Mannison Press, $5.99, ISBN 978-1005285722
Horror, 2021
I’m on a horror trip when it comes to my reading lately, as I’ve been burned out on romance for quite some time now. Hence, when I see hints of tentacles on the cover, and I buy. Hello there, The Pseudopod That Rocks the Cradle. Tim Mendees has assembled a collection of short stories here, always a pain in the rear end to review because it always takes me forever to do one, but what the heck, I’m doing this out of love and you all better appreciate my efforts.
The whole thing starts out with a gushing introduction of the author by some bloke, ahem, that may or may not be rewarded for his service by having his family name used in the first story. The author then talks about his love for everything cosmic horror, and yeah yeah, join the club. Then it’s time for the real meat of the story.
The first story is Rouse Them Not, which feels to me more like a PG-13 rated of Rawhead Rex than HP Lovecraft. In the cemetery of High Bend are two trees, said to be the prisons of the souls of vile murderers or worse. Aside from an old lady, most of the villagers, even the head druid, don’t fully recall or believe in the terrifying legend of these trees. They carry out the annual propitiation rituals to whatever is trapped in these trees out of tradition than genuine faith. These year, two drunks decide to dare one another to mess around with the trees (no, not in a dirty way, alas), and as you can imagine, really bad things happen as a result.
This one is okay, nothing too unexpected or remarkable, but it’s well put together enough to make a pleasant kind of anthology-opener.
Next is What the Butler Saw. Well, this is where my impression of the author’s style, hinted in the previous story, is cemented: Mr Mendees wants to do comedy as well as cosmic horror. Here, a butler, tired of dealing with his employer’s drunk and oafish guests, decides to reward himself with some enjoyable peek-see through the keyhole into what seems like a torrid pumpy session between a hot female guest and her paramour. Like the sages would say, you will never believe what he sees. Oh wait, this is a cosmic horror anthology, so chances are, readers will be able to correctly predict what the poor fellow sees.
Just like the previous story, this one feels tad derivative, like the author is just rehashing common cosmic tropes here. The humor aspect is something different, at least. This one is also an alright story, but I’m hoping to be bowled over.
The Pseudopod That Rocks the Cradle is next. That’s when I realize that the title is a mislead: instead of a story of a sinister octopus nanny, it’s more of a Rosemary’s Baby thing, only this time the people around the poor pregnant protagonist worship the giant jello Daemon Sultan or something. Again, this one feels a lot like tropes just warmed over, but I am starting to develop a liking for the author’s zany blend of comedy and cosmic horror. While no envelope has been pushed so far, the author displays a willingness to turn blasphemous or disturbing developments into James Gunn-esque humor hour, and I like that.
A Matter of Recycling sees a kid compelled to feed animals and, eventually, people in his neighborhood to some ravenous insects of the creepy kind in the clearing of a woods. So… sort of like the movie The Pit, I guess. I’m not saying that the author copied that movie, let me make this clear, I’m just saying instead that people that have watched that Canadian cult film will be able to guess correctly what will happen in this one, as there are enough similarities in the basic premise and the plot development in this story to those in that movie to give folks a pretty good idea of what they will be getting here.
I’m definitely repeating myself at this point, but this story is also very readable like the previous stories. It’s just that I feel like I’ve come across this story before, so I’m not exactly going “Wow! This is fantastic!” at this point.
Well, Pickles is something that feels far less “Hmm, have I read something like this before?”, so there’s that. If I wanted to be a curmudgeon, I’d say that this one feels more like conventional horror than cosmic horror, but hey, if it works for me, I am not complaining. This one is basically about four college kids that move into a rundown place with a mysterious neighbor living down the hall, and yes, the ladies begin to disappear one by one. What is happening? I
My issue with this one is the way the story is structured. The author so far seems fond of starting a scene in the present and then send me back to some time in the past, but I feel that this particular story would have worked better with a more conventional narrative chronology. The style adopted by the author actually kills the suspense of this story, as I know in advance which young lady vanishes first, and hence, he never quite builds up the sense of mounting terror that is needed for this one to become a frightening tale.
Next is I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside. Hey, could be worse, this one could have been called I Do Like to Sell Seashells Beside the Seaside. In this one, a plainclothes cop is convinced that the seaside resort he is staking out is not… normal. He is here to look into several cases of children going missing, so perhaps there is something happening around the place that is responsible for these kids going missing.
