C.T. Phipps

In this urban fantasy, the morally questionable fight the morally void. Derek Hawthorne and his twin sister Penny were raised within the secret organization known as the Red Room. This organization has kept the larger world safe from the supernatural for millennium. However, Derek is now caught up in a plot that is wrongly accusing him of treason while at the same time he hunts down the evil and powerful Wazir. Things are about to get messy.

This was a fun story. It’s got dark humor, plenty show more of action, and really interesting characters. I give extra points for all the Richard Matheson references. Derek is our main character and we experience the entire book through his point of view. He’s been raised to be this spy who happens to have some supernatural abilities and his primary job is to keep the populace at large from learning about the existence of supernatural creatures. The Red Room doesn’t really have a retirement plan, so once you’re in, you’re in for lfve. In Derek’s case, he (and his sister) were born into the Red Room. This is what they know. Penny is the witch in the family whereas Derek is more like a scruffy James Bond with some unexpected talents.

Lucy was one of my favorite side characters. She’s so cute and such a geek and doesn’t pick up on social cues. She’s grown up in the lab of the Red Room creating supernatural gadgetry for all the agents. She seems happy if a bit odd. I do wonder what she and Penny do on date night, since Lucy seems to never leave the lab….

While there is plenty of entertaining snark and jokes passed back and forth among the agents, there is this more serious underlying plot. First, there’s the unexpected reappearance of the Wazir and his henchmen. Then there is evidence that a mole is releasing critical information about the Red Room to outsiders. Derek eventually picks up on the fact that some higherups at the Red Room think that mole might be him. As a test of sorts, he’s given a new partner (Shannon O’Riley) and they are sent to question Derek’s ex-wife Cassandra. This plot kept me engaged the entire time because I wasn’t sure how things would turn out. I knew Derek wasn’t a mole but I wasn’t sure about Shannon or Penny or Cassandra. The story kept me guessing and I really like that.

Shannon is a bundle of mysteries. She’s assigned to Derek out of the blue and he’s immediately suspicious of her and whoever arranged for her to be his partner. Still, she’s efficient and pleasant company. As the story progresses, Derek learns some of her secrets and, for the most part, these revelations just make him more wary of her. Still, there’s this sexual tension between the two that make for some entertaining conversations, in or out of the locker room.

Battling the Wazir was more difficult than Derek expected. I really liked that the story started off with a cocky Derek but as one misjudgment or mishap after another occurs, Derek becomes more cautious. The man is trainable! While I was expecting a higher body count, I was pleased that several of my favorite characters made it out alive (if not unscathed). I look forward to seeing what happens next in this series.

I received a free copy of this book.

The Narration: Jeffrey Kafer was a great pick for this book. He makes a really good Derek Hawthorne. I also loved his snarky voice for Penny and his excited, geeky voice for Lucy. His Irish accent for Shannon started off a little rough but quickly smoothed out. He pulls off the humor so well! show less

The Old ones rose more than 100 years ago and humanity dwindled and fractured in their struggle to survive. John Henry is a highly trained ranger for one of the last ‘civilized’ cities. However, he lost his friends and his sanity (temporarily) while battling a one-time friend who had gone over to worshiping the Old Ones. Now he seeks vengeance for his dead friends and his own lost future.

This was a wonderful mix of wild weird west, post-apocalyptic, and creature feature. John Booth is an show more intense man and it was great to live this story through his character. Also, just a side note, it’s refreshing to have the main hero be non-Caucasian. Hooray for diversity in SFF! OK, so back to John. The story starts off with him and his small group of rangers heading out to find several children who had been kidnapped by Cthulhu-monster worshipers. Things go very, very wrong. John wakes up while being interrogated with his memory all fuzzy. Yeah, that sucks.

John goes on a quest of sorts to find out if all his ranger buddies are dead and to regain his lost memories. Specifically, he’s hunting for Jessica who was the last ranger standing with him before everything went blank. He needs the help of a skilled torturer, Mercury, if he’s going to be successful. John gets a few brief moments with his estranged wife Martha throughout the story. Then there is also an ex-lover of sorts that he and Mercury come upon later in the story. I really enjoyed the main female characters – they were so diverse and written so well. However, nearly all the ladies in this story had some sort of sexual/romantic interest or tie to John. I felt that was a little silly, but it was a very minor part of the story so I won’t let it detract from my enjoyment of the tale.

