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Lovecraft Unbound

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Earlier this week I finished Ellen Datlow's new horror-themed anthology, Lovecraft Unbound (2009), featuring 22 contemporary authors riffing on and personalizing familiar Lovecraft themes and settings: impending apocalypse and cosmic horror, Antarctic quests and ancient cities, isolation and loneliness. Given the subject matter, the tone of Datlow's collection could have easily detoured into overwhelming despair.

Lovecraft Unbound, however, is a very well rounded collection and offers a wide range of stories, from irredeemably bleak personal visions (Laird Barron's "Catch Hell") to comical pastiches. While the majority of the stories tend toward the serious, the likes of Richard Bowes, William Browning Spencer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Nick Mamatas bring much-needed levity to the proceedings, providing the collection with a nice tonal balance.

Who am I kidding, though? I like my horror fiction straight up -- dark, scary, and cold sober. Here are a few brief thoughts on such stories, my favorites of the collection.

* Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud team up for the book's auspicious opening, "The Crevasse," which takes place in Antarctica just after World War I. Told in prose pruned to perfection, the authors use Lovecraft's cosmic emptiness, as well as the barren setting, to amplify and parallel the protagonist's profound personal loss. Allow me this hyperbole: "The Crevasse" is Lovecraft by way of Raymond Carver.

* Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Houses Under the Sea" (2007; one of the book's four reprints), the best story in the collection, reinforces Kiernan's place on my list of favorite short story writers. (You disagree? Get thee to her masterful 2005 collection, To Charles Fort, With Love.) A 30-plus-page novella, "Houses Under the Sea" is a straight-up weird fiction masterpiece: arresting in story and adventurous in style, abounding with emotional and intellectual layers, and overflowing with indelibly creepy imagery. It's also a persuasive argument for the power of weird fiction. Quite simply, "Houses Under the Sea" is awesome, the kind of story that keeps me loyal to the genre.

* When I finished reading Laird Barron's novella "Catch Hell," my hands were shaking. Not only with fear induced by the story, but with admiration for Barron's adroit writing. With how he slowly unveiled his characters' identities, imbued the text with deeply personal pain and perversity, and manipulated this reader's expectations from page one -- even the title, seemingly generic, smartly sets up the story's mingling of pagan and Judeo-Christian horror themes. Certainly, Barron is one of the most erudite of horror writers, and "Catch Hell" proves he knows not only his Lovecraft but his Arthur Machen and Ira Levin as well. To this reader, Barron seems intent on producing only major stories, as if he's trying to redefine the horror genre one publication at a time. I think he's succeeding.

Because I can never resist an opportunity for a list, I'll conclude with my ten favorite stories from Lovecraft Unbound.

1) "Houses Under the Sea," Caitlin R. Kiernan (2007; reprint)
2) "Catch Hell," Laird Barron
3) "The Crevasse," Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud
4) "The Din of Celestial Birds," Brian Evenson (1997; reprint)
5) "Marya Nox," Gemma Files
6) "Come Lurk With Me and Be My Love," William Browning Spencer
7) "The Recruitor," Michael Shea
8) "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark," Michael Cisco
9) "Sight Unseen," Joel Lane
10) "Leng," Marc Laidlaw

Lovecraft Unbound is an anthology produced by Dark Horse Comics and edited by the respected Ellen Datlow. It is a large trade paperback with a generous 336 pages, and costs a reasonable $19.95. The cover is an appropriate if uninspiring photo of Lovecraft. Production qualities were good; I do not recall any typos. One thing I really liked was at the end of each story there was a brief biography of the author and a comment by them about how HPL influenced them or their story. This should be a model for other anthologies. In many ways Lovecraft Unbound is very important because it is the first anthology of Lovecraftian themed stories edited by a woman, at least that I know about. Ann K. Schwader and Denise Dumars have released single author collections with a fair number of Cthulhu mythos stories, and Caitlyn Kiernan has written novels with Lovecraftian themes and concepts. Back in 1997 Joyce Carol Oates edited a collection of Lovecraft tales for Harper. In spite of this, the Cthulhu mythos has, until recently, been a sort of old boys club. Lately, however, more and more women have taken up the pen and added their names to the ever widening Lovecraft circle. Elizabeth Bear just won the Hugo for "Shoggoths in Bloom." In particular, the Cthulhu Unbound series from Permuted Press had a significant number of women authors. I wonder if either editor knew the other was going to use Unbound in their title.