This story suffers worse than the previous one by the author’s determination to go all fancy with the chronology and points of view switching in his story. Let’s just say that the cast of characters introduced in the first page of the story and those in the last page are completely different. Of course, you can argue that the star of the story is the threat, not the characters, but I’d argue back that the characters are the anchors that root the reader into the story, to allow the reader to view the horror through these characters’ eyes. What the author has done here is to basically disrupt any possibility of me forming any connection with the characters here. In the end, I just don’t care about whatever is happening in this story; it’s just the author trying to show off the tricks he can do, and the danger of putting on a magic show instead of telling me a story is that there is a risk that I won’t be impressed and hence be bothered. That’s exactly what happened here.
A Mother’s Love actually portrays Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, in a benevolent light for once, as this being ends up being the unexpected protector of the young kids that are the targets of a cartoon villain’s tyranny.
This one is a pretty dire story, because it’s such a one-dimensional cartoon. The story has no nuance or anything that would have given it some depths—it’s just the story of a psycho allowed to keep committing all kinds of atrocity until the author has to wrap things up and drop an anvil on that villain’s head. The villain is so over the top absurd that, if anything, the true villains here are the townsfolk that just stood by and let him abuse kids, sometimes to death. Sure, the bad guy gets his just desserts, but if it were up to be, I’d have Shub-Niggurath do a The Blob and just consume all these horrible, horrible adults in the neighborhood. They have just as much blood on their hands by just clucking their tongues and hugging themselves all this while.
The Hollow Hills course corrects things a bit, but this tale of two men coming back to the remote, fog-covered village that one of the fellow grew up in is a pretty familiar tale of creepy menaces in a rural area. Whether it’s inbred cannibals, mutants, alien humanoids, or any other variations of the “ugly, nasty rural humanoids” trope, such story tends to play out in ways that will be familiar to a reader that has read or watched enough of such stories. That is what happened here. It’s a readable story, but it doesn’t grab me because I feel like I’m come across variations of this story often enough already.
Insecure Tenancy is about this down on his luck fellow having to move into government housing that turns out to be a rundown place complete with scrawled warning of never opening the red door, never letting the things behind that door in, et cetera. Well, duh, of course he doesn’t listen. Again, this one unfurls in a way similar to that of other house of Cthulhu stories I’ve read before, so I’m still waiting for the party to begin.
Then comes Afterimage, which is something not too similar to things that have come before. It also focuses on Cthuga, the Burning God, which leads to an interesting fiery apocalypse scenario when our protagonist foolishly releases that thing onto the world. Too bad that the lead character is so obviously an idiot, and the author once again employs the whole “start in a flashback, then go back to the past” technique that kills any build up of momentum in this story. One step forward, then one step back, and as a result, we’re back to square one, sigh.
In Romanticizing Sleep, an aspiring poet, frustrated at being unable to achieve the levels of success of the likes of Byron, Shelley, etc, manages to find his way through his drug-addled imaginations to stumble upon the dark secrets of cosmos. Oops. This one seems to be the author’s own spin on the premise of HP Lovecraft’s The Hounds of Tindalos, and those hounds even make an appearance here. The problem with such a “homage”, though, is that the original is so much better still in comparison. This one only boasts a cartoon protagonist that is not compelling enough to root for or against, and all I can think of while reading this one is that maybe I’d rather be reading that story by Mr Lovecraft instead.
Oh, The Toad and the Princess is something different! It’s about some toads hoping to dig enough to allow water to flood their nursery in a pool and save their tadpole brats, only to have a new threat looming over the horizon. Oh, I like this one, as it presents the other side of that story when a princess kisses what she believes to be a frog and it becomes a prince. What happens when the toad is happy being a toad and never wants to become human in the first place? Thank goodness that there is that daddy of all toad creatures in the Cthulhu mythos that can be propitiated and appeased to make an unhappy toad’s dream comes true…
This is easily the best story of the bunch to date because this premise is something refreshing and doesn’t feel derivative, plus it also goes along very well with the author’s brand of dark comedy. The toad protagonists are adorable, the story is adorable, and even the kills are adorable.