The Old Ones were gooey and deadly and scary and awe-inspiring. Phipps did a great job with these creatures from the beyond. There’s your typical squidhead Cthulhu-looking monsters, horrible bat-winged flyers, and things that defy description but the characters have to describe anyway. I want to see these things but not feel their wrath, so it’s a good thing I have John’s story to enjoy.

There’s plenty of action scenes but they are spaced out well with scenes that touch on dark humor or on deeper things. It’s not just humans versus the Old Ones but also human versus human all too often. There’s slavery and bigotry and government assigned marriages. Phipps has the start of a whole world to explore here. I especially liked Richard the ghoul. He brought in humor but also fed on corpses. No one’s perfect.

The story kept me guessing right up to the end. I really didn’t know if John would persevere. After all, the title does have the word ‘armageddon’ in it. I was definitely attached to John and several of the other characters so I really did care how things turned out. I was very satisfied with the ending and I am hoping Phipps gives us another story set in this world.

I received a free copy of this book.

The Narration: Jeffrey Kafer did a great job with this book, as I expected he would. He’s got the right voice for the main character, John. I also like his female voices, especially for Mercury in this book. She doesn’t have an ounce of tact and asks such personal questions so straightforwardly. He’s great at imbuing the characters with emotion as well. show less

There’s an obvious motif and plot element exerting a gravitational pull on any story about Shub-Niggurath, H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic personification of fertility. Somebody is going to end up on an altar in the woods surrounded by cultists and strange creatures. Some of these stories end up there; others skirt that destination, and others avoid it altogether.

Fertility and reproduction aren’t just viewed with ambivalence in our age of Malthus, modernity, and feminism. After all, Lovecraft show more depicted the dark cult of Shub-Niggurath as an ancient one. Reproduction can come from rape or romance. Families can be forced or fostered with love, children a joy or a burden. It’s that duality that leads to so many stories here having a more varied range of emotions than what you’d expect in a Mythos anthology.

For his part, C. T. Phipps in his “Foreword” sees Shub-Niggurath as one of Lovecraft’s “rare female characters”. He also argues that Lovecraft seemed to have a particular fondness for her. I’m not sure about that, but I’d agree that Lovecraft’s general disinterest in sex may account for his deity being taken up more by his Mythos followers than him though Phipps notes you can see the Mother of a Thousand Young as an object of unspoken worship in several Lovecraft stories. She’s a figure terrifying to some but also having an appeal for some women which, he says, puts a “slightly more witchy edge to things” than in the proceeding Books of Cthulhu.

Since there’s a structure to the anthology, I’ll look at the stories in order.

Yes, there is an altar in the woods in Phipps’ “Prologue: The Mother of a Thousand Stories”. Our narrator is looking forward to learning about the ancient stone ruins on Sentinel Hill. Maybe even more, he’s looking forward to some fornication under the moonlight with his refreshingly uninhibited guide Asenath Waite. (She’s so sexy in those male clothes!) But then the knife comes out. The question, of course, is whose consciousness is riding Waite’s body at this point in its life.

I haven’t read all of David J. West’s #SAVANT series, but I’ve enjoyed the ones I have more than this installment, “Mother of Darkness”. It’s a perfunctory tale of Porter Rockwell and Elizabeth Dee in the wastes of the Ottoman Empire circa 1875. Their zeppelin is downed and, not so coincidentally, three local women approach them offering aid in exchange for their help in retrieving a treasure stolen by an archaeologist. West avoids a full embrace of that obvious plot destination only by virtue of the desert setting

David Hambling’s “A Drive in the Goat Woods” features intrepid book acquirer and occult wary Captain Cross from his Stubbsverse. He’s surprised that his bookish and pale friend Cranley has emerged from his study and taken up motoring in a spiffy new car and wants Cross’ help in a quest for a book. It’s a collection of names whose souls have been pledged to the Devil. Said contract pledges not only the signatories’ souls but their descendants’ too. A woman of Cranley’s acquaintance is one of those descendants. The decidedly worldly Cross smells a set-up especially when Cranley’s transformation stems from his engagement to that woman. Cross’ guesses who it is, a woman he’s had his own encounter with.

It’s a long story that struck me as jauntier in tone than Hambling’s usual despite the dangers in the Goat Wood where, yes, an, an altar awaits. And the emotional revelations and denouement also struck me as something different for the Stubbsverse. Different but good.

