Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “The Greater Festival of Masks” and “The Music of the Moon”

I continue my look at Thomas Ligotti’s work with two more stories from Songs of Dead Dreamer.

“The Greater Festival of Masks”

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this one, though I admittedly found it intriguing, even though its meaning and significance mostly eluded me. Noss is a visitor to a town in the midst of a major festival involving masks and costumes. He ventures into a mask shop and soon find one that fits him perfectly. The shopkeeper asks him to mind the store for a while, which Noss agrees to do. Some people in the yard behind the shop ask him to bring them some masks. Again, he complies but the masks don’t fit these people and aren’t suitable for their (unspoken) needs. The shopkeeper returns and sends Noss off to a masquerade party wearing the mask that fit him perfectly. Over time, the mask comes to fit him less and less well, and eventually he discards it. Noss, it seems, has been changed somehow. Now, he learns, the real or at least more important festival of masks will begin. I am left a bit puzzled, but I do appreciate the implied bodily transformation and Ligotti’s sinister settings and atmospheric tension—there are few better at creating that subtle sense of unease in the reader.

“The Music of the Moon”

I find this one utterly intriguing. Tressor is a chronic insomniac who wanders around the city at night when he cannot sleep. He is invited to a strange concert and briefly meets the four (unsettling) musicians who will be performing. These are sinister figures and, it seems, to me, perhaps at one with their instruments—in other words, I am not convinced that they are not somehow both entities and musical instruments at the same time. In any case, during the concert they put Tressor to sleep (finally!), though he awakens to find the musicians gone, though the audience is still present, but asleep, cocooned within webbing, and missing their eyes. One audience member alone still has his eyes, though he doesn’t want to be freed from the webbing. Both Tressor and the narrator, who is a friend of Tressor’s to whom he imparts this tale, find themselves increasingly entranced by the moon, and it is only a matter of time before they return for another musical performance.

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Week 263 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Seabrook, Ligotti, Lansdale, and Brennan

Welcome to Week 263 of my horror short fiction review project. This week marks the end of Caped Fear, thank goodness, which was a truly awful collection that mixed really bad stories with stories that didn’t fit the collection’s stated themes AT ALL. I honestly don’t know what the editors were thinking; they ought to be ashamed of themselves for producing such dreck. That collection will be replaced in our weekly line-up by the first of Soren Narnia’ Knifepoint Horror collections (drawn from his amazing podcast). I’m already looking forward to that one. The clear favorite story of the week was “The Town Manager” by Thomas Ligotti, which was a Ligotti story I hadn’t previously read. What took me so long? I don’t know, but it’s excellent, so stop everything and pick it up.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“The Wedding Guests” by William B. Seabrook

A young woman in Haiti marries a much older man, then eventually learns that he is a necromancer or something similar (because it’s Haiti, you pretty much expect this sort of thing from the outset). Not bad, not amazing, but some decent suspenseful elements.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“The Town Manager” by Thomas Ligotti

What a stunning story. Ligotti has written a number of stories about weird little towns tucked away, mere shadows of their former selves, desolate and lonely and rundown and without hope or surcease from a kind of mournful suffering and descent into nothingness. Ligotti might even describe human existence similarly, but I’ve certainly been through more than my fair share of towns exactly like what he’s describing here throughout America. It’s almost the story of middle America, the America that’s not the wealthy coastal cities that elites live in. In any case, this is a town that is run by a series of town managers, appointed by unknown powers from outside the town when they depart. The residents then obey whatever new rules and dictates the town manager issues, some of which are ridiculous, and some of which suggests that there might be a method to the madness, though ultimately it always ends in the town manager’s disappearance and presumed resignation. This could all be dismissed as a pocket of weirdness, a kind of localized madness, mindless conformity to authority no matter how demonstrably detrimental it might be. The situation is absurdly humorous, of course, but the real horror begins when the unnamed narrator gets fed up with the town and going through another iteration of absurdity under the future new town manager and leaves. He travels the world, working odd jobs here and there, and discovers that they are all run exactly like his home town. Every last one of them. In some ways I wonder if this story was the inspiration for the podcast/book series “Welcome to Night Vale.” It certainly could have been, except that rather than having weirdness contained within the small desert town of Night Vale, here we have a world in which all cities and towns, large and small, are Night Vales.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