In Mr. Mannequin, hairless corpses tattooed all over with strange markings are showing up, and a detective will sadly learn firsthand the cause of death. This is a simple story, and for once, it sees the author getting into a no-nonsense horror writer mode to tell a simple yet chilling story upfront. No distracting gimmicky narrative, just a story. This is a solid story with good build up and a nice take on the lore of a certain progeny of dear Cthulhu himself. I can only wish some of the earlier stories had received this treatment from the author.
The protagonist of The Metamorphosis Cube takes great delight in channeling her fear of creepy crawlies into a perverse joy in killing them with extreme prejudice. Of course, this is seen as a bad thing in Cthulhu-verse, and she will soon pay the price. I don’t know, am I supposed to root against Rebecca because she kills cockroaches with her slipper? That’s one hate crime I can certainly get behind, because let’s face it, eeuw, cockroaches. I’ve seen similar stories of this sort in many similar stories and episodes in TV anthologies and even in A Nightmare on Elm’s Street 4: The Dream Master, so once again my reaction is: “Well, nice try, but I think I’ve seen this done many times before already to be impressed.”
It’s all about an artfully tormented artist in The Face in the Fabric, when the protagonist can’t find his proper muse despite being commissioned well for a gig in which he has full autonomy over creative direction and all. As you can probably guess, this fellow goes bonkers like every other protagonist in a story of this sort, which only goes to show that sometimes, artists are a lost cause that can’t be helped in any way. Still, this is another tad predictable story of a protagonist going bonkers either due to their own mental issues or by a sinister cosmic force (the reader is meant to be left uncertain as to whether everything is in the protagonist’s head… or not).
The Dark Web, computer games, and abandonware all come together in The Parasite Code, but the resulting story—players likely unleashing some dark sinister entity by “cracking the seventh seal”—feels very derivative of stories of this kind. Again, this is a readable story, but I wish the author had given this story a more distinct stamp that is uniquely his. Cosmic horror and software rarely go well anymore, and it’s the same here. Then again, maybe that is just my own prejudice showing, as I’ve always found the idea of Cthulhu and friends needing people to play a video game to make things happen a ludicrous rather than scary.
Oh god, this anthology still hasn’t concluded yet? I’ve been writing this review for hours already.
Right, right, next up is Blood & Luminol. I’ve mentioned that I’ve read stories in this anthology that remind me of stories elsewhere, but this one reminds me of other stories in this anthology, heh. I think by now, after reading the stories back to back, I am starting to see the patterns and trends favored by the author. Here, a divorced barren woman gets her life together by starting her own bio-hazard cleaning company, and the latest crime scene exposes her to a terrifying yet strangely unforgettable image done using blood and luminol, visible only under black-light. This is the start of her unorthodox journey to becoming a mother, so to speak. What, you think the author mentioned the protagonist’s inability to conceive early on in the story for fun?
This one feels a bit contrived in that it combines various disparate-seeming elements (infertility, CSI crime scene clean-up, etc) in a manner so specific that the whole thing feels like a deliberate design by a wacky creator, which in this case is naturally the author. It feels like the bullet points came first, then the story built up to tie these points together. This one isn’t a bad read in itself, but it feels far more manufactured than other stories in this anthology. I can never forget that I’m reading something made up by the author, so it’s hard for me to lose myself into this thing.
Finally, the last story of the lot, Monster in the House. I feel like I’ve been stuck doing this review for so long that Cthulhu would be rising up from R’lyeh anytime now. This one is basically Home Alone, the Cthulhu version, as a kid is left alone in his house and has to fend off the monsters with only tips found in an old witch’s books to guide him through the night.
I like this one, especially since it delivers some dopamine rush that follows the kid’s implausible victories over the monsters, and a hard punch in the feels when the twist is revealed. Mind you, I see that one coming from a mile away, but still, the author has succeeded in getting me to root for the badly bullied protagonist, and in many ways, the kid gets the best happy ending he can get in life.
So, that’s The Pseudopod That Rocks the Cradle in a nutshell. All in all, this is an enjoyable collection, with the weakest links still being very readable in their own ways. My only issue is that I never get this feeling that the author has succeeded in making the cosmic horror tropes here his own. Many stories still feel like hesitant efforts to use these tropes in ways that have been done better by other people, and in the end, I don’t “get” what could have passed for a unique voice or style that is Tim Mendees’s. Maybe one day.