How you react to Tim Mendees “Hollow Dollies” is going to depend on how much you like mixing horror with its type of humor. It’s part of Mendees’ Eugene Angove series which has been described as P. G. Wodehouse crossed with H. P. Lovecraft. Angove’s gardener is lured to a grisly fate in the nearby woods. The horrific images of what the Shub-Niggurath cult has been up to there are memorable. However, the identity of the cultists is pretty predictable. On the other hand, Mendees takes the trouble to provide some credible motivations for them in the context of the 1920s.

As I’ve said in previous reviews, I’m warming up to the Andrew Doran series from Matthew Davenport. However, I haven’t all of it, and I felt I was missing some of the context for “Andrew Doran and the Blessings of the Black Goat”. Still, I liked it. As with many of the authors in the book, Shub-Niggurath’s connection to fertility is linked to family. Here Doran reconnects with his sister Mary who is undergoing some significant changes in her life the least of which involves her job as an elementary school teacher.

The siblings decide to recapture the old days of the family camping out and head for a cabin in the Adirondacks. An acquaintance of theirs, who has been an ally in some of Andrew’s fights against dark forces, provides the cabin but warns them that some strange things are going on in the woods. And, indeed, there are, a point emphasized by a goat trying to batter the cabin door in. The ending is ambiguous in what it portends and, presumably, points to future developments in the series. But the Dorans’ relationship is more central to the story than the cult in the woods.

The devotees of Shub-Niggurath don’t have to restrict themselves to gatherings in the woods. They can be a family, a lifestyle, a cult that breaks up your real family. That’s the theme of Jessi Vasquez’s’ “Blessed Be Her Children”, Liriope, seemingly a teenager, gets a package from her Aunt Rachel when she gets home from school. The cover illustration, a beautiful horned woman with furry legs and cloven hooves, seems vaguely familiar as does the book. Inside is a journal from her mother Cassidy. Liriope’s memories of her mother and Aunt Jude are vague. Her father simply says they ran away to join some church.

The book reveals Cassidy as a woman in 2021, fighting a custody battle for Liriope against her abusive ex-husband. Her relationship with her older sister Jude, something like a surrogate mother once upon a time, is complex but close. But it’s a relationship that will fray because this isn’t exactly a diary of Cassidy’s. She’s just one woman who has written entries directly addressed to the Mother, an entity Cassidy was introduced to when Her sect’s Tarot reading app appeared on Cassidy’s phone. Things will turn on Cassidy’s ignorance of her sister.

On first reading, I didn’t like this story much. I thought it had undertones of anti-men feminism and anti-natalism. I attributed this to Vasquez’s as a self-described “queer writer”. But that’s the advantage of making notes. I still think some of the opening Cassidy diary entries are too long and one of the details of the magic in the story is underdeveloped, but there’s more subtly and ambiguity here than I first appreciated in the depiction of Cassidy’s ex-husband and Jude’s whole attitude toward reproduction. It’s a flawed story, but, overall, a successful one.

It didn’t take me long to become annoyed with Patricia Macomber’s “Soulless Gods”. Why do we have to spend so much time with boys digging in the woods at first? And why do we have to keep going back to them when we’ve got Dr. Joshua Lewis visiting Dr. Edmund Drake – disgraced medical researcher – to get a cure for Lewis’ wife’s leukemia? But I soon got over my annoyance and came to quite enjoy this story which covers Drake’s own unique relationship to the Mother of a Thousand Young and does macabrely link the two threads at story’s end.

Macomber’s tale completely avoids the motif of sacrifice in the woods and so does Andrea Pearson’s “A Thousand Young”, The Thomases, Emma and Peter, are desperate for a child. Everything has failed. But the online rumor mill has pointed them to a doctor in Providence who can work miracles. And a baby results. A perfect one. And then Emma gets pregnant again. And again. And again. And again. What do you expect when you consult Dr. Keziah Mason? You could quibble that the medical establishment and officialdom in general should take a greater notice of things than they do, but you could say that about many horror stories. This is an effective, memorable story.