[previously reviewed] “Mylakhrion the Immortal” by Brian Lumley

“The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down” by Joe R. Lansdale

An interesting novella, but once again I must ask why the editors hated the theme that they and their publisher selected for this selection? It’s neither “superhuman” nor “horror,” but I digress. This one is dedicated to Philip Jose Farmer, who wrote some good stuff and a lot of wacky stuff that doesn’t float my boat, and much of it intentionally dials up the exploitative sexual content. I don’t mind reading stuff with sex in it, but gosh, there are certainly good ways to include that kind of content and some very bad ways. Lansdale is emulating the worst of Farmer’s influences here. Society has essentially crumbled after an alien invasion that left the planet riddled with dimensional rifts through which weird stuff emerges periodically. Four men have built or acquired a large robot they pilot and are in a running battle with the being they call the Dark Rider, who is actually the time traveler from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, marauding across the countryside with a band of morlocks (he’s insane, and evil, for no apparent reason—we are told he caught a disease that made him this way, and that’s all we get). He likes impaling people, and raping them, and torturing them, and murdering them, and we get a great deal of detail on all that. There were some fun pulpy elements, and it certainly moved at a fast pace, but I can’t say that this was a good story, or one that was especially pleasant to read, and I say that as someone who likes some pretty freaky subject matter.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“The Willow Platform” by Joseph Payne Brennan

This one takes the idea of an ancient grimoire and applies it to a rural area, but instead of an elderly antiquarian playing with forbidden forces beyond his ken, it’s a local derelict who finds the forbidden tome, teaches himself how to speak Latin, and brings on untold horrors. Nice atmosphere and locale.

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Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “Dr. Locrian’s Asylum” and “The Sect of the Idiot”

Continuing my look at Thomas Ligotti’s work with two especially Lovecraftian tales in Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

“Dr. Locrian’s Asylum”

An old, abandoned asylum has lurked on the edge of town for decades but no one ever talks about it. The narrator of the story, Mr. Crane, owns an antiquarian bookstore in town. Harkness Locrian is one of Crane’s customers, as well as the grandson of the man who originally ran the asylum; Harkness’ father shut the asylum down for reasons that initially remain obscure. At the outset of the story, the townsfolk have decided to demolish the asylum at long last. As it turns out, Dr. Locrian had not actually been trying to cure or even treat his patients at the asylum, but had actually sought to exacerbate their perceptions and push them deeper into what we might call madness. The town’s destruction of the asylum has brought doom to the town. The town becomes haunted by the specters of the inmates who resided there, then a massive conflagration consumes the whole town. The narrator is driven made by the history of the asylum and what Locrian was trying to do. I read this one as a not all that successful pastiche of Lovecraft. Definitely not one of my favorite Ligotti stories, though there are some elements here I enjoyed.

“The Sect of the Idiot”

An unnamed visitor to a town is staying in a hotel room with a gorgeous view of the entire town. He is visited by a strange man who seems innocuous. The narrator has dreams of cosmic vistas, robed and hooded horrors, hidden meanings, and malevolence that trouble him, as one might expect. The reader has a hint of what might be going on: the story is introduced with an epigraph, nominally taken from the Necronomicon, that discusses Azathoth, Lovecraft’s blind idiot-god that dwells at the center of the universe and is more of a malevolent force of chaos than a coherent deity or entity. In any case, the narrator wanders the town the next day and perceives it in new ways—clearly influenced by his cosmic dreams the previous night. He encounters the previous day’s visitor again; this time, it is clear that the man is insane and a servitor of elder beings. After continuing to wander around and receiving increasingly strange reactions from the strangers he encounters, the narrator discovers that one of his hands has been transformed into a clawed, tentacled horror, with the implication (I think) that the rest of his body will transform as well. This is certainly one of Ligotti’s clearest Cthulhu Mythos-related stories, though it seems a bit…disorganized, at least in the sense of lacking a clear otherworldly horror that provides a framework for the story.

