Darrell Schweitzer

This new anthology of original work has a simple postulate - that Cthulhu and his monstrously indifferent hordes have arrived and that humanity has to die or survive in their midst.

After that, the writers have been left to their imaginations and, as you might expect, the results are highly variable, crossing genres and even the two traditions of the mythos (orthodox Lovecraftian and heterodox, and tainted to us purists, Derlethian).

The best are short and keep to the essence of Lovecraft - a show more sense of unease or cosmic horror at the world turned upside down and a hint of psychological states that are mad in form but real in content. There is a fair anount of the visceral but none of the writers over-indulge and the one that is most brutal in this respect (Ian Watson's) is fully justified by the story line.

Watson's has a pure Lovecraftian title, 'The Walker in the Cemetery' and others of this quality include contributions by Mike Allen with his psychological nightmare 'Her Acres of Pastoral Playground' as well as a tale of true spiritual horror that will unnerve anyone with faith in religion in Will Murray's 'What Brings The Void'.

There is a bleak but thought-provoking tale of mutating human resistance in the cracks of the new world from Jay Lake in 'Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names' and a work of true imaginative cosmic horror in 'The Holocaust of Ecstasy' from that old master Brian Stableford.

Indeed, only Stableford thinks his way with any depth into the Mythos, creating an extension of it that is a cogent update of Lovecraft's own vision, not dwelling on the horror of pain and suffering caused by the monsters but, like Will Murray, on the utter cold indifference of Lovecaft's creations to what we aspire to or want.

The underlying horror of the Mythos is that forces out there are not our enemy, we are just in the way. It is our projection of what we do to flies, wasps, slugs and cockroaches. 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport' (King Lear).

Others are good enough anthology material - solid work by Don Webb that echoes Stephen King (a good mix of the two masters' styles in 'Sanctuary'), Matt Cardin's noble attempt to get inside the skin of a theologian of the new regime, a traditional tale that slips over the edge into acceptability from John R. Fultz and a jolly bit of adventure with no side to it from Gregory Frost.

Laird Barron's ambitious but ultimately over-written 'Vastation' gets an honourable mention for effort - this could be a seriously good book with some discipline but cannot be contained within a short story.

As a footnote, in a book with remarkably little contemporary commentary and thankfully no obvious fashionable eco-think, Don Webb neatly manages to bring the current and recent scandal of priestly paedophilia into play but the instinct of the writers is to make the stories highly personal and familial or get lost in Golden Age tropes or accept that the new world of Cthulhu can have little concern with the old and will present us with existential challenges that place our current concerns as trivial.

The interesting psychological aspect of the anthology is that, faced with radical cosmic horror, the story tellers tend to let the destruction of humanity be pictured like a Hollywood disaster movie and then move on, consciously or subconsciously, quickly and far away from the social towards family, buddy and individual responses.

The irony, of course, is that Cthulhu's indifference results in a form of Stirnerism in which individuals shrink back into their existential selves with concern only for the remnants immediately around them. Is this what would happen if Professor Hawking is right and the aliens that we may attract one day are powerful and malign? Are we not, after all, more like rats than ants?

On the other hand, a few writers (who I will have the good manners not to name) are prolix and obscure in that way that only some self-consciously literary Americans can be or are just plain lazy, predictable, obvious and dull while the closing 'hopeful' Derlethian space opera (well hopeful, if the billions that currently make up the human race survives as a boy, an autistic girl, a tired mum and a dog, all of course from an American professorial family), which I hope was written in ironically pedestrian style with a deliberate lack of imagination, should not be in there at all. The least interesting always seem to be the longest tales.

In other words, like all new and original anthologies, it is a mix of talent with diamonds amongst the rough. Recommended for hard line Cthulhu addicts but the rest of humanity may be puzzled by the in-references or depressed by the sheer hopelessness of much of the best content. show less

Brother Schweitzer here offers the only contemporary published tome of Elder Filking of which I am aware. It is a veritable thingsend to someone like me, who, though steeped in the lore and unmentionable fluids of Those Who Shall Return, has never had the pious pleasure of attending one of the blasphemous conventicles organized by the Reverend Robert Price under the aegis of the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast.