Certainly this book has gotten more hype online than other titles in this vein; I've even seen on the shelves of local bookstores. It's good but I don't know that it's any better than other mythos books I've read lately. The purpose of the editor in compiling this anthology was to allow the authors to take Lovecraft's contributions and influences, and see what they could create, rather than asking for a new bunch of Cthulhu mythos stories. In a way, it is similar to the 1998 Golden Gryphon anthology Eternal Lovecraft (a least the last third of that book), or perhaps the 2005 Horrors Beyond from Elder Signs Press. It is roughly contemporary with Cthulhu Unbound, although in that series the editors wanted the authors stretching the limits of the Cthulhu mythos (The difference between the Cthulhu mythos and something being Lovecraftian is addressed at length by ST Joshi in The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu mythos. You can think of it as the difference between the monsters being the message vs the place of humanity as a flyspeck in an indifferently hostile cosmos.). more important than any philosophical underpinnings, whether this anthology will be successful depends on the quality of the prose. I mostly liked it, although I had quite a bit of heartburn with it too. When you ask for a Lovecraftian tale, I guess you get what you get and don't throw a fit.

"The Crevasse" by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud - After WWI, a team of Antarctic explorers accidentally stumble across a crevasse in the ice. Maybe there is evidence of ancient alien life there, maybe not. Maybe they are just losing it. This was a pretty engaging tale.

"The Office of Doom" by Richard Bowes - In flashback we find that as a prank, a librarian ordered an interlibrary loan of the Necronomicon from Miskatonic University. Complications ensue that echo down the years. This wasn't bad prose but for me it committed a major faux pas. In a mythos story if you mention HPL wrote fiction, and then it turns out that fiction was real, I find this plot device to be a major turn off. It destroys the mood/world building. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

"Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour - Some scientists spread rumors that stealing petrified wood from a national park invokes an ancient curse, trying to warp reality by changing people's expectations. Good enough if not especially original concept, but I found the prose pretty flat.

"The Din of Celestial Birds" by Brian Evenson - A man in some unnamed mountain range comes across an abandoned hit and sees a cape of feathers inside a cage. After that his world starts to crumble (fly?) away. This was a well written story but it wasn't really what I think of as Lovecraftian except in a rather tangential way.

"The Tenderness of Jackals" by Amanda Downum - In this story a modern ghoul is on the hunt. It's not really a Lovecraftian ghoul. It's not really a Lovecraftian tale. Pretty good, but perhaps out of place, like some others here.

"Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane - A young man whose father went off the deep end years ago is required to go through his father's estate to see if there is anything worth keeping. He tries to come to grips with his father's madness and how it affected him. Well written if not my cup of tea. Also the alternate reality that possessed the father seems to have been mundane mental illness instead of anything mythosian.

OK, here I am over 100 pages into the book and I haven't really been blown away by anything yet. It's all just OK.

"Cold Water Survival" by Holly Phillips - And now we get a brilliant tale, also set in Antarctica, as some young people make their home on a melting iceberg and seem to see alien shapes inside the ice. This was wonderful.

"Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" by William Browning Spencer - Another absolute gem! A young man falls for the charm of a cultist's daughter only to find the cult is the truth. Superbly written and with a nice leavening of humor.

"Houses Under the Sea" by Caitlín R. Kiernan - Goodness me, but Caitlin Kiernan can write. This is a masterpiece, perhaps the jewel of this book. The lover of the leader of a cult tries to sort out what happened after a mass suicide.

"Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" by Michael Cisco - Michael Cisco is another outstanding author. This story uses certain Lovecraftian styles and plot devices without really being Lovecraftian per se. A young woman is lured to her doom by her incomprehensible friend.

"Leng" by Marc Laidlaw - This is a terrific story about a mycologist trying to reach the plateau of Leng, to see if there are any new species of fungus there, at the same time trying to find out what became of a previous expedition. Wonderful stuff with a great ending.

"In the Black Mill" by Michael Chabon - This is the only story in the anthology I have read previously, but heck if I can remember where. HPL names abound here, for example Yuggogheny Hills and Carlotta Brown-Jenkin. Apart from these in jokes, this is a great story of a secret society controlling a small town in the service of an ancient evil.

"One Day, Soon" by Lavie Tidhar - In this pretty good story a man loses himself inside time, inside a book.

"Commencement" by Joyce Carol Oates - Although Ms. Oates is perhaps the most famous author in the book, this story didn't do much for me. As part of a celebration of graduation at an unnamed university, there is a ritual much like Tlacaxipehualiztli. The anonymity of it all weakens the story. It was also predictable.

"Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth - OK, a decent story about what desperation can lead a man in love to do, but not Lovecraftian or mythos in any sense.

"The Recruiter" by Michael Shea - Good, in the same way all of Mr. Shea's stories are well written, but this is not my favorite of his work. An elderly man is swept up by an entity he doesn't understand.

"Marya Nox" by Gemma Files - What a nifty little story! A temple consecrated to Our Lady of Night is violated, and everyone pays the consequences.

"Mongoose" by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear - This is a space opera short story and actually is about transdimensional rifts and the Hounds of Tindalos. It is pretty darned good.

"Catch Hell" by Laird Barron - I just recently read The Imago Sequence and have become a huge fan of Laird Barron. This is a wonderful story, more about the other, the fantastic, and how it can affect damaged people. Not really mythosian but has a Lovecraftian feel in the same sense as The Wicker Man (not the remake, the novel or the first movie).

"That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas - This is a post mythos apocalyptic piece, and is a good, if brief, story.

So what is my bottom line? I'm not sure! I was hoping for much more than I got, but maybe I'm just greedy. Some of these stories are as good as any Lovecraftian tales I have read, for example the ones by Kiernan, Spencer and Phillips. Most were well written and highly effective, but a few were more tedious. All such anthologies are a mixed bag, I guess. I think general horror fans would like it and there is much here to please the dedicated Lovecraftian. However, for me the best modern Cthulhu mythos or Lovecraftian anthology remains Dead But Dreaming.

H. P. Lovecraft's work stands as foundational for generations of writers. His continued influence is everywhere: in movies, television, and role-paying games. Search "Lovecraft" on Google or Amazon and be bombarded by free homage websites and numerous collections of his tales, as well as collections featuring contemporary stories inspired by his legacy.

"Lovecraft Unbound", edited by Ellen Datlow, stands above them all. In a collection boasting the quality one has come to expect from a Datlow-anthology, twenty-two of today's best writers present their visions of Lovecraft, managing to invoke a timeless, nameless dread in new, fresh ways. There's no "weak" story in this collection, but some of the most memorable are:

"The Crevasse", by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, in which a doomed expeditionary team discovers something ominous and unearthly deep beneath the icy Antarctic wastes. "Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour is a tale in which two academics discover the risks of tampering with the power of myth-making. In "The Din of Celestial Birds" by Brian Evenson, a man stumbles down a mountainside with no memory of what's happened to him, and a strange skin aliment, and the certainty that something inside him is clawing its way to the surface.

"Come Lurk With Me and Be My Love" and "In the Black Mill", by William Browning Spencer and Michael Chabon, respectively, are absolutely hilarious, tongue-in-cheek pastiches of Lovecraft that are extremely well written; the first about a doomed suitor who meets the "wrong kind of girl", the second featuring the classic, doomed Lovecraftian scholar whose curiosity outweighs his survival instinct. On the other side of the spectrum, "Houses Under the Sea", by Caitlin R. Kiernan is a chilling story that invokes all the watery terror that Lovecraft inspired in "Dagon" and Shadows Over Innsmouth", without ever mentioning either tale.

