BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Alchemist (1908) The Cats of Ulthar (1920) H P Lovecraft Cthulhu's Reign (2010) Editor, Darrell Schweitzer The Lovecraft Anthology: Volume I (2011) Editor, Dan Lockwood   The Black Wings of Cthulhu (2012) Editor: S. T Joshi   I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H P  Lovecraft (2013 Edition) S T Joshi At some stage, we should review all of Lovecraft's stories but we mention two only to start the ball rolling, the first only to dispose of it as juvenilia. The Alchemist must be regarded as o ne of Lovecraft's weakest stories but then he was only 17 or 18 and it was his first. The basic story line is fairly trite (which we will not repeat for the sake of spoilers although it is barely worth the effort). However, Lovecraft is good at absorbing Gothick memes and replaying them effectively. In other words the story is worth reading for its 'atmosphere' as an antiquarian throw-back to the world of 'The Castle of Otranto' or of Ann Radcliffe over a cen

Skizz (1983) [ with Jim Baikie ]     Captain Britain Omnibus (1985-1987) [ Various Contributors, notably Dave Thorpe, Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison ]     Lost Girls (2006) [ with Melinda Gebbie ]     The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [ with Kevin O'Neill ]        Black Dossier (2007 ) [ also with Ray Zone ]        Century 1910 (2009)      Century 1969 (2011)     Neonomicon (2010) [ with Anthony Johnston and Jacen Burrow s]     Fashion Beast (2013 originally from a 1985 film script) [ with Anthony Johnston and Facundo Percio ]   Skizz , first published in 1983 for British comic series 2000AD (originator of Judge Dredd and many other iconic comic figures), is a rather heart-warming tale. Yet the tale is told without losing an ounce of the dystopianism for which the British are so well known. Set on the Planet Burmy-Gam, it helps to read the text in a Brummy accent to get a real feel for it. Alan Moore is very good with linguistic clues – his brutal and unhinged

Nethescurial/The Mystics of Muelenberg from Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) Teatro Grottesco (2006) The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (2011) This review is essentially about the later Ligotti of the current century. We hope to return to the earlier Ligotti in a later review but we can set the scene with just two stories from his second major collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991). Nethescurial , for example, appears to be a very obvious homage to Lovecraft almost to the point of pastiche in terms of structure and mood although it is clearly very much a Ligotti production. It is as if Ligotti decided to see how he could take as many Lovecraftian tropes about ancient cultic lore and the dark occult, refine them to their basics and come up with a definitive layered narrative oozing unease rather than outright horror. Ligotti is at his best not in trying to present something visceral, disgusting or terrible but in presenting som

The Mask of Cthulhu (1939-1957 coll. 1958)  The Trail of Cthulhu (1944-1951) August Derleth.   The Taint and Other Novellas (1971-1983 coll. 2008)   Necroscope (1986) Necroscope II: Vamphyri (1988) Brian Lumley August Derleth saw himself as H.P. Lovecraft's natural heir, weaving his stories into the Cthulhu Mythos and incorporating the 'dreadful events in Innsmouth' and other incidents from the original corpus. He will suggest, in a fit of in-joke paranoia, that Lovecraft and others died young because they knew too much - a nice little conceit. He has been much and rightly criticised on two grounds - for being derivative (and even thieving and manipulating Lovecraft's unpublished drafts for his own purposes) but, more seriously, for attenuating the raw cosmic horror of the original (as if he had failed to understand its essential bleakness). Both accusations have merit. He constructed a mythological fantasy of good and evil much closer to religious tradition a