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Week 262 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Borges, Ford, Nolan, and Aickman

Welcome to Week 262 of my horror short fiction review project! There’s a really interesting mix of horror and weird fiction this week. My favorite was “The Beautiful Gelreesh” by Jeffrey Ford, which is utterly fascinating and a true example of how evocative weird fiction can be.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges

An occultist travels to a remote jungle area because he has plans to dream a man into being. Yes, that’s a pretty wild premise. He ends up learning what I can only describe as an unpleasant fact about the nature of reality. I don’t normally like Borges’ writing, or magical realism in general, but I liked this one well enough. Probably my favorite Borges story to date.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“The Beautiful Gelreesh” by Jeffrey Ford

I thought I was going to dislike this story but I gave it a chance and came out really enjoying it. A monstrous, canine-esque humanoid, almost demonic in appearance uses illusions and deception—and above all sympathy, though feigned, I think—to tempt depressed and sorrowing people, his victims, into committing suicide. He then devours them. He does this as often as he can before he’s caught, then he moves on to the next town. Eventually his misdeeds catch up with him, and he’s detained and put on trial. It’s during the trial that he offers his origin story, though I don’t think a word of it is true. Fascinating and well done.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Double Space” by William F. Nolan

Though written by a master writer, this just isn’t a good story. At least it does fit the collection a bit better than most (it contains a superhero but no horror), but this could be the origin story of a superhero in a 1950s era comic book. A shoe salesman named Freddie is transformed into a quasi-Superman by the most stereotypical German mad scientist I’ve encountered in decades. His negative emotions (we don’t know enough about Freddie to say what these are) are siphoned off during the process and placed inside a clone. Freddie acts the same after this as before, so it doesn’t seem to change him much. Then the evil clone escapes from the lab and they have to fight. In the process, Fredie loses his powers.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“Le Miroir” by Robert Aickman

I long ago realized that Aickman’s work is just not for me, and this story is further evidence of that. Celia is sent to an art school by her very elderly widowed father. She purchases what may be a magic mirror and then lives in an apartment in the city by herself for many decades, steadily growing older while her living stipend is gradually reduced. Celia wastes away. Not an awful story to be sure, but stylistically, this one just wasn’t for me.

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Book Review: The Rack and Cue by David Owain Hughes

The Rack and Cue
David Owain Hughes
Plumfukt Press (November 16, 2022)
Reviewed by Andrew Byers

In The Rack and Cue, David Owain Hughes provides us with a promising premise: In the middle of nowhere during a terrible storm, an English pub (the eponymous “Rack and Cue”) is hosting a billiards tournament with an unexpectedly extravagant prize for the winner. A number of different travelers from various walks of life—a couple female hikers, some truck drivers, a motorcycle gang, and some undercover cops on the trail of the motorcycle gang—seek shelter at the pub. This is not a group of people who are likely to get along well. In fact, these various relationships are a trainwreck waiting to happen. And there’s one more problem: the family that runs the Rack and Cue, led by barkeep Porky, are not what they seem. I’m not really spoiling much by suggesting that if you’ve seen any of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, you’ll have a fair idea what Porky and his kinfolk have in mind for their guests.

What follows is a brutal, savage, gore-filled slugfest that gets darker and grimmer the longer the billiards tournament goes on. As each loser of a match is sent off, they are ushered into the back rooms of the pub where they meet the rest of Porky’s family. At about the 70% mark in the book, the story seems to be wrapping up with what I thought would be a fairly satisfying ending. Then it switches gears and some new characters—along with a supernatural element that I won’t spoil—are introduced and the book lets this new situation play out. I don’t think that was ineffective (think about what happens when From Dusk Till Dawn does something similar), but it did catch me off-guard so I wanted to mention it.

As one additional note, I should mention that this seems to be the revised second edition of the novel (first edition published in 2017, though I can’t speak to how extensively those revisions were).

