Customer Reviews

Dark Wisdom

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dark Wisdom is a single author collection of stories by Gary Myers, newly published by Mythos Books. I very much liked the stories and thus recommend the book, but I have one very great reservation that I will explain a bit later. I don't know much about Gary Myers except that he was born in 1952. He actually has a small entry on Wikipedia where it lists this fact and says that his occupation is short story writer. Not to be too presumptuous, but he must have another day job because his output has not exactly been prolific. He wrote The House of the Worm, a collection of short stories set in Lovecraft's (and others', especially the author's!) Dreamlands, published by Arkham House in 1975. I have a copy of this slim volume but have never read it (all right, I just picked it up a few months ago and it's still in my to-be-read stack along with a huge mound of other books). This is his first book since then. Maybe he has been more active in other genres? Since 1975 he has had a few stories crop up in magazines and anthologies devoted to Lovecraftian tales. Dark Wisdom lists for $15.00 but is discounted to $10.20. It is a good quality trade paperback, up the usual standards of Mythos Books (who really, really need to make their website more user friendly, particularly for fans who want to search out upcoming titles). Here is my major gripe and one which may give some readers pause before buying this book. It is only 120 pages of text. Pugmire's The Fungal Stain from Hippocampus Press for the same price was about 160 pages. Arkham Tales and Hardboiled Cthulhu were listed at about $15, and were > 200 pages. Regardless of the quality of the prose (and this was high quality prose), this slender book is not a particularly good bargain. I listen to classical music and if there is < 60 minutes of music on a CD I have great qualms about buying it for full price. Editing was tight; I noted no typographical errors. Mr. Myers provided the cover art which shows a reddish cephalopod eye moodily staring at the reader. He also was the artist for the interior art, which was evocative and effective, adding to my enjoyment of the book. The introduction by Robert Price was useful for putting Mr. Myers' work into context. My second (and only other) gripe about the book has to do with issue of copyright. On the back of the book it says these are new stories. Copyright for all stories is listed as 2007. But I know for a fact that some of these stories have been printed before. In last year's The Tsathoggua Cycle the story "Horror Show" appears with a copyright of 2002. This sent me scouring my collection of other mythos books where I found "The Web" copyright 2003 in The Disciples of Cthulhu II and "Understudy" copyright 1999 in Tales Out of Innsmouth. Not appearing in Dark Wisdom, I also found "The Snout in the Alcove" in The Nyarlathotep Cycle. Maybe someone in the know about the biz can explain to me what is going on. Furthermore, some of the other stories just seem darned familiar, as if I had read them somewhere. It would have been very nice for the publisher to actually list the publication history of Mr. Myers' stories to allow us to know how many of them would already duplications already present on our collections, and also to put them into context. I like to see how Lovecraftian authors develop their art. "Horror Show" is very skillfully written, the culmination of many years of practicing the writer's craft. I wonder when the earliest story dates from. This issue of questionable copyright lineage crops up every so often in Lovecraftian fiction. For example, "Eldritch Fells" by Tim Curran was originally published in an obscure book Hastur, Pussycat, Kill, Kill, rather than Hardboiled Cthulhu but this was not obvious from the latter book's title page.

Here are the contents:

"The Web"
"Slugs"
"Mother of Serpents"
"Fast Food"
"Understudy"
"The Big Picture"
"Omega"
"The Mask"
"What Rough Beast"
"The Nest"
"From Inner Egypt"
"Horror Show"

**************spoilers may follow so stop reading if it bothers you***********

Gary Myers has an accomplished hand at prose. Whatever churlish complaints I may have made so far, I was hugely entertained by everything I read. Character development, dialogue, descriptive prose, plot and Lovecraftian sensibility were all highly polished. I only wish Mr. Myers was more prolific, that the collection had another six or seven stories. It flitted by in a few too brief hours, leaving me hungry for more. In fact, in his introduction Price mentions that Myers has written (or is writing) new Dunsanian tales that will appear in forthcoming book, The Club of the Seven Dreamers. I'll be among the first in line to acquire that title and will also now rapidly turn my attention to The House of the Worm (although maybe I should read Lovecraft's Dreamland tales first...).

