Usually over at Night Shade Books, we show off a forthcoming book's cover well in advance of a its ship date. But poor Mall of Cthulhu got a little bit lost in the shuffle. Now, this one's less than two weeks away from shipping (along with Tim Lebbon's Bar None), and not only that, it's as good as it looks.


Coming April 30, 2009

A decade ago, college student Laura Harker was saved from a fate worse than death at the hands (and fangs) of a centuries-old vampire priestess and her Satanic minions. Her rescuer, an awkward, geeky folklore student named Teddy, single-handedly slew the undead occupants of the Omega Alpha sorority house, spurred into heroic action by fate itself, inexorably intertwining his and Laura's destinies.

After navigating her way through law school, Laura is now a junior FBI agent assigned to the Bureau's Boston office. Unfortunately, she finds her job involves more paperwork than adventure. Ted, on the other hand, has spent the past decade perfecting the ultimate latte, and works as a barista in a nearby corporate chain coffeehouse named for a character in Moby Dick.

When Ted stumbles onto a group of Cthulhu cultists planning to awaken the Old Ones through mystic incantations culled from the fabled Necronomicon, calling forth eldritch horrors into an unsuspecting world. He and Laura must spring into action, traveling from Boston to the seemingly-peaceful suburbs of Providence and beyond, all the way to the sanity-shattering non-Euclidian alleyways and towers of dread R'lyeh itself, in order to prevent an innocent shopping center from turning into... The Mall of Cthulhu.

Trade Paperback 978-1-59780-127-0
240 Pages $13.95

One of the down sides to traveling with the best-dressed publisher in the room is that I, occasionally, start to feel a bit self-conscious about my own appearance. Thing is, I'm not the type to carry a closet with me, not the type to wear a different colored zoot suit every day. No, I'd rather be comfortable: pair of jeans, T-shirt, boots. It's that blue-collar, rock-and-roll aesthetic that fits me best. But still...

Once in a while...

Like yesterday afternoon. I'm working the dealers room, chatting people up, selling books. A diminutive old man comes up to the table. He's an odd-looking fellow, but I can't seem to put my finger on why. He's wearing a brown suit, frayed sleeves, easily thirty years past fashion. Maybe forty. His shirt is yellow, his tie greenish. He's fascinated with The Lurker in the Lobby, our cinematic guide to H. P. Lovecraft. He talks of many things, not cabbages and kings, but the Night Gallery adaptation of "Cool Air" and the depiction of female characters in Lovecraft adaptations. He's a fan of the former, but not the latter, complaining that adding a "romantic element" to the stories somehow spoils them.

He's a fanboy, granted, a fanboy of an earlier generation, so I smile, nod, laugh at the appropriate points. He has that maladroit fanboy expertise, he knows his Lovecraft trivia, but even so, there's something odd about him. His eyes seem two different shapes. His neck pulses, rhythmically, as he talks. And that accent, East Coast, not New York, not Boston, but... Did he just ribbit? "So, where are you from?" I ask, making conversation.

"Inns... er, Providence," he says. And then he makes the personal appearance comment. "You don't look like a publisher."

I shrug. "I'm more of an editor," I answer.

He tilts his head, focusing on me with the larger of his eyes. "Naah," he croaks. "You look more like a publisher's garage man."

"Hmmmm..." I say, stroking my beard, puzzling out what "garage man" means. After all, we do run the 'Shade out of a garage... or does he mean automotive? I'd tell him to hit the road, but I know that if I tolerate him just a bit longer, he'll hand over twenty bucks for the copy of Lurker that he's been pawing, bending, clumsily mauling the pages of. Just a bit longer.

"Where are you guys out of," he asks. "Are you local?"

"San Francisco," I say.

"Oh, I love San Fran. I was there in '68, I was in the..." he pauses, produces a guttural sound. "In the navy. I was stationed on Treasure Island. Before they bulldozed everything, put in low-income housing. Those people, you know, those people. Nothing but crime and drugs and..." He bends the cover of the book he's holding, creasing it.

Just a few more moments, I think. Just buy the book and leave. I nod.

"Those people," he says again. "They're just not like us."

"Well, that's very interesting," I say. I want him to leave. "So, it's twenty for the book, anything else I can get you?"

"No," he croaks, setting the book down and fishing in his pockets. "That's going to do it." He hands me a twenty dollar bill. It smells of the sea. He picks up the book again, clutches it to his chest. His fingers, I notice, are webbed. "Thank you," he says.

"Thank you," I respond. "It was... fascinating talking to you." Later, I would spot him in the disco room, snapping ground-level photos of passing girls in skirts, confirming that the creepy feeling he gave me was warranted on many levels. But for the moment, I was happy just to watch him disappear into the crowd.

So, should I step it up? Should I start wearing suits to these things?

...when one of the first things you add to the spellchecker on a freshly-formatted computer is the word "Cthulhu."