Finally, among the best are "Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane and "Catching Hell" by Laird Barron, because they feature two "Lovecraftian" deities/beings that don't often see treatment, and the anthology's ending story, "That Of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable", by Nick Mamatas, which manages to inject Lovecraft with a bit of Raymond Carver, or mix Lovecraft into Raymond Carver, whichever describes it best.

Wondering what to get for the shoggoth who has everything? Look no further.

Unlike Datlow's earlier tribute anthology, Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, where many of the stories, removed from authors' notes and the context of the book, didn't seem to have much to do with Edgar Poe, almost all these stories have an obvious Lovecraft connection. It usually isn't a listing of the blasphemous tomes and extraterrestrial entities created by the master. Datlow wisely avoided that, for the most part, along with Lovecraft pastiches.

It isn't an entirely new anthology. Four of the stories are reprints. But virtually all the stories are enjoyable and work as either modern examples of cosmic horror, horrific nihilism, or interesting takeoffs on Lovecraftian themes and premises.

The one exception is one of those reprints and, surprisingly, from the biggest name here. Possessing no discernable Lovecraftian theme, image, or plot element, Joyce Carol Oates "Commencement" also fails even in its internal logic. The plot concerns the allegorical cast of the Poet, the Educator, the Scientist, and the Dean and a fate they really should have seen coming at a future graduation ceremony.

The connection to Lovecraft is a bit dilute in other tales but still noticeable. In Lavie Tidhar's "One Day, Soon" it's a magical book that pulls a modern Israeli man into a horrible world of Nazi genocide in the Jewish heartland. It works as horror and as an alternate history premise not explored before. Anna Tambour's "Sincerely, Petrified" isn't very Lovecraftian in its plot of scientists rationally perpetuating the hoax of a curse (though petrification shows up in Lovecraft's "Man of Stone"), but the story is entertaining, particularly the odd relationship between the two enthusiastic rockhounds. Vast, impersonal, sentient forces invading our world and literally devouring us is the revelation a woman has upon meeting a childhood friend she had, she hoped, lost track of in Mike Cisco "Machines of Concrete and Dark" but the story is marred by an end that doesn't really work. "The Din of Celestial Birds" by Brian Evenson is another reprint. The parasitism and possession encountered in the South American home of a mysterious German émigré monk is certainly in keeping with Lovecraft, but the story has more of the flavor of Lovecraft's friend Clark Ashton Smith when he was at the top of his form: lush, exotic, and morbid.

Lovecraft was fascinated by polar exploration and Tibet, and some of the best tales here use those settings. Dave Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud's "The Crevasse" has some Antarctic explorers in the 1920s catching a glimpse of something. And, as in the best cosmic horror, what is glimpsed is less important than all that it implies. Thrillseeking settlers of an iceberg in the south polar seas discover something deadly and almost invisible in the ancient ice of their vessel in Holly Phillips' "Cold Water Survival". Mark Laidlaw's "Leng" adjoins that land to Tibet and sends an amateur mycologist there to explore it for legendary and new fungi. And, of course, he finds something. Effective first-person horror.

What would a Lovecraft tribute anthology be without sinister cults? "Come Lurk With Me and Be My Love" by William Spencer has a very introverted 32 year old man willing to go to great lengths to win the favor of a gothish girl. That includes meeting her father and reading her tracts on intelligent design. Michael Chabon's "In the Black Mill" (another reprint) comes close to being a Lovecraft pastiche in its story of a sinister factory and its frequently maimed workers in a Pennsylvania town in 1948. Michael Shea's "The Recruiter" has an elderly man receiving some much needed money from a sinister cult in San Francisco. Shea's rhyming entities add a note of gleeful evil. Another reprint is Caitlin R. Kiernan's superb "Houses Under the Sea". Weaving back and forth in time, its narrator tells of his lover, a Velikovsky-like academic and the cult she led - straight into the sea. The Lovecraftian themes of the call of heredity and intelligent and nonhuman survivals from prehistory are mixed with the very un-Lovecraftian theme of sexual attraction.

