Cthulhu 2000 (Paperback)

~ Various (Author) "I shot my answering machine today..." (more)
Key Phrases: pine lights, firing place, inspection chamber, Miss Kramer, Fat Face, Uncle Alvin (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Editor Jim Turner has compiled a real page turner in Cthulhu 2000. His anthology of short stories based on the works of horrorist H.P. Lovecraft is a dark gem, and of superior stuff. Although they all have the coppery tang of the eldritch, the tales aren't strictly in the horror mien. Some of them are an alloy of horror with a sci-fi, humor, detective, vampire or even romance slant.

The very best are truly horrible, in the most complimentary sense of that word. "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" (Poppy Z. Brite), "The Adder" (Fred Chappell), "Fat Face" (Michael Shea), "The Unthinkable" (Bruce Sterling), "Love's Eldritch Ichor" (Esther M. Friesner) and "On the Slab" (Harlan Ellison) are the keen standouts, but all the rest, practically, are of almost equal quality. However, there are a couple of tales that do not deserve to be amongst this company, and the tome would have been better and tighter by their absence. Certainly, at 398 pages, there's no lack of material.

In "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," Poppy Z. Brite deftly invokes a vampric flavor to themes of decay and the forbidden, his writing style as ornate and refined as rococo and in the real spirit of the master. Fred Chappell's "The Adder" draws the dangerous and inimical from the ordinary in a tale delightful for its originality. Bruce Sterling also slings some fresh ideas around in "The Unthinkable," melding modernity and necromancy in a brief, effective story.

Horror gourmands will find a good meal here, but Cthulhu 2000 should have a bit of life outside its traditional genre, for the writing is strong, imaginative and entertaining. --Tamara Hladik

From Kirkus Reviews

Anthology of reprints by 18 modern masters of the bizarre to honor horror mandarin Lovecraft's weird-aliens Cthulhu mythos, long mined by HPL followers for gold scatterings. Cosmic fantasist HPL regarded himself, as editor Turner tells us, as an ``indifferentist,'' and any fellow human being as ``only another collection of molecules.'' Thus, this total materialist loved moments of horror that transcended the natural order. As an underpinning to wonder, he placed on earth an alien species called the Cthulhu, superintelligent creatures too hideous even to look at. Appropriately, in T.E.D. Klein's ``Black Man with a Horn,'' they really are out of sight and appear only as something like a scuba diver with flippers who looks in through your midnight window, or perhaps as a black man with a horn, John Coltrane, say, while Klein's narrator is an elderly horror writer on the downslope, nowadays mentioned in print only as a follower of his old friend ``Howard'' (HPL). Kim Newman's immensely amusing spoof of Hollywood private eyes, ``The Big Fish,'' is set three months after Pearl Harbor: ``The Bay City cops were rousting enemy aliens . . . . It was inspirational, the forces of democracy rallying round to protect the United States from vicious oriental grocers, fiendishly intent on selling eggplant to a hapless civilian population.'' The Cthulhu horrors come disguised as a naked (but scaly) movie jungle-queen and her squiddish baby. Other outstanding entries: Poppy Z. Brite's ``His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,'' set in New Orleans and something of a satire on Anne Rice; F. Paul Wilson's ``The Barrens,'' in which a monster writhes like a bunch of albino snakes; and Roger Zelazny's ``View of M. Fuji,'' a Japanese death odyssey: a dying woman tries to destroy her husband, whose spirit has entered cosmic cyberspace. The Newman story alone is worth the price. The rest is just a seething mass of obscene gravy. Gobble it up. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; Reprint edition (May 25, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345422031
• ISBN-13: 978-0345422033
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #481,058 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good modern collection of Cthulhu short stories , July 29, 2004

By	Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

_Cthulhu 2000_ is (as one might guess from the title) a collection of recently written short stories set in the universe created by H.P. Lovecraft, none by Lovecraft himself but rather by a variety of different authors. Editor Jim Turner provides a nice introduction to the Lovecraft's writings, drawing attention to two themes in the Cthulhu mythos. One theme is that though Lovecraft is in many ways a horror writer, he did not see the universe in terms of some epic, Biblical struggle between good and evil. Turner writes that a conventional horror writer "presupposes an actively malicious universe;" Lovecraft saw the universe in his stories instead as profoundly indifferent, that the interaction of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are so universal and eternal a phenomenon that they are far beyond any meaningful relationship with any species so transient as man, located as he is on such an insignificant planet. Man is a speck, nothing at all, against the horrors in a true piece of Cthulhian fiction. The best he can hope for from the universe is profound indifference. Lovecraft's monsters aren't evil, they just exist, they are almost elemental forces.

