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Title:
Book of Cthulhu
Series: Cthulhu Anthology
#17
Editor: Ross Lockhart
Rating: 3.5
of 5 Stars
Genre: Cosmic Horror
Pages:
564
Words: 225K
This was published in 2011. I can believe it was quite the collection then. I would have really enjoyed all the brand new stories. Sadly, because I read this as the 17th installment in the Cthulhu Anthology series, I had already read several of these. Let me name them for your reading mispleasure.
A Colder War
Fat Face
Black Man with a Horn
The Shallows
Not a single one of those stories is a bad story. I dutifully read A Colder War in its entirety. Fat Face I began to skim. Black Man with a Horn I skipped whole sections. The Shallows I skipped right to the ending to make sure it was the story I thought it was (it was). It made me realize something, about myself but mostly about the Cthulhu Mythos. Its appeal is the newness of the stories, nothing more. The existential dread one might have felt upon reading A Colder War for the first time went up in a cloud of poofy smoke upon this re-read. It wasn’t grim, it wasn’t dreadful, it didn’t make me shiver or go “brrrrr”. It bored me.
Some books and stories have re-readability and some simply do not. Those that do not, they are the paper plates of the book world, use once and dispose of immediately. They have no lasting value, nothing to offer besides new’ness. Once that new’ness is gone, all you are left with is a pile of words that sit there like a lump of garbage. You might ask “Bookstooge, WHO ARE YOU to pass such judgment?” and here is my humble reply. I read over 150 books a year. Over 25% of that, on average, is re-reading. I fething know what I’m fething saying because I’m a fething Book-Authority and don’t you forget it! But seriously, I read and re-read enough to know what I am talking about. If someone eats soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner, even the most dimwitted clodhopper at some point begins to realize some of those soups are much better than others. I am no dimwitted clodhopper. Far from it. I am genius enough to know that the tall sunflower falls the farthest while the humble grass simply soaks up the sunshine. I’m down here on purpose folks.
In previous collections, I have complained about Jehovah and Jesus being trampled underfoot by the authors and Cthulhu’esqu gods simply obliterating them as powerless and empty human abstracts. That didn’t happen here. But what did happen was that a Muslim Jihadist was the goodguy and Allah gave him the power to overcome the Cosmic Forces arrayed against him because he, Allah, was such a kind and benevolent and POWERFUL being. Equal treatment folks, that’s all I ask for and I didn’t get it, not even close.
Ok, that was a powerful load of complaining. Even I acknowledge that. You might be wondering why in the world I gave this 3.5stars with those paragraphs and paragraphs of whiny complaints. The reason is simple. The rest of the stories were really good.
Calamari Curls was a story about a new restaurant opening up and taking business away from the old grumpy and cantankerous jackass who owned a soup shop. Only to have everyone go insane as the building was a weakspot and cosmic horror regularly broke through every couple of decades.
Bad Sushi dealt with a Japanese World War II vet trying to stop the takeover of a town that was being fed elder god in the new sushi menu. He’s like 80 years old and dies. But he stops it.
The Fairground Horror was all about two brothers that allowed greed and fanaticism to destroy them both when they confront Cthulhu and try to use him as a vending machine, metaphorically speaking.
The Doom That Came to Innsmouth was a wonderful tale of descendant of Innsmouth making his way back and escaping to the sea, as the Federal Government once again tried to wipe out Innsmouth. It was diabolical how twisted the main character was and how he used every means possible to present himself as “normal” even though he was a sick, twisted, perverted murderer, as was every other Innsmouth inhabitant.
The rest were just as disturbing and shiver inducing. That is the exact reason I read these.
★★★✬☆
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Andromeda Among the Stones
The Tugging
A Colder War
The Unthinkable
Flash Frame
Some Buried Memory
The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins
Fat Face
Shoggoths in Bloom
Black Man with a Horn
Than Curse the Darkness
Jeroboam Henley’s Debt
Calamari Curls
Jihad over Innsmouth
Bad Sushi
The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife
The Doom that Came to Innsmouth
Lost Stars
The Oram County Whoosit
The Crawling Sky
The Fairground Horror
Cinderlands
Lord of the Land
To Live and Die in Arkham
The Shallows
The Men from Porlock
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