Other stories use Lovecraft as a jumping off point to explore personal relationships. Amanda Downum's "The Tenderness of Jackals" has a teenage drifter at the end of his rope seeking some kind of change with the ghouls of Hannover, Germany. In his notes for "Sight Unseen", Joel Lane notes the prevalence of absent fathers in Lovecraft's work . His protagonist travels to Manchester, UK to learn about the father that long ago left him and the obsessions that made him fear the light. The protagonist of "Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth's doesn't lose his lover to Lovecraftian horrors but a horror writer. Laird Barron's "Catch Hell" has a creepy anthropologist and his resentful wife locked in an unhappy marriage and both getting their wishes in a Washingtown town where the Black Goat hides in the nearby woods.

The rest of the stories fall in no easy category but are all good. Interlibrary loaning the Necronomicon sounds like a joke or a cliched start. It is sort of a joke in Richard Bowes "The Office of Doom" - at first. But, amidst a tale of university politics, intrudes some wonderfully subtle and sinister notes. Gemma Files' "Marya Nox" has an unusual structure - part of an after- lecture interview of a Nigerian Catholic priest who saw a strange church uncovered in Macedonia. Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear's "Moongoose" postulates a whole ecosytem of extradimensional entities - rather like moles following grubs in a lawn - that plague spaceships. This story, despite the Lovecraft derived names of various space stations, owes as much to Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll as Lovecraft. And, finally, Nick Mamatas's "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" answers the question, effectively, of what some people would do when one of those Cthulhoid entities finally does return to our world. Some will always welcome the end of the world regardless of how it comes.

Only the Cisco and Oates stories mar this very good collection which should appeal not just to Lovecraft fans but horror fans in general.

A wonderful collection of strange and creepy fiction that Lovecraft fans should not miss!
I bought this anthology because I love Caitlin Kiernan's writing and was delighted to enjoy not only her fine contribution to the volume but also all the other stories as well. A brief bio was included for each author at the end of their offered story as well as a note from the authors about how each of them originally found Lovecraft's work and how his work has influenced their own.

An excellent collection of short stories, well worth it's most reasonable price.

Once upon a time I wrote part of a dreadful H.P. Lovecraft pastiche. I mention this not because you care about the many pieces of fiction I've abandoned over the years, but to offer another small piece of evidence for the truth Ellen Datlow mentions in her introduction to this eminently enjoyable anthology: unimaginative Lovecraft imitations are everywhere. People treat his stories like a mathematical formula: strained antiquated prose plus unspeakable tentacled evil equals masterwork of horror. Well, no. Lovecraft, like another much-imitated writer born in the 1890s, J.R.R. Tolkien, wrote as he did because of who he was and how he thought. You can't re-evoke that, and the results when you try bring to mind Twain's immortal if outdated comment on a woman swearing: "She knows the words but not the music."

In Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow brings together stories that are inspired by Lovecraft without slavishly imitating him. The drawback for some readers will be that some stories seem too loosely inspired, not "Lovecraftian" enough. I admit that I thought this about one or two of the stories in this anthology, but I don't see much value in pursuing the point: Lovecraft is so influential a writer that almost any modern horror tale could be said to be influenced by him, and in any case what matters is that the stories are good. And in this volume, they are. A few struck me as underdeveloped, but even those had such strong style that it's hard to complain.

I've now read "The Crevasse," the collection's first story, twice: once in this volume and once in The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Two, also edited by Datlow. On first reading I was disappointed by the story. It seemed to me too interested in subtle effects at the cost of narrative substance. It was like reading the first twenty pages of a fine novella and then having it abruptly stop. On second reading, I was better able to appreciate the intensely evocative prose Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud bring to it. For a story in which very little happens, it's remarkably atmospheric, and confronts Lovecraft's deepest themes, and some of his narrative motifs, in a new way. It's still a story I respect more than enjoy, but I respect it a heck of a lot.