Phipps has a lot of stories in this book, and I wonder if that points to fewer writers taking up its subjects, but they all work. “None Shall Inherit the Earth” is a prequel to his Cthulhu Armageddon series and is as grim as you would expect. Our narrator is Peter Booth traveling through the wasteland of Massachusetts with his daughter Samantha a couple of years after the Great Rising when the Great Old Ones returned to Earth. They are remarkably unsuited to be survivors. Peter is diabetic only kept alive by Samantha’s help in scrounging sugar. Rather difficult since she’s wheelchair bound. Peter silently agrees with Samantha’s proclamation that it would have been better if they hadn’t survived the apocalypse.

Things get worse when Peter wakes one morning to find their camp ransacked and Samantha gone with her wheelchair left behind. A young girl – well, a girl with furry legs and horns – shows up offering help. She’s the Black Maiden to the Mother. It serves her own ends and amusement to point Peter to the Shub-Niggurath cult that kidnapped Samantha. Off he goes to be overpowered and caged.

Eric Malikyte’s “The Mother’s Gift” starts with familiar setup: a single mom flees her abusive ex-husband and domineering father for a new life. The mother, our narrator, is Ward with a five-year old son, Jacob. She’s fled to Caprae Island somewhere in the Atlantic. There she runs a not very successful antique shop and gets some unwanted attention from a customer, Chester, that creeps her out. She also comes to the attention of the local church and its fearsome and equally creepy matriarch Agatha. Ward has acquired an idol that interests the cult and which Agatha claims is a million years old. The commercial enticements of the church and more encounters with Chester pull at Ward. She thinks she resists, but the journal her therapist has asked her to keep says otherwise. Increasingly, Ward’s perceptions and memories start to disintegrate. Ward may be dominated by men past and present, but, if Shub-Niggurath represents the feminine force, there’s no salvation from that quarter either in this story whose often nightmarish quality works

Phipps’ “Beyond the Gardens of Good and Evil” takes place between his novels The Tower of Zhaal and The Tree of Azathoth. Dr. Brianna Lethder shows up at the Wages of Sin bar co-owned by Sheriff John Booth and his lover Mercury. Brianna is improbably well-dressed and clean. She’s also remarkably perky and patronizing and insulting about humanity. Booth doesn’t trust her for a moment and quickly realizes she’s a Yith riding in a human body. Brianna wants their help in returning to Project: EDEN, a project started in the 1960s. Using Yith technology, it is a trans dimensional space where humanity can live and may be of use to the Yith since they never foresaw the Great Rising that would bring the Great Old Ones back to Earth.

Brianna offers hope to Booth that he can learn to manage his shapeshifting powers and occult knowledge to Mercury. She also says EDEN offers salvation for the human race. Booth doesn’t think it can be saved. Mercury does. On arrival at EDEN, we find out just what Brianna is really up to and just how much of a rogue Yith she is. Thematically, this serves as a counterpoint to “None Shall Inherit the Earth” in its perspective on the struggle for survival.

Phipps’ “Epilogue: Black Goat Goddess” picks up the story of his earlier “Prologue”. It links its events to those in Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” and develops Phipps’ contention that Shub-Niggurath, in all her fearsome drive and power, possesses enough human attributes to make her the most sympathetic deity in Lovecraft’s pantheon.

Identified as a “bonus story”, Phipps’ “The Maltese Cthulhu” (said to take place during the events of his The Tree of Azathoth) is relatively light hearted for a Cthulhu Armageddon story. The story seems constructed around a joke in the last line, but it’s a joke that works. As the title indicates, it’s a PI story with John Booth working as a detective in the Dreaming City. He’s approached by the beautiful Marceline de Russy to retrieve a Cthulhu idol. He doesn’t trust her for a moment but finds himself compelled to pursue the matter. Soon he’s meeting with the Crampton sisters, members of a sorority devoted to Shub-Niggurath, who have the idol.

The anthology’s writers usually overcome the more restricted possibilities of the subject matter. If you liked previous Books of Cthulhu, you’ll like this on,e and Mythos devotees will find something of interest. show less

Have you seen the Yellow Sign?

Well, you’re going to, a lot, in this book. And that’s not a bad thing.

As someone notes in the “Foreword”, Hastur is one of the most nebulous gods of the Cthulhu Mythos. That’s partly because he passed through other hands before H. P. Lovecraft took him up. He was introduced by Ambrose Bierce in “Haita the Shepherd”. Robert W. Chambers used him as well as Bierce’s land of Carcosa in his The King in Yellow. Lovecraft never concentrated on Hastur show more in any story. So, the writers here use Hastur in several ways and mostly in the vein of Chambers and not Lovecraft.

