Brian M. Sammons

A decent collection of Cthulhu mythos stories taking place within some war-related context. Although the title might suggest the stories take place during World War I or World War II (or both), that’s not the case for most of them. Instead, we get a variety of times and places, including two set in the American Revolution, two in the Trojan War (one on each side), a Vietnam War story, a Cold War story or two, at least one set in a distant future war, and, I’m sure, several others I’m forgetting.

Having absorbed the Delta Green universe’s take in the mythos, many of these stories feel like they could take place in that world, or even be Delta Green ops themselves.

Unlike the DG universe, many of these stories end… well—at least for the immediate future if not for the main characters themselves. Generally, the mythos threats are being called up by the baddies, and we’re not especially sympathetic when things go wrong for them, but in some stories, mistakes are made, all sides suffer, and in some of the stories, some of the characters are, themselves, mythos creatures.… (mer)

A fairly slender volume containing sixteen stories of liturgical Yog-Sothothery, The Dark Rites of Cthulhu featured only four authors previously familiar to me, so I was grateful for the appended "About the Authors" info. The stories are reasonably solid throughout. Some do sort of stretch the category of ritual magic, such as one concerned with martial arts ("Of Circles and Rings" by Tom Lynch). A few are detective stories oriented around ritual murders. There is considerable variety of flavor within the "magic" field, encompassing voodoo, online cult recruitment, and stage magic, among others.

Most of these tales don't bother with Arkham and Lovecraft country, though some do, and a few even go so far as to include or reference specific characters from Grandpa Cthulhu's "ritual literature" (so-called by Michel Houellebecq). The Lovecraft stories that most conspicuously served as references in this assortment were "The Dunwich Horror" (of course) and "From Beyond."

"The Dark Horse" by John Goodrich is set in a stars-were-right post-apocalyptic regime of human dispossession. Edward Erdelac's story "Black Tallow" lost points from me initially by misspelling the name Aleister Crowley, but ultimately redeemed itself with a credible representation of pathological contemporary ceremonial magic, along with lovely Club Dumas bibliophile fan service.

I read this book slowly over several months, since there is no continuity from story to story. It's a decent collection of new weird fiction built around specialized themes that are of particular to interest to me, and I was satisfied by it.… (mer)

It is rare that collections are not a mix of quality, all but the very best having a few misfires. This is quite the opposite, a generally low standard of fiction with a couple of stand-out good stories, no great ones, and a few that are quite painfully bad. Often, the stories were just not very interesting, and reading to the end of even these short works often a slog. It must be said, I got the distinct impression that part of the issue was in the editing; several of the stories seemed to contain clumsy sentences or word usage of the sort that I'd have though an editor - or even a proofreader - would have picked up on.


Cthulhu Mythos stories are quite difficult to do well, having to get the right balance of weirdness and cosmic terror and hopeless dread, and the proliferation of Lovecraftian works due to ever increasingly popularity over the last few years suggests an even greater preponderance of tripe than the general run of fiction. Sadly, this volume does nothing to dispel that. One of the pleasures of a short fiction collection is finding authors to seek out in the future, but there are only a couple from this who I would even consider seeking out, and some that would actively put me off should I see them included in an anthology.… (mer)