"The Office of Doom" is the best kind of comic horror: it's funny without skimping on the chills factor. This brief story by Richard Bowes has surprising scope and real charm. Anna Tambour's "Sincerely, Petrified" takes a while to get going and sometimes seems to indulge in quirkiness for its own sake, but by the end it's evolved into an excellent, creepy take on the power of the imagination. Brian Evenson's "The Din of Celestial Birds" is another one that lacked the edge I was hoping for, but it's a more than competent story of a man's strange transformation. "The Tenderness of Jackals" has a protagonist who's Evil But Not Really Because He's World-Weary, which is not the sort of thing that sits well with me, but Amanda Downum writes this about as well as it can be written. "Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane starts well then ends a bit abruptly, but what climax there is creepy.

In "Cold Water Survival," Holly Phillips masters the sense of encroaching terror that pervades Lovecraft's best stories. A group of adventurers have colonized a giant chunk of ice in the Antarctic, but is there something alive down there? You know the answer, and watching the characters discover it is good scary fun. At times the stylized descriptions of action on the narrator's video camera are a little distracting, but this is a minor quirk in a great story.

"Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" is a funny and oddly sweet comic romance about a guy in love with a strange girl. She's in this weird cult, but that won't be too much of a problem, or will it? This story has only touches of horror, but they're very well-executed, and the love story has real charm. I look forward to reading more of William Browning Spencer's work in the future.

For some reason I've been resistant to checking out Caitlin R. Kiernan's fiction, despite her high reputation among readers of dark fiction. The loss has been mine. "Houses Under the Sea" is a brilliant story, using motifs and structure reminiscent of Lovecraft but bringing a distinctive modern narrative voice in as well. Another of HPL's great talents was his ability to arrange seemingly unrelated facts to devastating gradual effect, and Kiernan has a similar gift. I've already purchased one of her novels, and look forward to seeing what other tricks she has up her sleeve.

Michael Cisco's "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" is a little too abstract and dream-like for my taste; its style is unsettling in a way that's not only atmospheric, but just a touch annoying. Still, it's a fine creepy story that reflects Lovecraft's theme of broken-down psychic borders. Marc Laidlaw's "Leng" is a likable epistolary piece. It doesn't bring quite as much innovation as some other entries here, but that just means the joys of its elegant traditional structure are easier to savor, and it does have a couple twists to offer. "In the Black Mill" by Michael Chabon was one of the stories I was most excited about when I picked up the anthology, and it didn't disappoint. It too is closer to the bounds of "typical" Lovecraft than some, and Chabon writes in a less extreme versions of Lovecraft's typical manner, which he handles perfectly. I'm at a loss to describe quite why I'm so fond of this tale, except that Chabon is as always a master stylist.

Lavie Tidhar's "One Day, Soon" is an unsettling tale that lingers in the mind. It deals with a topic that I don't often enjoy seeing in imaginative fiction (he said vaguely, to avoid spoilers), but does so with a understatement that increases its horror. In "Commencement," Joyce Carol Oates satirizes the pomposity of the typical college graduation ceremony by describing a school where that ritual has a disturbing twist. It's not hard to see where things are going, but as always with Oates, the pleasure is in her hypnotic style and the portrait of the thought processes of her all-too-human characters. "Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth is an intense, deeply-felt story of suffering, and an excellent read. Another writer could have used these elements in a weak story that felt dismissive of Lovecraft, but Unsworth's handling is just right. When looking at the table of contents to remind myself which stories were in this book, I had to think a minute about which one Michael Shea's "The Recruiter" was. It had already slipped my mind. Now that I remember it, I can't find much to say. It's a good story, with some interesting stylistic touches, I suppose, but I really don't feel much about it one way or the author.