C. T. Phipps’ “Weird Tales with Randolph Carter” is thoroughly Lovecraftian though. This Randolph Carter is a pulp writer competing with some other unnamed writer to fictionalize events around Arkham. Carter’s rich and occult-obsessed friend Harley Warren has returned from India with a copy of the Book of Hastur. He’s decoded it and hyped to go to Florida to check out a tomb. He drags Carter along and the events of Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” ensue. Here, though, Carter comes home to find that book waiting for him on his desk. Maybe Harley sent it. Maybe his “new master” did. In any case, the rest of the anthology seems to be tales from that book.

We were promised pulp action, and Phipps’ “Blood Eagle” delivers. It’s a medieval sword-and-sorcery story with our not terribly bright – but greedy – hero Harald Bjornson fleeing after the Viking raiding party his brother Nordi put together was undone in a mutiny. Harald finds himself hungry and on the run on a wooded island where he encounters an ancient monk in a smelly, yellow robe. Sure, he could kill the monk and take his food. He’s a Christian, after all, and Harald doesn’t like Christians. But the monk has a proposal. The island, which belongs to the Lord of Shepherds, is inhabited by some heretics who need killing. If Harald helps him kill them, they’ll be gold, a ship, and maybe a slave girl that was set to be sacrificed. Harald agrees. But the slave woman, the heretics, and the monk are not what they seem.

Naturally, the World War One setting of Tim Mendees’ “La Compaigne Maudite” predisposes me to liking it. Our hero Captain Eugene Angove is waiting to take part in the Big Push because the Battle of the Somme is ongoing. Not that Angove really wants to be in the trenches. An archaeologist before the war and a fan of drink and drugs back in his manor, he’s not the military type. But his father, who very much is, signed him up, and there he is. His superior, Captain Carrington, really doesn’t like Angove which is especially awkward because Carrington is his brother-in-law.

But Carrington has a solution to their problems. He’s sending Angove to a behind-the-lines unit of mining engineers operating out of a disused chateau. They are, after all, missing a commanding officer since he went AWOL But Angove finds no mining going on but a lot of slack or soldiers acting weird. One even carved himself up with strange signs on his body. And why are all the portraits in the house holding a book called Le Roi en Jaune? Why was the vanished officer so obsessed with translating something? Mendees inventingly twists the idea of Hastur as a shepherd god to fit the times.

One of the regulars from David Hambling’s Stubbsverse shows up at “To Play the King”. Gun toting bookseller Captain Cross is approached by his honorary niece Cassie to unload some books that she and her friend Milly found in the house they just bought. Not all that valuable, it turns out – at least the two they have. But some rambunctious bicycle factory apprentices next door have been paying the young women unwanted attention and “borrowed” another book. Going next door, Cross finds a group of “lost boys” led by their Peter Pan, one talented, if amateur, thespian named Chambers. The book is The King in Yellow, and Cross has to pull one of his revolvers to get it back. Cross’ hope that Chambers interest in the play and Cassie won’t lead to trouble comes to naught. He even consults with Harry Stubbs for tactical advice. We also meet The Turk, Cross vowed enemy and competitor in the book trade.

It’s another winning Hambling story, and the highest compliment I can pay it is that it put me in mind of Brian Stableford’s Auguste Dupin series. As in that series, literary works can encode secrets and have magical powers, and, Cross realizes, work by their own rules.

As I noted when talking about Tales of Nyarlathotep I’m warming more to Matthew Davenport’s Andrew Doran series as it gets grimmer and that continues with “Andrew Doran and the Masks of Flesh”.

What won’t academics do to keep the departmental budget from being cut? Well, as Doran, now Dean of Miskatonic University, finds out that doesn’t include staging the legendarily dangerous The King in Yellow. That’s the idea of theatrical department head Ruth Dodgson. She does know, he asks, that the play is associated with madness and that Carcosa is not a place you want to go? Au contraire. Carcosa is a place filed with artists and actors which sounds like utopia to Dodgson. And she’s already working on the play.

And it’s away to Carcosa, a disturbingly theatrical place where souls and identities are stolen and transferred to masks anyone can wear. And Doran will find himself bargaining with the King in Yellow on the drama of his future life and forced to make a hard decision.

