Crossroad Press, $2.99, ISBN 978-1952979392
Horror, 2021
Yog-Sothoth is an Outer God in the Cthulhu mythos, a deity with motives and goals that are not capable to be fathomed by mere adults. No one really knows what this fellow does or wants… well, aside from that one when he was summoned forth into this world to sire some monster brats in HP Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror.
Well, as the title would indicate clearly, this anthology is all about that charming fellow.
CT Phipps starts the show with The True Name of God. This is a solid anthology-starter, as it pits a Muslim assassin, taking a contract from a Jewish rabbi in a Crusades-torn land, against an undead Templar that knows secrets such no mere mortals should know. Faith will be tested, and there will also be some interesting philosophical what-ifs related to religion, faith, and zealotry in the context of the mythos.
This isn’t a long story, but it has struck the perfect balance involving exposition, introspection, and action.
Up next is David J West’s The Haunter of the Wheel. The author’s last name is West and this is a Western, heh. Our hero, the cowboy Porter Rockwell, is tracking a lost shipment of gold when he gets entangled in a strange and, of course, dangerous case of some kind of creature stalking the neighborhood and leaving a gristly trail of badly mangled corpses in its wake.
This is also an entertaining tale that combines cowboy hokum-pokum tropes with summoning-tentacles-beasties ones. I’m not sure whether the farcical nature of the denouement is intentional, as up to that point the tone of the story hadn’t struck me as over the top, but I have fun laughing at the villain’s melodramatic rants in that scene.
David Hambling’s The Ghost Door features Harry Stubbs, which I assume is the author’s protagonist in some series of which this story is a short detour for that fellow. This one is set in the early 20th century so Harry is of course a PI that gets tangled up in something straight out of Call of Cthulhu tabletop session.
This one has the misfortune to follow the previous two stories, because its slower pace and the author’s tendency to dwell so much on extraneous details make the story feel cumbersome to read. The author’s attempts at levity often come off as smug Buffy-speak instead, which doesn’t help matters.
Next up is another tie-in to an author’s ongoing series: Andrew Doran and the Forever Gate by Matthew Davenport. Who’s Andrew Doran? Well, from this story, he appears to be a vigilante-type that travels around the world to take down woo-woo threats to humanity. Anyway, it’s 1938 and he’s complaining about the Great War. Well, won’t he cheery in a few years time. He and some sassy lady Bethany find themselves embroiled in a lot of drama involving Yog-Sothoth, a gate, and a cray cray witch that he knows from the past.
This one plays out like I’m expected to know of events that have happened in the past—read the author’s past works that featured Andrew Doran, in other words—and the thing is, I haven’t read those things. Hence, I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of things here. Furthermore, this one also has cringe-inducing Buffy-speak, making it hard for me to take the whole thing seriously.
The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Dun WHAT? Horror by David Niall Wilson isn’t just a billboard for one series, it seems to be one for two series, as it says below the title: A Cletus J. Diggs Adventure Featuring Donovan DeChance.
Cletus J Diggs, trailer park hick and making no apologies for his life choices, has been around, seen many weird and even nightmarish things, and now he is content to be where and what he is. An acquaintance, Ben, approaches him when this story opens. Someone is stealing the cows in his ranch. He believes he almost saw a glimpse of a old, unmarked horse trailer that may be responsible for the disappearance of those cows, but he mysteriously felt drowsy and couldn’t make out any detail of that trailer when he tried to approach it.
It’s not just Ben’s ranch, the neighboring ranches are similarly affected, and their livelihood is stake because the insurance companies are not going to believe their story. So, he asks Cletus for help.
Meanwhile, one Donovan DeChance, who seems to be a scholar of the occult, somehow gets his hands on the infamous book of Cthulhu woo-woo, The Necronomicon, and now one Jedediah Whateley (yes, that bloke from The Dunwich Horror) wants it. Because Jedediah says he is from Old Mill, Donovan’s spider senses tingle and he contacts Cletus for assistance.
As far as advertisements go, this one is far more successful than the last two, in that the pacing, dialogues, and action are all better. Sure, these characters crack one-liners one and now, but they never come off as smug or obnoxious like the characters in the previous two stories. The whole thing is quite predictable, really, and it’s pretty evident that the missing cattle and Jedediah are all part of the same problem. Still, this one is an alright read and I’m entertained.
CT Phipps is back again with The Final Gate. What is it with these authors and gates, sheesh?
It had been a little over a century since the Great Old Ones had been awakened from their millennia-long slumber and the end of human civilization. Reality had been altered with the skies turning different colors, the stars rearranging, and the environment becoming a variety of alien hellscapes. It was, in many ways, a miracle that humanity had managed to eke out a living in the dusty ruins of a once-grand civilization. We—if you could consider me a human—were no longer the top of the food chain, but we weren’t quite extinct either. Life was nasty, brutish, and short with perhaps no future beyond the next few generations. Still, we persevered and became more like the Old Ones every day.
John Henry Booth—no, not that fellow that killed Abraham Lincoln, that’s another John Booth—is an immortal, in the sense that he is actually the offspring of now-extinct alien, Yog-Sothoth-y things that was left to grow up among humans. Hmm, kind of like a Lovecraft-ian Clark Kent, then?
Well, he’s now a bartender during what looks like an impending end of the world as far as humans are concerned. His daughter, a ghoul, has just given birth to a child she conceived with her giant husband. It’s probably a good thing that the world is so messed up that DNA testing is no longer done because yikes, who knows what kind of spawn has resulted from this union.
Perhaps this is what the mysterious villain wants to know too, as soon they are sending their agents to retrieve the baby for some undoubtedly sinister purpose.
This is a strange story. It starts out a pretty somber and serious story, and then becomes something more of a typical urban fantasy romance thing when everything starts to point to John’s sexy and fertile who-knows-what man butter as the potential savior of mankind. And then the whole thing becomes more of a campy farce with everyone cracking one-liners as if the author were paid a dollar for every cringe-inducing Buffy-speak crammed into the final act. This one starts out gripping, only to end with a scratch of the head rather than a glorious high.
Then again, that’s also Tales of Yog-Sothoth. It starts out great, only to end with a “What is this?” kind of whimper. These people should have placed the so much better first two stories at the back instead, so at least this one could have started out meh and ended with a wonderful kaboom.
