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Title:
Cthulhu Reloaded
Series: Cthulhu: Harrison
Peel #1
Editor: David Conyers
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Short Story Collection
Pages:
240
Words: 94K
I enjoyed this collection of Cthulhu
oriented stories, but with some big ol’ caveats. And they are big
enough that I seriously considered dinging this down to 3stars
instead of the 3.5 I ended up giving it.
First off, this is a collection of
short stories all centered about the adventures of one Australian,
Harrison Peel. He’s special forces and gets inducted into a secret
agency that fights intrusions of the cosmic horror into our reality.
And that is where my first caveat comes in. They are great horror
stories. Wonderful in fact. But Peel sails through them all with nary
a mind break in sight. What he sees affects him, but not any more
than how veteran cops are affected after a life time of seeing the
worst of humanity. And that is why I didn’t give this the “Cosmic
Horror” tag. Peel should have been broken like an egg dropped from
a sky scraper and he was barely scratched, not even cracked and
totally not broken. In both the Introduction by Peter Clines and the
Forward by the author, they mention how they don’t understand why
people want to read stories about the main characters failing or
breaking and thus Conyers created Harrison Peel as a character to
combat that idea. Which just goes to show that Conyers doesn’t
understand Cosmic Horror at it’s fundamental, foundational level.
THE WHOLE POINT IS THAT CTHULHU AND HIS ILK ARE INIMICAL TO HUMANITY
WITHOUT EVEN TRYING TO BE, THEY SIMPLY ARE. When you depart from
that premise, you can have some great horrific stories but they
aren’t cosmic horror. So that is my first and biggest caveat.
My second caveat is almost a sub-caveat
to the first one. A lot of side characters DO go mad or get destroyed
or totally lose it in one way or another. But not Peel. He keeps
surviving through each and every short story. That is inimical (love
that word!) to Cosmic Horror. It makes the stories simply adventure
stories and if you’re looking for that, you’ll get your fill of
some really good ones here. I was pretty impressed overall with the
quality, but the author does admit that he went back and reworked
many of these stories to fit together better and to polish them up. I
had no problem with that and considering this collection came
together, I’m happy he did that.
My final caveat is that there is a King
in Yellow story and man, was I disappointed. It all springs from the
idea that Peel doesn’t crack, so of course I was disappointed. The
Yellow King never attempts to destroy someone until they have been
sufficiently worked on so that they will destroy themselves. The King
in Yellow would not offer me a harem, because he would know I was
committed to Mrs B. But what he would do is to work against that love
and loyalty that I have for Mrs B for my entire life until I WAS
ready to accept a harem. And he would work it so that I would give
myself heart and soul to him for just that chance. But once again,
not Peel. He gives Peel the option to have something he truly wants,
but it is offered without the ground work being laid so of course
Peel walks away from it and the King in Yellow just lets him go.
Bologna! That is NOT how the King in Yellow stories work. If he knows
you are insusceptible, he won’t tempt you. Now, the story itself,
dealing with the side characters, was a great KiY story and I enjoyed
that part of it, a lot. But the inclusion of Peel and his “shrug
it all off” attitude destroyed my enjoyment.
I really debated about including this
as part of my Cthulhu Anthology “series” and wondered if it would
be better served as it’s own little thing, but in the end I did
include it because I feel that anything Cthulhu related should stay
together to make it easier for others to find out about it. There
are two more Harrison Peel collections and I plan on reading them
both, but I will approach them quite differently than I did this time
and hopefully that will help mitigate some of the dislike I felt for
this author and his deliberate misinterpretation of the “Cosmic
Horror” genre.
★★★✬☆
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