"The Web" shows what happens when an eldritch text is made available online to anyone, sort of like when The Dead Seas Scrolls were released. Maybe the information age is not such a good thing.

"Slugs" was a nifty conventional mythos story although keeping the beasties off screen certainly helped heighten the tension, as a petty thief steals something he shouldn't from it's location in the sewers.

"Mother of Serpents" was the only story where I had an issue with the prose, there being rather too many sentences beginning with conjunctions. Perhaps it was a stylistic affectation that was to suit the mood and period/locale feel of the piece? It was, however, a very good Yiggy yarn where a young couple has the misfortune to come into the ambit of an avatar of the father of serpents.

"Fast Food" was brilliant, maybe the gem of the book. A new hamburger joint opens across from the protagonist's workplace. They are pedaling perhaps more than food and he begins to get suspicious.

"Understudy" mingles the Deep Ones and the Creature of the Black Lagoon. No surprises but a very good story.

"The Big Picture" describes how a man begins to look beyond the veil of reality, after a chance encounter with a not so friendly stranger. Appearances can be deceiving and maybe we are better off thinking that we know what we're looking at.

"The Mask" was also a more conventional mythos tale where an eccentric recluse has brought back an unusual artifact from places far away and wants to show it to his young protégé.

"What Rough Beast" vies with "Fast Food" and "Horror Show" for pride of place in this collection. In this tour de force by Myers a traveling motorist tries to help a young pregnant girl escape from the clutches of a bizarre cult.

Myers offers a tip of his hat to Lovecraftian ghouls in the highly enjoyable "The Nest."

"From Inner Egypt" is Myers' take on Nephren-Ka, the evil necromancer first introduced to us in HPL's 1921 "The Outsider."

I really liked "Horror Show" when I read The Tsathoggua Cycle and it is still a great read. Terrific prose enlivens the story of a bored young lady who has a chance encounter at a goth night club that leads her to the ragged edge.

That wraps it up! In the end you have to make the call. The stories are all really good with at least three mini-masterpieces. And who knows when you will get another chance at Gary Myers' work. The down side is it will cost you a few bucks more than it should have to. So the five stars are because I really liked the stories but for some the small number of pages might lower the rating a star or two. I await other opinions with interest.

I was chiefly interested in Gary Myers' collection of Lovecraftian-inspired short stories because they all take place in a modern setting. I'm always looking for ideas for my Delta Green campaign and was curious to see how other authors updated the Cthulhu Mythos. This review contains spoilers!

There are two ways an author can modernize Lovecraftian horror. He can borrow elements from Lovecraft and incorporate them into his own work, thereby changing the setting but not the theme. Alternately, he can maintain the narrative style of Lovecraft and apply it to a modern tale. Most authors choose the first option, because it's easier; Lovecraft's archaic voice is difficult to emulate and even more difficult for modern readers to absorb. His protagonists narrate the horror tale after the fact, diminishing any sense of urgency. And the final twist is always blasted with great fanfare; italics, exclamation points, and all.

Myers vacillates between these two options with varying degrees of success. Unlike Lovecraft, he is fond of ending the tale at the moment the protagonist is about to discover his fate. He does mimic Lovecraft's narrative style in "The Nest," wherein a police officer shares in the first person his encounter with a ghoul. It's actually one of the best of the lot, and shows a glimmer of potential that isn't always recognized in the other stories.

In some cases, Myers is just content to create an eerie sense of weirdness. "The Web," in which two boys mess with a Necronomicon web site, plays out more like a bad eighties horror movie.

