Lovecraft Unbound (2009)

I am rating this one at 3.5, the highest rating I've given an Ellen Datlow collection so far. Having just finished four other books she's edited, I have to say that this one has a wider range of good stories than the previous four volumes of The Best Horror of the Year do individually. It's still a mixed bag though, with some stories much better than the rest, some following under the category of "good and I'd probably look for more by their authors," and some that just didn't do it for me. In short, your typical anthology. If you're considering reading this one, keep in mind that the book was not intended to be a collection of Lovecraft pastiches but rather a collection of stories inspired by Lovecraft's work. Even so, it comes out a bit unevenly and while the authors each offer a brief write-up on how Lovecraft inspired their work, some of the stories seem to be a bit off.

So let's get down to business:
There are six I really liked and five that were good, not great, so that accounts for over half of the stories in this book. The best story in this book is without question Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Houses Under the Sea," set in beautiful Monterey. The story is seen through the eyes of a narrator who not only has no name but no gender either. He/She has been assigned to write about Jacova Angevine, his/her former lover, who once had a promising career in academia but later became the head of a cult called "The Open Door," whose members she led into the ocean one day in a mass suicide. It's one a summary doesn't do justice, but my god ... this story is absolutely chilling and probably meets best the Lovecraft-inspiration criteria. I have to give Ms. Datlow kudos for including it. "The Crevasse," set in the Antarctic is also an excellent, Lovecraft-inspired story but one I've read before; also set in the Antarctic is Holly Phillips' "Cold Water Survival," another previously-read but excellent story. Also clearly in the Lovecraftian zone is (believe it or not) Michael Chabon's "In the Black Mill," which I found to be outstanding; I did a double take when I got to this author's entry because well, he does horror & dread so nicely -- a side of Chabon I've never seen before! "Marya Nox" by Gemma Files also caught my eye -- told in more or less epistolary format, it focuses on a strange church in Macedonia that was uncovered after having been purposely buried in its entirety. "Catch Hell," by Laird Barron isn't exactly Lovecraftian so to speak, but there's definitely evil lurking in the woods around the Black Ram Lodge. This one I've read before and while I really like this story, its inclusion in this particular volume is kind of a mystery.

The six that were (imho) good/not great but still deserving of a mention are "The Din of Celestial Birds," by Brian Evenson, “Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love” by William Browning Spencer, "Leng," by Marc Laidlaw -- I'm a total sucker for anything set on the Plateau of Leng, and "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable” by Nick Mamatas. This one resonated with the idea that there's nothing one can do when confronted by cosmic forces beyond anyone's control and it appealed. And while "The Office of Doom" was kind of playful with its interlibrary loan of the Necronomicon, I'm still not quite sure about it. Ditto for "The Recruiter," which was dark enough for my weird tastes but kind of missing something there.

That leaves

“Sincerely, Petrified” by Anna Tambour
“The Tenderness of Jackals” by Amanda Downum
“Sight Unseen” by Joel Lane
“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark” by Michael Cisco (whose work I normally LOVE but this one was just off)
“One Day, Soon” by Lavie Tidhar
“Commencement” by Joyce Carol Oates
“Vernon, Driving” by Simon Kurt Unsworth
“Mongoose” by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear

that I wasn't overly impressed by.

Obviously anyone reading this collection will have their own personal favorites, since as I've noted before, horror is definitely in the eye of the beholder. I'd recommend it -- there are many fine stories here. ( )

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. ( )

While it's true that many of the stories involved no tentacular horror (and therefore might not fit the definition of "mythos"), I'd like to offer a different reader perspective - Lovecraft's style is not just the syntax, the goo and tentacles and darkness. It's also about leaving stories unfinished and only party told, about horrors only partially revealed and little understood, about the smallness of people in the face of the universe and the contradictory depth of their emotions and feelings. In some ways, I always found him to be making a point about how our own experiences will never cease to matter to us, no matter how big we understand the universe to be. When I read these stories, I found many of them to remind me of Lovecraft or be connected to him in their emotional senses and points about human beings. It's not unfair to say that these stories are, as described, inspirations - but at least some readers may find them more connected to that inspiration than not. ( )

The stories in this anthology are not Lovecraft pastiches. Most of them don't reference his mythology much or at all, and the ones that do tend to do so indirectly or in unusual ways. Instead, they try in various ways to capture something of the spirit of Lovecraft's writing, specifically that sense that there are older, stranger, more horrifying things lying behind the world we know, of which we can sometimes catch brief and disturbing glimpses.

While these stories lack Lovecraft's overwrought prose, most of them also lack the weirdly compelling quality of his best work. They are generally solidly crafted, though, ranging from the slight-but-interesting to the engagingly creative. One or two of them left me feeling a bit lukewarm, but I didn't actively dislike or feel bored by any of them, which is rare enough in a collection like this. I was a little surprised by the fact that none of them produced any truly visceral feelings of creepiness, but a number of them did things that I can intellectually appreciate as creepy, anyway.

On the whole, I'd say this is worth a look if you enjoy Lovecraft or, perhaps especially, if you like Lovecraft's themes but aren't exactly thrilled with his prose or the more problematic aspects of his writing. ( )

some eloquent renditions but the majority was not worth looking at. Overall, not a great anthology. Save your money ( )