William Meikle

While this isn’t my favorite kind of weird western, I think the most inventive ones are science fiction stories that don’t use time travel or aliens, I still found this story gripping and fast moving.

Meikle starts the action right away with a cavalry squad swept to another dimension where they are recruited in a fight to keep Satan imprisoned. Only one survives, Stevens, who is imbued with the weaponry and power of an angel and returns to our world.

The second viewpoint character is Joe show more Clancy. He’s a rancher with his wife Jessie, son Tommy, and hired hand and family friend Paddy Doyle. His ranch is on the brink of being foreclosed on; there is a drought, and he needs the cattle in good shape to make his mortgage payment. Meikle really makes you feel the plight of the Clancys all through this story.

Tommy discovers a spring except it’s really the source of an “infection”. The ghastly looking fish in the spring are only the beginning of horrors. Clancy immediately senses danger, but the rest of his family and Doyle eat the fish as do the townsmen.

Another viewpoint character is Isaac Prentice, musician and bouncer at the saloon in the town nearest the Clancy ranch.

The danger coming from that spring feels like a combination of the infection in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” and a zombie plague when the changed attack our heroes.

But more than bodies are at stake. The danger is also spiritual. People began to have seductive dreams of an underwater temple.

Things go from bad to worse when a gunslinger comes to town threatening to kill Prentice – as soon as said gunslinger is out of the local iron bar hotel.

There are the usual Meikle aspects which I like – Scotsmen, lots of smoking, whiskey, and music. Mention is made of “The Death of Sergeant George”, a song mentioned in other Meikle stories.

It’s a range war story, and the spread at stake is the whole world, and it’s another winning Meikle story. show less

I approached this one with some trepidation when I heard mountain trolls were the monster the S Squad faces this time. Was Meikle simply going to give us a version of the movie Trollhunter with Scottish commandoes?

I needn’t have worried. It was another of Meikle’s suspenseful S-Squad stories.

The squad is sent to Norway to sterilize traces of a joint Norwegian-British scientific project done after WWII lest it now prove politically embarrassing.

But, on the shores of a fjord, they find the show more project to create supersoldiers for the Cold War has left a living legacy. Meikle has an interesting science fictional explanation for the monster in this adventure. As with the previous S Squad installment, Operation: Loch Ness, we also get a sympathetic monster.

There's a quite surprising change of location about two-thirds of the novel showing Meikle continues to inject a lot of novelty into the formula for this series.

More than most of the S Squad stories, this one deals with military honor and the soldier’s duty to his comrades. It’s also more emotionally affecting at the end than the usual S Squad story. Soldiers aren’t just trained killers. They have ties to the outside world and their families like all of us. show less

The subtitle says “A Haunted House Book”. True enough, but this very enjoyable story has elements I don’t associate with haunted house stories: sweetness, sorrow, loneliness, friendship, and love.

John Fraser is a writer eager to make his mark, and he thinks he has the project to do it: a biography of his famous grandfather, Hugh Fraser. So he drags his wife Carole to a manor house isolated on the Scottish moors for a long weekend interviewing the man who knew his grandfather best, show more David Blacklaw.
In their heyday, in the 1950s and 1960s, Fraser and Blacklaw were worldwide celebrities, travelers, explorers, and champion wenchers. That all ended with Fraser’s death in 1968.

From the beginning of the story, Carole and John are rubbing each other wrong. Carole senses something in her bedroom. There are noises in the house’s library. Some strange man is walking about the foggy moors. A servant has his own story to tell. The enfeebled Blacklaw can’t or won’t reveal all he knows about Fraser’s life. The details of Hugh Fraser’s death don’t at all match the public records. And unknown records exist of that death.

This novella moves to a satisfying, unexpected end.

While Meikle’s fans will catch references to his some of his other stories, glimpses of his larger universe, those new to his work will find this a fine entry point.

I bought the kindle edition. However, if I had known it had several nice M. Wayne Miller interior color illustrations, I would have sprung for the paper edition. show less

The linked stories of this eponymous series, what Meikle has dubbed the “Meikle Mythos” are his most original work I’ve encountered. However entertaining his Lovecraft Mythos tales, monster stories, and Sherlock Holmes and Carnacki pastiches are, he’s playing in others’ sandboxes. He’s built his own with this series.

The series is built around houses. As Meikle says, “There are houses like this all over the world. Most people only know of them from whispered stories over show more campfires; tall tales told to scare the unwary. But some, those who suffer, some know better. They are drawn to the places where what ails them can be eased. If you have the will, the fortitude, you can peer into another life, where the dead are not gone, where you can see that they thrive and go on, in the dreams that stuff is made of.”

Not all these stories strictly follow that pattern though.

Dave Carlson, a burglar, singer in a pub, and narrator of The Job, is, as he frequently tells us from the beginning, an idiot. He’s not retarded. He’s just got bad judgement.

“Only a day ago, but one in which I’d lost my debt, found a job, thrown a dog in the river – and murdered two men, one of whom I had almost considered a friend.

“I figured that was enough excitement for one day.”

His problems start when, to pay gambling debts, he goes on a job with a friend to steal a book. But the burglary is foiled first by the strange sound of rustling paper in a country house near Glasgow and then by a burglar alarm.

And that sound of rustling paper continues in his head after he flees as well as a chant in Latin.

It seems Carlson has an affinity for that country house, and he learns that the worlds bordering a Sigil House do not hold just the dead.

It’s a tale of degradation and redemption that introduces Meikle’s series.

Broken Sigil is the most original thing I’ve read by Meikle, a clever mixture of his Sigil and Totem concept with The Maltese, guilt, grief, addiction, and devotion. It’s the fullest realization of the Meikle Mythos I’ve read yet though there are two full novels in this series that I haven’t read yet.

Narrator Joe Connors is a detective with the Internal Affairs Bureau of the New York City Police Department. He’s burnt out and still dealing with the death of his wife Brenda a year ago – after she told him she was having an affair with his best friend, another New York City cop named Johnny Provan.

Things start out peculiarly with Provan being shot dead by another policeman after Provan went crazy and pointed a gun at his fellow officer.

Investigating the why of this leads Connors to a strange house with strange residents. He learns Provan lived there. And, fantastically, he’s told that Provan was reconnected, somehow, with Brenda.

But Provan didn’t follow the rules of this Sigil House, and now there’s an intruder there.

Pentacle takes the series to the logical next step in developing its theme. In the two previous stories, we’ve learned that Sigil Houses have concierges to help the residents and protect the house. The hero of this story is John, one of those concierges, new to the job and with little training. That means he’s not exactly sure what to do when some road construction in Edinburgh seems to have disturbed something.

Besides an enjoyable development of his idea, Meikle throws in some references to William Hope Hodgson’s “The Hog” and either The Night Land or The House on the Borderland (whichever has black pyramids – I’ve read neither yet though hope to soon). The use of some nameless occultist’s “electric pentacle” is similar to Meikle’s Carnacki pastiche “The Larkhill Barrow”, and this is one of those tales where Meikle embeds, through a document, a story from the past. It’s not as original as Broken Sigil but still suspenseful and moving.

So, even if you’re not interested in Lovecraft related stories or Scottish commandos battling monsters or pastiches of Hodgson or Arthur Conan Doyle, this omnibus is worth checking out for a new concept in supernatural and weird fiction. show less