"Slugs," in which a thief finds a statue of Cthulhu in a sewer, begins what is something of a problem in Cthulhu-mythos authors: massive information downloads. Look, we're all fans of Lovecraft. But it is not necessary to mention every Mythos deity, explain who Cthulhu is, and otherwise lay out the plot like a Saturday morning cartoon. Part of Lovecraft's genius was being perfectly comfortable not explaining anything, and in these very short stories there's not a lot of room for exposition. A thief who just happens to run into a sewer and just happens to find a Cthulhu statue and just happens to be on the run from the police and just happens to know an antiques fence...the whole thing begins to sound like a Tales from the Darkside episode.

"Mother of Serpents" is an oddity as the tone is completely different from the rest of the stories. It's written in the stilted language of an older, more formal time. The ending isn't particularly scary and entirely predictable.

It's not until we get to "Fast Food" that Myers really knocks it out of the park. An office worker is sickened by the food at Belial's (yes, it's called Belial's, complete with a pitchfork logo on a matchbook), a burger joint. Customers obsess over the burgers, become grotesquely fat from gorging on them, and are then led herd-like into the restaurant at night. Despite the cheesy name of the restaurant, this is a clever take on an old Mythos beast...and no, it's not tcho-tchos. The imagery at the end stuck with me long afterward.

Connecting Deep Ones to the Creature of the Black Lagoon is the plot of the "Understudy," a mediocre entry. "The Big Picture" is much more Lovecraftian, about a man obsessed with stereograms (remember when those were popular?). This is a modern twist on a popular Lovecraftian notion of perception beyond space and time, but it's pretty standard fare. Similarly, "Omega" is more like a Lovecraftian tale, with a narrator who provides the big twist at the end. This is another massive Cthulhu Mythos dump that saps the story of its momentum.

"The Mask" is another great entry, expanding on the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign and the Mi-Go war. That's followed by "What Rough Beast," a hitchhiker tale that is both heartbreaking and terrifying.

"From Inner Egypt," like "Omega," provides too much detail and not enough freaky weirdness. Likewise, "Horror Show" ends without any real denouement.

For reasons known only to the publisher, someone allowed Myers to produce black-and-white artwork for this book. This was a mistake. The cover is perfectly evocative, but the interior art is a lesson in bad Photoshop. Two cloned pictures of a pixilated butcher standing in a hallway, meant to represent two cultists at Belial's, nearly ruins the story. As does the full-page picture on page 97 of...boxes. A story about Yig has a picture of a snake; a story about Tsathoggua has a picture of a toad. This book would have been better off without the art.

For modern Cthulhu fans, Myers has some entries worth reading. But the uneven nature of the tales and the terrible art detract from what could otherwise be a solid collection.

This is a tight little book of horror fiction -- a mix of strictly modern with eldrich stories with thick ribbon of Lovecraft laced throughout.

It is somewhat odd in that while it has Lovecraft's literary fingerprints all over it, and even a strong whiff of Dunsany, it is tightly written, clean prose. This is not the more elaborate, almost purple prose of the author's previous book, _The House of the Worm_, which has a heavier layer of what could more strictly be called Lovecraft's style.

That previous work reeked with the heaviest perfumes of Lovecraft, Dunsany, and not much else. Charming, but not the most accessible style.

This book has a lot of modernity mixed in with the Old Ones. In addition to a continuance of the Lovecraftian and Dunsanian influences, I detect very faint but definite notes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a soupcon of Twilight Zone. Apparently since the first book was written the author has moved a television into his dusty library of occult tomes. Not a bad thing if you pick your influences carefully.

One previous reviewer mentions that these stories are copyrighted 2007 even though some have appeared elsewhere. Having access to a few of the previous appearances, I can assure that reviewer that these are definitely rewritten, tightened versions, and so the current copyright is technically correct. These specific rewrites are new to this book.

If you like Cthulhu Mythos/Lovecraftian stories that are well-written, then this one is a must-have. Gary Meyers is among the very best.