William Browning Spencer

This is a book I've been meaning to read for years. Around the time I was twelve, I got my hands on this book, read the first 100 pages or so, and promptly lost the book.The story (what was happening?), the characters (particularly Allan, Helen and Jeanne), and the prose (haunting, thoughtful) clung to my mind. I found the book many months later and started over. I got to roughly the same spot and was swamped with books to read and homework to do for school. I didn't have time to finish it, show more despite a desperate urge to do so. Eventually, that copy of the book disappeared from my home. I am now 18 and bought this book at Powell's Books in Portland, OR after discussing the novel with a friend who had similar issues finishing it. I rarely keep books, and I intend to give the copy I just read to him as a graduation present, but I will have to find a copy of this novel for my long term collection,.

The story has been rehashed here enough that I feel I don't need to summarize. I loved the opening, a marriage of a madman and a catatonic woman in a thunderstorm, which set the perfect mood. I read through the book at breakneck speed, because it's truly a book that keeps you turning pages. The novel is a perfect blend of confusion and explanation. The ending, I was a little dissatisfied with. To be fair, I had been speculating on the ending of the book for several years, but I think it's fair to say that the ending is an anticlimax and a largely unexplained anticlimax at that. I wouldn't say that I like my answers to be spelled out for me, but I do like it when the conclusions I come to about a novel clearly match the author's conclusions.

Speaking of conclusions, it feels good to close the chapter of my life that was spent thinking about this book in quiet moments. The fact that this book kept me thinking for nearly six years should be a sign to you all that it's certainly worth picking up. show less

Philip Kenan works a tedious job at a print shop, and spends much of the free time his boss grudgingly allows him endlessly fiddling with the bloated horror novel he's been writing for the last twenty years. But he doesn't believe the Lovecraftian horrors he's writing about are merely fiction. He's seen them. Or he thinks he has, at least, even if everyone else in his life thinks he's crazy.

The basic concept here is something like the Cthulhu Mythos meets Office Space, with Lovecraft's show more monstrous Old Ones either representing or in league with the soul-crushing systems of corporate America. Which is an utterly irresistible premise. But, despite the fact that there are some really fun ideas and entertaining moments, this story never quite clicked for me the way I wanted it to. I'm not entirely sure why. I think mostly the balance between the wacky, ridiculous elements and the more serious ones never felt perfectly right, somehow. Or, at least, I was never quite able to calibrate that balance properly in my head. I suppose it also didn't help that that main character's stalkery behavior towards his ex-girlfriend was a bit of a deal-breaker for me when it came to being able to sympathize with him. Or, come to think of it, that the female characters were less believable than the extradimensional abominations.

Still, I can't help thinking that, handled the right way, this story could have served as the basis for a really entertaining offbeat movie. show less

One of my absolute favorite short stories. It nails the very tricky combination of creepy and hilarious through some fantastic characterization as well as deft, concise descriptive passages – such as how the narrator tries to characterize what he hears from the attic toward the end. I'm a fan of Weird Fiction, which this is. Stories that manage to be both thoroughly amusing and genuinely eerie/creepy are few in number. This is one of the best.

William Browning Spencer wrote Resume With Monsters, which I have but have not read. Irrational Fears was touted as a mythos book in Glynn Barrass' chapbook from Rainfall Books. I was able to get a rather inexpensve used copy of the hardcover edition from White Wolf, published in 1998.

I'll keep my comments brief. The book centers around Jack Lowry, an alcoholic in detox. He meets up with a motley crew of other alcoholics and they end up going to rural Virginia to a rehab center. There they show more start butting heads with a radical group called The Clear, who say that alcoholism is actually demonic possession. What follows is a lot of surreal events and weird behavior on the part of everyone, as some members of the rehab group vanish or are kidnapped, zand Jack and his strange crew work out how to get them back.

At first I thought it was actually going to be a mythos title. The Clear has a pamphlet that says alcoholics are the heirs of the K'n-Yan who had previously worshiped Tsathoggua and were cast into an asynchronous reality where their hungers were focused on drugs and alcohol. In one of the AA meetings, some woman says something like "Thank Azathoth I'm better now." There certainly is a weird episode where some otherwordly betentacled creature engulfs a surroung crowd of mindless naked worshipers. However, it turns out that the founder of The Clear, Dorian Greenway, had been through a period where he had read Lovecraft and sort of incorporated Lovecraft's fictional beasties into his group's message, including discussing the Pnakotic Pentagram. All the strange happenings may be paranormal (caused by Greenway tapping into someone else's psychic powers), but not mythos paranormal, and in fact they may just be drug induced hallucination. There are no ancient entities. no ancient tomes, no inimical reality beyond reality. None of the missing characters actually die, they just show up again a bit befuddled.

I honestly don't know why it was included in a list of mythos books, unless whoever compiled it only gave it a cursory skimming. Is Ghoul by Slade a mythos book, if its main bad guys were influenced by Lovecraft's fiction and used some mythos names? What about Needful Things by King, where there is a scrap of graffitti "Yog Sothoth Rules?"

Spencer is a talented writer, who has obviously made a study of Lovecraft. His mythos story in Lovecraft Unbound is great. His characters came alive, acted convincingly in context, had good dialogue and made you care about them. Throughout the prose sparkled. Irrational Fears was an energetic read with some off beat humor and a good forward moving plot. The detail bespeaks an intimate knowledge of Alcoholics Anonymous, addiction and recovery, which immeasurably added to the depth of the book. I dashed through it in a few days. But I sure won't be recommending it to someone looking for A) a mythos book or B) a book with a great Lovecraftian feel. I rate it as very good on its own merits but not really for mythos fans. I'll give Resume With Monsters a try, for Spencer's prose and becase people tell me it's definitely a mythos book.....we'll see. show less