Andrea Pearson’s “A Required Sacrifice” is a sequel to “Blackwood Relic” and relies on the same joke: our teenage hero Travis is remarkably unlucky in his choice of girlfriends. Here it’s one Cassie whose rich lawyer dad proudly represents the Hastur cult. Surely, argues Cassie, Travis would be a great choice to see its new theatrical production. And he could bring that two-tailed pet goat of his. Travis also has to deal with somebody sniffing around the family property and the library of his evil great-grandfather Algernon Blackwood. Pearson rings a second – but satisfying – joke when Travis sees that play.

By far the most horrifying and disturbing story in the book is Eric Malikyte’s “The Stranger”. In 2009, a naked man covered in some strange black substance is found wandering outside of Missoula, Montana. Dr. Webber of the Office of Extra-dimensional Intelligence (last seen in Malikyte’s “In Its Shadow”) puts him under hypnosis. He’s Eli Jones, a retired paleontologist, recently of Langville, Montana. He’s a widower whose wife death from cancer was particularly gruesome. In the local dial-up forum, Jones follows questions about strange salesmen going door-to-door selling computers – sometimes just hanging outside the door for hours. MIBs? Aliens looking to do an anal probe? By the way “Have you seen the Yellow Sign?”

But things go from odd to personally disturbing when Jones finds out his dead wife, an archaeologist, had a secret blog obsessed with the King in Yellow. And not just references to him in Bierce and Chambers but ancient myths and odd historical events. And then the neighbors start acting oddly, their houses glowing with yellow light, and Jones meets one of those salesman.

David Niall Wilson’s “The Feller in Yeller”, another one of his Old Mill, North Carolina stories featuring Cletus J Diggs, is a surprisingly – though not exclusively — benevolent version of Hastur. Randy Hemphill is an unpretentious but quite wealthy farmer devoted to tending his flock of sheep in a wooded grove. His family has been in the area since colonial days, and the grove has transplanted trees and soil from England. Every day, Randy offers up the same simple offering to Hastur every day.

And then, one night, the grove seems to change. Which is great for Randy since a beautiful woman shows up and not so great for a neighbor who is now compelled to approach the grove and stare slack-jawed at it for hours – though he can’t actually get inside. Cletus goes to investigate. He and Randy will find out Hastur can be different things for different people.

C. T. Phipps’ “The Pits of Hastur” wins the award for the pulpiest story in this anthology. (I mean that with all due respect. The Books of Cthulhu are supposed to be pulpy.) Why? Cause we’ve got that old pulp standby: gladiatorial games. Sheriff John Booth, hero of Phipps’ Cthulhu Armageddon series, visits Kuranes, master dreamer (first seen in Lovecraft’s “Celephaïs”) who can manipulate the stuff of the Dreamlands and has become a mad, immortal king. But Kuranes sees through Booth’s fraudulent identity. While he can mostly read Booth’s mind, he doesn’t know Booth wants the Eye of Hastur held by Kuranes. Or, at least, getting it is what Nyarlathotep told him he needed to do.

Kuranes makes him a deal: train his gladiators for the upcoming match with the Great Pasha of Leng’s champions and he’ll let him and his witchy girlfriend Mercury go. Besides, the prize of the games is the Eye of Hastur, and Booth really doesn’t want to see the Pasha get it does he? Naturally, for this series, things get pretty grim though there may be hope with the Amazonia Nybba of inhuman origins. She unexpectedly seems to become Booth’s lover when deprived of Mercury’s company. But, as you might expect, when the games begin after a year of training, Kuranes hasn’t been truthful. Is Booth going to have to unleash his inner shoggoth? This one ends on something of a cliffhanger but was enjoyable.

While I appreciated Eric Malikyte’s “The King in Court” taking the curse of The King in Yellow into a new medium –the world of online virtual reality games – and liked the briefly hinted at background to his story, I found the effects someone muted given that he repeats, with less effect, some of the style of his earlier “The Stranger”. The story involves three players trying out a new game. Real identities are unveiled, and the play goes way beyond the product description when an NPC shows up and tells them they’re not going to fight the King in Yellow. They’re just going to meet him in Carcosa. The tale did have a nice ending.

This is another satisfying installment in the Books of Cthulhu series. Obviously, fans of the King will want it as well as those following the various series represented. For the rest of you, Hastur’s tentacles are still offering delights. show less