I do love an epistolary horror story. Gemma Files's "Marya Nox" is presented as an interview with an exorcist priest, who recounts a strange experience he had in Southeastern Europe, in one of those churches that had incorporated an older pagan tradition, which seeps through in a disturbing way... The value of this format is that it removes the reader from the horror in a manner that paradoxically makes everything creepier. In "Boojum," Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear offer a fun dark science fiction story that's also an homage, not just to Lovecraft, but to Kipling and Lewis Carroll, and perhaps others that I missed. It's also about how attached one can get to an animal companion, even when that companion is, er, a trifle unusual.

Laird Barron's "Catch Hell" offers his usual distinctive, atmospheric prose, but its tale of a troubled magic and the extreme lengths to which the couple will go to help themselves is also a little longer than it might be, and the setting doesn't mesh with the characters fully. It's still a worthwhile read, of course. And the collection closes with Nick Mamatas' "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable," a story that might be baffling to readers who aren't familiar with its non-Lovecraftian literary antecedents, though the author's note will help them cover this unfortunate gap in their reading. For those who know what's up, this delightful and sad story is the ultimate reminder that Lovecraft's themes aren't limited to creaky retreads of his basic forms, but can be-- and should be-- re-imagined over and over again. Lovecraft Unbound shows some of the finest modern writers of dark fiction doing just that.

I came very late to Lovecraft, only starting to read his works last year. And, he certainly wrote his fair share of garbage, as did all the pulp writers of his day. This does not, in any way, diminish the fact that his weird genius and truly brilliant stories juxtaposing his dark world of Old Ones, Cthulu, Yog-Shaggoth, and crawling chaos within, above, and below the illusory "ordered" world inhabited by his readers easily ranks him as one of the foremost fantasy and horror writers of all time. Yes, it is easy to mock his sometimes heavy-handedness and overuse of certain conventions, but it is the rare writer who both creates and maintains the distinctive "voice" he achieved in his all too brief career. And the artful writers in "Lovecraft Unbound," whatever the merits and flaws of their offerings on Lovecraft's altar, do their level best to maintain and emulate that unique voice, a daunting task indeed.

Other reviews in this thread do a fantastic job of summarizing and critiquing the book's content, and I will not repeat that here. I will say that the great strength of this collection is, as I mentioned, the authors going to great lengths to replicate Lovecraft's atmospheric and half-mad dreads and glooms. By in large, I think they succeed very well, so I cannot see the basis of the two star critique that this book has "no Lovecraft at all." It is true that there is a dearth of Cthulu myth stories, and I too was slightly disappointed at that omission. But only slightly. The overall quality of the tales is something that August Derleth only wishes he could have achieved. Noteworthy are "Leng," "In the Black Mill, (arguably the most "Lovecraftian" of the stories in the talented hands of Michael Chabon)" and "Come Lurk With Me and Be My Love." But, the glittering gems are clearly Kiernan's "Houses Under the Sea" and Barron's "Catch Hell." Both of these tales scared the daylights out of me and did the "Old Master" much justice. I was gratified to see that other reviewers in this thread also agree with that assessment. I also really enjoyed how each author, at the end of his or her story, wrote a brief personal "squib" about how they encountered Lovecraft and their assessments of him and his effect on their own work. That was something of a little, unexpected treat.

It is true that some of these stories, at best, only bear the sketchiest of tangential relationships to the Lovecraft canon. This does not mean that the sories are at all "bad." Quite the contrary, although a few like Joyce Carol-Oates "Commencement" were pretty weak just as "The Din of Celestial Birds" was unusually strong. Still, a couple of them left me scratching my head and wondering why they were included in the book. But no matter. It is a very minor point to my way of thinking and one that does not diminish the collection as a whole.

All in all, a fine job with just a couple of little flaws here and there. If you like Lovecraft, this book is definitely worth your time and money. And again, "Houses Under the Sea" and "Catch Hell" standing alone would be worth having. The rest, as they say, is "gravy."

Recommended!

This book is a slam dunk. All the stories are good. I especially like Mongoose. Twisted Sci-fi meets Louis Carroll, meets Lovecraftian inter-dimensional beings.