A second theme, in many related to the first theme, is that the universe is vast and probably unknowable by man. Some of the horror from Lovecraft's writings comes from the "finite mind grappling with infinite reality," the results of which are often insanity and/or death. Lovecraft himself said humans live on a "placid island of ignorance" amidst "black seas of infinity," and that mankind was not mentioned to voyage far. Man is better off not knowing the true horrors that lurk in the shadows.

So how well do the eighteen short stories in this volume realize these themes? Pretty well overall I think. Many of the stories depart from Lovecraft's typical mode of writing; most of his short stories were tales (memoirs really) told by men after the fact - sometimes dead or insane at the end of the story - rather than actually accounting events as they happened, often lacking dialogue. Though a few of the stories are in Lovecraft's traditional style, most are not. To me this is quite refreshing.

Several stories to me were exemplary, centering on a seemingly normal person, perhaps an investigator, perhaps not, in what looks like a normal, mundane, mortal world, one that is revealed to be hiding untold horrors unknown to most of humanity. _Black Man with a Horn_ by T.E.D. Klein was an excellent page-turner (I wished it was longer though it was already almost a novella in length), an intriguing tale that wove together elements of Malaysian folklore, a retiring missionary, an elderly horror writer, and some mysterious disappearances in Florida. It had a wonderful atmosphere and the author did a great job of slowly, very slowly, revealing what the horror of the piece was. _The Last Feast of the Harlequin_ by Thomas Ligotti was similarly excellent, the protagonist an anthropological researcher (who specialized in studying the role of the clown in various cultures) traveling to the town of Mirocaw to research a Winter Solstice celebration that was rumored to involve a clown figure. The main character finds more than he bargained for, discovering that there was a great deal more to the festival that initially met the eye. _The Barrens_ by F. Paul Wilson focused on a researcher and his ex-girlfriend, the former obsessed with the phenomenon of pine lights (eerie will o'wisp like globules of light said to haunt the New Jersey Pine Barrens), an obsession that leads the main characters to view the world in an entirely different light.

Several stories were a bit more unusual and I am not sure I understood them. _Shaft Number 247_ by Basil Cooper appeared to be set in the far future, underground, in a highly mechanized and regimented society that either could not survive on the surface of the earth or was afraid to. The Cthulhic element was subtle, almost slight. _The Shadow on the Doorstep_ by James P. Blaylock was well-written, almost poetic, describing the author's encounters with mysterious aquarium shops in various places in California as well as what might or might not have been some horrid apparition on his doorstep late one evening, but the horror and mystery in this piece was very subtle, maybe too subtle.

A couple of stories were humorous, playing with the Cthulhu mythos but not much in the style of Lovecraft, not that they weren't enjoyable. _Pickman's Modem_ by Lawrence Watt-Evans dealt with as one might guess a demonic modem and its effects on its user and _Love's Eldritch Ichor_ by Esther M. Friesner was almost slapstick, the subject a budding young romance writer (!) with some rather unusual friends.

I enjoyed this book a lot, I find it a fairly quick read and a good continuation of Lovecraft's writings. I would love to see a sequel volume.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cthulhu Meets Computers, August 11, 2002

By	Bruce Rux (Aurora, CO) - See all my reviews

To my intense surprise and delight, Cthulhu 2000 proved to be a pretty good collection of highly diverse tales, a fair number of them good-humored send-ups that I was almost embarrassed to admit I found myself laughing with - my favorite being "Love's Eldritch Ichor," a very funny piece about a descendant of the Old Ones and a book editor falling in love in a Lovecraftian mansion a la The Addams Family, which, believe it or not, is a lot better than it sounds.

But I was even more surprised at the collection of legitimate horror stories, some as genuinely creepy as anything Lovecraft ever penned himself. Not all the stories are strictly Lovecraftian by connection, but most are essentially true to his overriding theme of cosmic terror. Don't expect straight Lovecraft, and you might find yourself really loving this book. I did.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ever Hear Tell of a ~Shoggoth~?, July 8, 1999

By A Customer

I highly recommend this collection to all fans of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. This is quality stuff -- some of the best Mythos stories I've ever read, and I've read many.

I have not yet read all of the stories in this collection, but standouts thus far are "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," "Fat Face," "Black Man with a Horn," and "The Barrens." The latter tale has the nice feature of adding the New Jersey pine barrens and the Jersey Devil to the Cthulhu Mythos! This is a welcome bit of local color for Philadelphians like me, who have driven through the pine barrens year after year on the way to the South Jersey shore points. Now you don't have to go to New England to be in Cthulhu country! "Fat Face" has a ~very~ frightening look at what the ~shoggoths~ have been up to lately.

The book includes some stories I'd read before in other collections, like "Black Man With a Horn," and "Shaft Number 247," but since they are excellent tales it is nice to have them all together.

This book would make excellent beach reading for the Jersey shore... but you may not want to drive through the pine barrens on your way back.