror #CosmicHorror #NauticalFiction #TheBoatsOfTheGlenCarrig #WilliamHopeHodgson

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on October 24, 2020.

The Troop

By Nick Cutter – Gallery Books – February 25, 2014

Review by Robin Marx

Nick Cutter cites Stephen King’s Carrie as an influence, but this book felt closer to King’s Thinner mixed with The Lord of the Flies.

The story centers on five 14-year-old scouts and their scoutmaster on a camping trip on a small island off Canada’s Atlantic coast. Their excursion is interrupted by the sudden arrival of an emaciated and insatiably ravenous man who turns out to be an escaped test subject from some extremely unethical human trials. Hilarity ensues.

This book is one of the most intense horror novels I’ve read in years. Characters are well rendered, few in number, and their situation desperate. It has some of the most squirm-inducing descriptions of violence and self-mutilation since the 80s Splatterpunk movement. This novel is not for the squeamish, but I found it to be an incredibly compelling page-turner.

This probably isn’t suitable for casual horror fans—people who stick with King and Koontz and think gross-out horror is a crutch for authors who can’t create an atmosphere of terror—but if you’re comfortable with the deeper end of the pool this book is a hell of a ride.

★★★★☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Horror #TheTroop #NickCutter

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on April 17, 2019.

The Ritual

By Adam Nevill – Pan Publishing – May 28, 2011

Review by Robin Marx

The Ritual tells the story of four friends from college who have attempted to revive their camaraderie via a camping trip in the Swedish wilderness. They overestimate their stamina, however, and when two of their number are hobbled by injuries, they elect to take a “shortcut” back towards town through an ancient forest. They soon encounter strange noises and disturbing relics, and realize they are being stalked by something powerful and stealthy, capable of eviscerating a grown man and flinging him up into the tree branches.

I greatly enjoyed the 2017 movie adaptation of The Ritual, but wished that more had been revealed, and that the finale had been less rushed. I picked up the novel hoping for more of what I enjoyed in the movie, and this book certainly delivered.

Despite the surprisingly fast pace of the book, a great deal of attention is paid to establishing an oppressive, ominous atmosphere. The reader is made to feel a great deal of empathy for the exhausted and injured hikers lost in the primeval Nordic wood. Tempers flare and nerves fray as the gravity of their situation becomes clear.

While much of the film is a close adaptation of the book, the two works diverge considerably when the protagonist encounters the local residents of the wilderness. The movie plays it safe with a fairly conventional evil cult, while the book heads in a much more interesting and original direction. (To me, anyway; apparently it's somewhat controversial to some other readers.)

Despite its bleakness, I was unable to put this book down. It was a horror novel of a grueling kind not often seen. The protagonist is pushed to extremes, suffering a laundry list of injuries coupled with incredible mental strain. His struggle and slipping sanity are incredibly effectively rendered on the page, resulting in the most engaging horror novel I've read in a number of years.

★★★★☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Horror #FolkHorror #TheRitual #AdamNevill #AdamLGNevill

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on August 27, 2019.

The Book of Cthulhu

Edited by Ross E. Lockhart – Night Shade Books – September 1, 2011

Review by Robin Marx

This is an uncommonly strong anthology of recent(ish) Cthulhu Mythos stories. Anthologies of this nature often fall prey to Lovecraft pastiche, but for the most part the stories here offer fresh and imaginative takes on the source material and span a wide variety of time periods.

While the average quality is high, a number of stories stand out in particular. Although I had read it before, “A Colder War” by Charles Stross remains a masterful melding of Cold War paranoia with the Mythos. “The Men from Porlock” by Laird Barron and “The Crawling Sky” by Joe R. Lansdale are particularly creepy and effective tales of rural folk encountering the otherworldly. “Fat Face” by Michael Shea offers a fun update of a classic Lovecraftian creature.

Lovecraft has attracted a great deal of negative attention in recent years for his vehement racism, to the extent that some argue that he should be excluded from the horror/science fiction canon. I think that would be a terrible shame, however, as a number of writers have combined Lovecraftian inspiration with more palatable views on race. “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear and “Jeroboam Henley’s Debt” by Charles Saunders are both very Lovecraftian stories that benefit greatly by centering race and starring black protagonists. Outside of this anthology, a number of other recent stories and novels have worked with a Lovecraftian foundation while dealing with race-related issues to good effect.

Overall, this is an easy book to recommend to Lovecraft fans curious about recent Mythos-related fiction.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on November 6, 2013.

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

By Laird Barron – Night Shade Books – April 2, 2013

Review by Robin Marx

The best stories in this collection could be labeled “rustic horror.” Many of them take place in the Pacific Northwest, in the deepest forests and shadowy valleys. The protagonists are often rough and tumble men who are nevertheless set on edge by a variety of creepy occurrences. Imagine Jack London writing spooky stories and you'd be on the right track.

While the rustic horror stories are great, the ones set in more modern and more urban locales were much less engaging. These stories tended to be longer and also more obscure (probably with the intent of creating a phantasmagorical atmosphere), which made matters worse.

One thing I found interesting was the use of Old Scratch himself, the Devil, as the prime supernatural threat in many of the tales. While this might seem cliched to some, I actually found it delightfully retro, reminding me of the “Satanic Panic” stories from the 70s and 80s. There's some Lovecraft homage in here too, but more an appreciative acknowledgement than slavish devotion.

While I didn't love every story in this volume, I came away with a strong interest in Laird Barron's work. Recommended for horror fans, especially those who enjoy the classics of the genre and rural settings.

★★★☆☆

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