Not being a big Lovecraft fan, I can't really say why I picked this up -- but I was pleasantly surprised with it. The quality of the writing is consistently good, with the stories being inspired by Lovecraft, rather than imitations of his work.

My favourite story was Mongoose, by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear -- it was suspenseful, but had a lovely charm to it, with engaging characters.

Sadly, the weakest for me was In The Black Mill, by Michael Chabon. I really expected to love this one, but found it dull and predictable -- I saw the entire story unfold by the second page (virtually within one sentence), which was incredibly disappointing. Oddly, this was also the only story in the book with editing errors -- I have no idea why that would be, but there they were.

I would have loved to have seen Quinn Belhorn's GhoulSpeak included in this collection, as the lighter tone would have been a nice counterpoint to some of the more serious pieces.

I would think this book would appeal to anyone who loves suspense or horror, but especially to fans of Lovecraft.

There seems to be a new group of very serious editors who are compiling anthologies of modern Lovecraftian fiction -- fiction that is far removed, in most cases, from the Cthulhu Mythos. It began, perhaps, with Jim Turner's superb ETERNAL LOVECRAFT and may include THE CHILDREN OF CTHULHU as well. The best of these newer anthologies is the just-published BLACK WINGS, edited by S. T. Joshi. Ellen Datlow's LOVECRAFT UNBOUND is almost equally as fine. As stated in her introduction, "I asked for stories INSPIRED -- thematically and possibly -- by plot points in Lovecraft's mythos. What I wanted was variety: in tone, setting, point of view, time. In fact, I'd prefer not to have any direct reference in the story to Lovecraft or his works. No use of the words 'eldritch' or 'ichor,' and no mentions of Cthulhu or his minions. And especially, no tentacles." This is close to my own editorial policy when I was working on Tales of Lovecraftian Horror. I had felt that other forms of pure Lovecraftian horror had been usurped by what has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos, and I was especially dismayed at how so much modern (though not what one could call professional) Mythos fiction treated Lovecraft and his Mythos as a source of mere amusement and folly, something with which to raise laughter rather than gooseflesh.

With LOVECRAFT UNBOUND, Ellen Datlow has proven herself yet again as one of modern horror's finest and important editors. The other reviews speak well of the tales in the book. One of the wonderful features, perhaps not mentioned in any other review, are the fascinating authors' afterwords that follow each tale and reveal the author's personal connection to H. P. Lovecraft. And there is one story that is absolutely Cthulhu Mythos, "The Recruiter," by the magnificent Michael Shea. Shea writes fiction that is decidedly Cthulhu Mythos and so named by him -- his most recent book as I write is COPPING SQUID, a fabulous collection of all Cthulhu Mythos stories published last year by Perilous Press.

I have not read any tales by a number of these writers, and so this book proved as introduction to a number of names. Each tale is superb, some are so powerful that they hit you with uncanny force. Laird Barron's "Catch Hell" is my favorite story in the book. It begins:

"For years she awakened in the darkest hours to a baby crying. She finally accepted the nursery they'd sealed like a tomb was really and truly empty, that the crib was empty. She learned to cover her ears until the crying stopped. It never stopped."

Laird is a master at evoking sinister sense of place, and that which taints such localities. His work is that of a man who has observed much and imagined more. This is one of his darkest tales, a work of genius.

I love the cover illustration of a very young HPL wearing eyeglasses, looking so very grim. Dark Horse is to be commended for allowing Tina Alessi to contribute such a tasteful cover, so beautifully designed, with perfect tones. I found this cover tied, in a way, to the book's title and theme: too often Lovecraft has been the victim of atrocious covers. One need but look at the current jackets for the three volumes of his tales published by Arkham House, which features awful artwork that is an insult to the author. This cover, and this book LOVECRAFT UNBOUND, gives us Lovecraft respectfully, a serious artist who strove to create works that were, in his eyes, Literary Art. The stories in this book are also works of such art, amazing, sophisticated and original works that shew what a wonderful age this is, now, for horror fiction. My one wish was that a hardcover edition of this magnificent anthology had been offered -- it surely deserves such distinction.