The quality of the lyrics is pretty high. My particular favorite is the "Hymn to show more Yog-Sothoth" to the tune Nun danket. (19) Alas, there are only ten hymns included, making it an inadequate resource for a regular congregation or choir. The madness undergirding our tenuous reality demands a more wide-ranging liturgical inventory. Given that all of the songs in this volume are of Brother Schweitzer's own invention, however, it is a reasonable achievement. A more robust volume would draw on the exudations of a larger corps of scribes.

A notable error arises in connection with the hymn "An Eldritch Horror Is Our God." (15) While it does quite effectively expose the cosmic horror lying at the back of the German reformer's famous song, it is missing a line at the conclusion of each full stanza. (The text gives two stanzas printed as four.) I propose a one-line refrain to conclude each: "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!" Alternatively, the title itself "An Eldritch Horror Is Our God" scans adequately.

Allen Koszowski's illustrations are also quite suitable. show less

As one among innumerable collections of Lovecraftian short fiction, a couple of features distinguish the recent Cthulhu's Reign. First, all of the stories are new, evidently commissioned for this volume, with none garnered from zines and prior anthologies. Second, the unusual theme that they share is that of the Cthulhoid eschaton accomplished: the stars have been right, and humanity's domination of Earth is over and done with.

There are a total of fifteen stories, each by a different show more author. Most of them don't venture too far beyond the return of our alien landlords; only in a couple instances does the narrative comprehend events that follow the end of our history by more than a single generation of dispossessed humans. In at least a few cases, the packaging seems to work against the content--that is to say, the story might have had more dramatic force if the reader hadn't come to it already informed that the setting was "an Earth ruled by Cthulhu, or his minions (or even his enemies)" (per Schweitzer's introduction, 6). All of them show a distinct level of creativity beyond the ordinary Lovecraft pastiche. After all, while the wholesale return of the Old Ones is an invariable element of the mythos, HPL only actualized it in narrative once, in the brief, dream-inspired "Nyarlathotep" (1920).

The stories that do go further into the future than the immediate aftermath of the Old Ones' return are certainly the most exotic. I liked the surreal solipsism of Laird Barron's "Vastation," and Brian Stableford offers piquant food for thought (or is it thought for food?) in "The Holocaust of Ecstasy." In other standouts among the generally high-quality selections, I appreciated the well-informed Central Texas setting of "Sanctuary," as well as its wry blasphemous features that were surely imperative in a story written by Don Webb and dedicated to Robert Price. The most overtly theological entry is "The New Pauline Corpus" by Matt Cardin, which demonstrates even better than Webb's story how adaptable the human religious attitude really is. More pedestrian Cthulhu cultists feature in "Ghost Dancing" by the volume's editor, and in "The Seals of New R'lyeh" by Gregory Frost. The last couple of stories, "Nothing Personal" by Richard A. Lupoff and "Remnants" by Fred Chappell, both expand the context to an interplanetary scale, and tip the genre strongly toward science fiction.

The experience of reading these tales over the course of a week or so brought into relief for me the background sense of recent cataclysm that seems to be part of early 21st-century life, whether it's the 9-11-2001 events, hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, or the flood of Pakistan, it seems like the world has always just gone to hell. At one point, someone mentioned Houston in conversation, and I found myself mentally groping for the horrible event that had just befallen that city, before realizing with some relief that it was merely a passage from Cthulhu's Reign that I had mentally misfiled too closely to "fact." show less

This collection's theme is grim and simple. As predicted -- and prevented in many of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories, Cthulhu and the Old Ones once again dominate Earth.

Rape, transformation, and religion are themes that show up in several stories.

On a metaphorical level, a sort of intellectual rape - the forcible introduction of unwelcome, devastating knowledge into the mind - occurs in many a Mythos story. But, in two stories, Cthulhu commits a literal rape. A group of survivors show more find themselves trapped and experimentally winnowed down in an Italian necropolis after Cthulhu's return in Ian Watson's chilling, first person narrated "The Walker in the Cemetery". In John R. Fultz's "This Is How the World Ends", an Iraqi War veteran finds himself holed up in a mine as a horrible transformation is wrecked on the world outside.

