Customer Reviews

Delta Green: Alien Intelligence

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Note: mild spoilers are included.

Not to keep anyone in suspense (not that anyone was in suspense), I really liked this story collection. It may be hard to come by so if you really want this title (and you should!) just be diligent.

One overall impression: this was a relatively new genre, outside of RPG for the DG crew. I found The Rules of Engagement and the first few stories of Dark Theaters to be superior. I have not read the original source book but it did not lessen my enjoyment of the stories.

John Tynes - The Dark Above: There were certain things
about this story I thought were too over the top, particularly the lead man going ballistic when he smelled a fish-like odor from a woman. Also I don't know if Forrest was a character from the source book, because you just had to accept his hardened attitude toward the deep ones half breeds. What I mean was this emotional aspect of character development wasn't as well realized as the rest of the story. Too bad, because the actual substance of the story and its imagery were terrific.

Dennis Detwiller - Drowning in Sand”: A great read!

Ray Winniger - Pnomus: Another great read!! Both of these stories epitomize the best of modern, creative mythos fiction.

Bruce Baugh - Climbing the South Mountain: An OK conventional brain robbing mythos type story in poem form. I'm not
too into mythos poetry. The very end of the narrators's poem and the memo from Delta Green were the best parts for me.

Greg Stolze - Potential Recruit: Yet another great read, this time about trying to infiltrate cult with darker connections than suspected.

Adam Scott Glancy - An Item of Mutual Interest: Perhaps
the most coventional type mythos story in the book. Enjoyable but nothing special.

Bob Kruger - Identity Crisis: Did not knock my socks off. Maybe it tried to cover a little too much ground and would have
worked better as a short novel. Still a very agreeable read.

Blair Reynolds - Operation Looking Glass: A fast paced roller coaster ride to ice the cake of this nifty anthology.

My complaints are perhaps too cantankerous. This collections beats out any of the Chaosium collections (except maybe The Hastur Cycle) for consistent overall quality. Those anthologies have too much chaff with the wheat. It tops most of the Fedogan and Bremer collections too (except Cthulhu 2000, the first place I saw Black Man With A Horn).

Essential reading for the modern Cthulhu mythos reader.

Rather than espouse about the concept of the 1990s Cthulhu Mythos 'Delta Green' world, let me cut to the chase. This is an excellent book, filled with the writing that Mythos fans have come to expect from Tynes, Stolze, and Dettweiler. Each story comes from a distinctly different persepctive in the morass of horror that is the Mythos, from a Nazi's attempt to harness the power of the Elder Ones to the tale of a Delta Green operation gone terribly wrong in wartime Indochina to the decent into Lovecraft's Dreamlands. I have not enjoyed a good horror yarn like this since Shadow over Innsmouth.

Cthulhu comes of age. Ignore the fact that this book is linked to an RPG - it doesn't matter. It contains some of the best Lovecraftian short stories of the last fifty years. The mythos is brought up to date with punchy, well-crafted modern short stories and all the tension and atmosphere you could hope for. The stories by John Tynes, Bob Kruger and Greg Stolze are a particular pleasure. I cannot recommend this book highly enough - it's up there with Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer as a vital read for any fan of wierd horror.

There is a good deal to recommend this book. It is for the most part well-written, and the idea behind the book is outstanding. However I have quite a few problems with it. The opening tale by John Tynes is somewhat too short to overcome by backstory and characterization a rather ugly incident that takes place within it, equating experience with the Deep Ones to a version of combat syndrome, and that taints the rest of the book. Other tales fare somewhat better, and have some very thought-provoking concepts, adding a bit of science fiction to the world of the Mythos. One can become a ghoul, for instance, by reading a certain book, and a certain Great Old One can tear holes in the spacetime continuum in order to attract males for her followers (kind of silly, but effective within the tale). On the whole, I liked it, but for me that is the crux of the biscuit-I wanted to love it, and did not. Fell far short of the expectations that were engendered in me by the blurbs on the back cover and the front cover recommendation from Lucius Shepard. Can't give it a thumbs-up, but worth looking at if you have the money. Slim for the price.

A stunning collection of short stories drawing upon the Mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft and updated for the 90's and beyond. The stories are all tight, the characters complex and the horror is writ large on a personal scale and on a scale beyond human comprehension. Highly enjoyable!!

Well, there goes Pagan Publishing again. Delta Green is their 90's campaign add-on for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, and "Delta Green: Alien Intelligence" is a collection of short stories, a poem and a novella based on it.

In short, they are all amazing and imaginative stories that expand the Cthulhu Mythos, and thankfully never go into the "there is hope after all" theme that August Derleth had on his stories. A worthy read, all in all.

I really enjoyed reading this book. As with any collection of short stories, I liked some more than others, but there were none in here that I didn't like. There were a couple that I consider to be real gems. My only real complaint is that it's not much book for 12 bucks. It's about half an inch thick, with eight stories in it. I guess maybe it's priced higher than most paperback books because of the cost involved for a small company to have smaller quantities of a book like this printed, but I must admit I was a bit disappointed with it in this respect.

DELTA GREEN is the modern adaptation of Call of Cthulhu. Drawing on the same body of UFO lore and paranormal activity as the X-Files, DELTA GREEN has tapped into something very deep. And of course, once you have a successful RPG, you might as well start the fiction flowing, right?

"Alien Intelligence" is a collection of vigniettes that explores the world that DELTA GREEN inhabits and adds further detail to many hints, clues, and allusions from the DELTA GREEN RPG book. It gives more substance to the conspiracy of silence by our goverment on the supernatural, extraterrestrial, and subterrestrial.

Some situations explored by the authors are a resurgence in the colonization of humanity by aquatic beings who seem almost human, a review board examining a failed mission to stop a dimensional disturbance in South America, a sojourn into a spirit-realm by two ghouls, alternately trying to save or damn the soul of an unwitting agent, the last testament of a man who has spent his life trying to decode a message in alien technology and intends to use that message to escape from his captors, among other stories that will give you an idea of the psychological torment that must wrack these defenders of humanity.

Because the monsters, magic, and aliens are just a backdrop; the story is about men and women who become something they don't want to in order to protect those that they love. Who lose thir humanity to protect it in others. Who were just following orders until they realized it was what they wanted all along. Because when you take away the monsters, all that remains is a mirror, and you see yourself.

Yet they are not monsters. They are aliens and they once ruled the Earth. Well, some of them did. Some of them are as scared of what is out there as we are. And that's telling you something!
Delta Green, brought to life after the 1928 raid on the town of Innsmouth Massachusetts is like the X-Files. But with bigger guns. For example, Innsmouth no longer exists. Just check a map. Also, to be a nick-picker Green Delta was around before the X-Files.
The stories in this book are, mostly, great links to Lovecraft's wonderful creations, placed in a more modern setting. Unlike the Lovecraft stories, Delta Green is more centered around teams or groups fighting the horror behind the darkness. So instead of one white male going nuts, we get whole groups of mixed nuts. With guns, bombs, and government backing. Sometimes.
I would suggest grabbing it right away but for one thing. The prices. Try to get it in a used book store or flea market.