Titus Crow: The Burrowers Beneath, the Transition of Titus Crow by Brian Lumley

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fritz Leiber, creator or the best-known pair of adventurers in all of fantasy literature (and no stranger to the Lovecraftean pastiche) was no great fan of Brian Lumley’s The Burrowers Beneath, the first of the two novels collected in Titus Crow, Volume 1. “This is not just science fiction,” wrote Leiber in an essay published in Fantastic, June 1975 (and reprinted in Fritz Leiber and H. P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark). “It is science fiction of the cosmic-war-of-the-gods sort which Lovecraft most detested.” And while Leiber certainly makes his point, he misses what The Burrowers Beneath actually aspires to be, a Haggardian adventure, completely over the top, utilizing the tropes and inventions of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror as if they were the animatronic ghouls and goblins hopping up and down in the path of a careening ghost train. Told primarily in an epistolary style, The Burrowers Beneath is the tale of Titus Crow, an occult adventurer comprised of equal parts Abraham Van Helsing, Sherlock Holmes, and Dr. Who, and his Watson, frequent narrator (through journal entries) Henri-Laurent de Marigny, as they take on the Elder Gods (known here as the CCD, or “Cthulhu Cycle Deities”) in mano-a-mano combat, the stakes being the universe itself. It’s silly, sure, but a good enough ride that one is inclined to forgive the sort of arch-silliness that comes when Crow’s home, Blowne House, is literally blown apart by wind elementals at the conclusion of The Burrowers Beneath. References to Lovecraft’s locales, stories, and characters abound, as do evil, squid-headed (and no-headed) alien monsters intent on unleashing cosmic destruction. Leiber may have been more entertained by the second half of Titus Crow, Volume 1, the novel The Transition of Titus Crow, which derives as much from Lovecraft’s Dunsany-inspired dream fantasies as The Burrowers Beneath did his pullulating pantheon. With The Transition of Titus Crow, Titus is elevated to a sort of fantasy superman: he flies through space and time in a coffin-shaped clock, fights dinosaurs, is reassembled by robots, rides dragons, and makes love to a beautiful goddess. It is a kitchen sink approach to fantasy, one that works almost in spite of itself. While nowhere near as engaging as The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow effectively raises the stakes, introducing a pantheon of good deities to balance Cthulhu’s evil, and bridging the first novel with the four which follow.


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Continuing the Cthulhu Mythos theme I currently seem to be invoking, I cracked into Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark (an Xmas gift from Jennifer's mother) late last night, and have spent much of today plodding through its pages (I'm not a fast reader, what can I say?). I'm still in the first section, selected letters (circa 1936) from H. P. Lovecraft to Fritz and Jonquil Leiber, and am finding the experience both fascinating and revelatory, particularly the writing advice that Lovecraft (a year before his death in 1937) gives to Leiber (including an in-depth deconstruction of Leiber's "Adept's Gambit," the first of his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tales), and in the titles of stories and books that he recommends the Leibers read (of course, I have my own reactions to these recommendations, such as wondering why I don't own a copy of Arthur Machen's "The White People."). Lovecraft is considerably humanized by the content of these letters, and his comments regarding Fritz Leiber's Shakespearean actor father, Fritz Leiber, Sr., are downright fannish. In spite of a few textual glitches that suggest this volume was hastily assembled and only cursorily copy edited (no reflection on editors Ben J. S. Szumskyj and S. T. Joshi, I'm sure), I'm rather impressed, and am looking forward to the next two sections, a sampling of Fritz Leiber's Lovecraft-influenced stories and poems and a collection of Leiber's essays on Lovecraft.

A Colder War by Charles Stross

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
1980's Cold War paranoia meets the Cthulhu Mythos in this novelette by Charles Stross. Unsurprisingly, the Great Old Ones and the Reagan era mesh seamlessly, providing fertile ground for Stross to extrapolate a "present" (circa 1984) in which the events of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness actually happened, making the late 20th Century a far, far stranger era. Loaded with detailed references to Cold War politics, military hardware, and, of course, Lovecraft's pullulating pantheon, "A Colder War" is an alternate history/mythos mashup well worth reading.


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Straight to Darkness by Ken Asamatsu

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’d heard good things about Kurodahan Press’s Lairs of the Hidden Gods, a four-volume original anthology series marrying the talents of many of Japan’s hottest horror writers and H. P. Lovecraft’s oft-pastiched, oft-parodied, but only rarely equaled Cthulhu Mythos. Straight to Darkness, the third book of the cycle, makes a compelling argument for the series as a whole. Sandwiched in between an introductory essay by Robert Price that compares Lovecraft’s elder gods with the rampaging daikaiju of Toho’s Godzilla films and a closing essay examining Lovecraft’s influence on heavy metal music are seven tales of terror, each one translating Lovecraft’s themes of alienation, mysticism, and cosmic horror to a uniquely Japanese perspective. Standouts are Sano Shiro’s “Horror Special,” an ambiguous tale of strange happenings on the set of a television adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror”; Kobayashi Yasumi’s “C-City,” in which the world’s top scientists attempt to battle the machinations of the Great Old Ones; Aramata Hiroshi’s “The Road,” a chilling story following a young Japanese businessman (and Lovecraft fan) as he walks the streets of Providence, hoping to place himself in the footsteps of the master, but finding himself, through the perverse peculiarities of time and space, somewhere else entirely; and, of course, the title story, Tomono Sho’s “Straight to Darkness,” an action-packed splatterpunk showcase featuring a Deep One, a Ghoul, and more Mythos cameos than you could safely shake a shoggoth at. For fans or J-Horror and Lovecraft’s legacy, Straight to Darkness: Lairs of the Hidden Gods, Volume Three not only illuminates a previously-unexplored corner of the Cthulhu Mythos, but does so with style, panache, and aplomb. I, for one, plan to investigate the remaining three volumes.


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