Not exactly rape, but a gathering of horrible knowledge anyway, is the theme in Brian Stableford's "The Holocaust of Ecstasy". In this story, full of imagery that owes more to Clark Ashton Smith than Lovecraft, a biology professor from Miskatonic University, finds himself reincarnated into an alien ecosystem. Of course, Cthulhu's return is a time of transformation, and many stories take up that theme. In Jay Lake's "Such Bright and Risen Madness", a resistance movement secretly meets on a blighted, chilling Earth to hear of a new weapon which may free them from their masters, the Old Ones. Slowly transforming from "Innsmouth Syndrome", the narrator feels the almost forgotten stirrings of sexual desire when he meets the plan's architect. But he also encounters a figure from his past in a brilliant tale of despair and resolve. The hero of Mike Allen's "Her Acres of Pastoral Playground" inhabits a zone relatively safe from the Cthulhian horrors outside, but cosmic chaos still intrudes in unwelcome changes to his wife's body.

Of course cults and magical rites were frequently a feature of Lovecraft's own Mythos stories, but several authors here ambitiously take that religious element even further. The most stunning here is by a onetime religious scholar, Matt Cardin. "The New Pauline Corpus" logically, horrifyingly, weaves an account of the sights of a Cthulhu dominated Earth with the writings of a Protestant theologian to produce a melange of Christ and Cthulhu, Jerusalem and R'lyeh, a new, "less agreeable" Revelation. Don Webb's "Sanctuary" has a man sent on a mission, by a Catholic priest, to retrieve a special bible three years after Cthulhu has risen in the Pacific. The priest has some disturbing ideas about what man's new purpose on Earth is. Will Murray's "What Brings the Void" (sort of a sequel to his "The Sothis Radiant" in Miskatonic University) reinterprets the pantheon of the Mythos. A remote viewer from the National Reconnaissance Office is sent on a mission to see, in the normal way, what's going on in the zones of America controlled by the Old Ones and finds a another Catholic priest, but this one is preaching a strange new gospel of death. While the title of Darrell Schweitzer's "Ghost Dancing" alludes to a famous end-of-the-world cult, its hero is offered, by an old acquaintance, a chance to make himself useful to Earth's new masters.

Several stories are sort of off by themselves. Since it mentions Yuggoth and is written by Richard A. Lupoff, who used that same planet of Lovecraft in his brilliant "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone -- March 15, 2337", it's sort of a surprise that "Nothing Personal" is a rather standard tale of how an alien-human war breaks out and its resolution. Not a bad story but it doesn't have much of a Mythos feel to it. Fred Chappell's long "Remnants" also often seems, in its story of members of the Peaslee family pathetically living in caves to escape the Old Ones and their shoggoths, rather more like regular science fiction than a Mythos story. But there are elements of cosmic horror as the family decides to heed the telepathic message received by its autistic member.

A couple of stories are as blackly light hearted as the collection's theme will allow. Ken Asamatsu's "Spherical Trigonometry" has a wealthy Japanese businessman, his wife, and the narrator and his wife retreating to a safe house with no angles. In there, they hope to ride out the "Change". "The Seals of New R'lyeh" by Gregory Frost is sort of a cross between a hardboiled crime story and a Mythos story as two thieves look for a seal to magically expel Cthulhu from Earth in the ruins of New York City.

Two outliers of stories stand alone in their style and ambition. "The Shallows" by John Langan combines a family drama with imagery from Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and never explicitly mentions any of the standard Cthulhu props of blasphemous books and malevolent alien entities. Laird Barron's "The Vastation" is, I think, a solipistic tale of a time traveling religious leader who may just be the last real human on an Earth populated by androids in the wake of an alien invasion, massive genetic engineering, and racial purges. You may find yourself concluding, like me, that these stories don't quite work even after a second reading but still applaud the authors' imagination and ambition to combine cosmic horror and the trappings of the literary puzzle story.

This anthology is so good that I think even those unfamiliar with Lovecraft may like it even if oblivious to some of the nuances. It's getting a four instead of the perfect five because not every story was great but many were. show less