I had fun with this one. It’s full of hyper-violence, gore, and lunatics of various stripes. Were there some occasions when I craved a little more depth? Yes, though not as much as one might expect. Despite all the blood, gore, and occasional grossouts—which I enjoyed, though your mileage may vary—characterization was solid and pacing was tight. All of the victims, er, protagonists are introduced thoroughly and we have a clear sense of who these people are and what motivates them. Blood and guts abound, but it’s a rollicking good time. Recommended, you just have to understand what kind of ride you’re in for.

This review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” and “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”

Continuing my look at Thomas Ligotti’s work with the next two stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer, though one of them is more a set of philosophical reflections that got folded into Ligotti’s philosophical treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

“Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech”

On the surface, a simple story but I think there’s actually a lot going on here, with Ligotti idolizing death throughout the tale, and demonstrating the horror of birth/life at the very end. No surprise, of course, that Ligotti would revisit these themes. Mr. Veech treks up a very tall staircase to visit Dr. Voke in his loft, a chamber of horrors complete with a wooden ticket taker sort of manikin. Veech wants Voke’s help: he desires the affections of a woman but finds himself caught up in a love triangle. Voke tells him to bring the other two people down a particular street late that night and the matter will be resolved. Veech does so, and the others are suddenly grabbed and yanked high into the air by unseen forces. When they are brought back down, the couple has been transmogrified into some hideous hybrid: their bodies have been sort of melded into one. Veech returns to Voke, deeply upset, to find out why this had to happen this way. He too is yanked into the darkest recesses of Voke’s loft. Voke then converses with a female corpse he has stored in a coffin before throwing himself, laughing, off the stairs while the ticket taker manikin is creakingly brought to life. So, at the end of the story, we have a complete reversal: Voke, Veech, and the two other people are all dead in the story, as is (still) the corpse of the woman in Voke’s loft. All that is left is the manikin, who has been made to suffer the torture of wood coming alive—life coming into being out of death. And there it, or perhaps, he now sits: alive and probably insane inside Voke’s loft. A very intriguing tale.

“Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”

An interesting set of reflections on the appeal and purpose of supernatural horror. There are a lot of elements I could pull out of this essay to share, but some that especially stood out to me:

• Horror eats the light and digests it into darkness (which I read to mean that it transforms normalcy and mundanity into something horrific).
• Morbidity: Away from health and sanity; dejection and melancholy; acknowledgement that we use up all our time.
• Pessimism: our gloomy inheritance; supernatural horror allows us to live with our “double selves”—celebration and condemnation of our consciousness (which Ligotti sarcastically calls “our gift”).
• “Existence equals nightmare.” One thing we know is real: horror.
• Sardonic harmony: our virtues only trouble us and bolster (not assuage) our horror. We may momentarily evade horrific reprisals of affirmation via supernatural horror (affirmations of life torment us in the face of gruesome facts).

Enjoyable piece on supernatural horror. I can see a lot of these ideas ended up in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

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Week 261 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Sambrot, VanderMeer, Webb, and Fritch

Welcome to Week 261 of my horror short fiction review project! While none of this week’s stories knocked my socks off, my favorite was probably “Night of the Leopard” by William Sambrot. I’m a sucker for stories about witch doctors and were-leopards.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“Night of the Leopard” by William Sambrot

Four Peace Corps volunteers and a Catholic priest confront an African witch doctor who is almost certainly a were-leopard. Really good Africa-set adventure and tale of a confrontation between the primitive (demonstrably evil, oppressive) and the more modern.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

[previously reviewed] “Feeders and Eaters” by Neil Gaiman

“The Cage” by Jeff VanderMeer

I simply don’t like stories like this one, or much of VanderMeer’s writing, I think. I can’t quite define what it is about tales like this that bugs me so much, but I’m just not the right reader for it. Hoegbotton runs an antique shop and has just acquired the estate of a family that has (inexplicably) met with tragedy. They seem to live in an oppressive society that has a kind of secret police obsessed with rooting out any fungal outbreaks. Also, his wife has been blinded by some terrible affliction, and there seems to be something going on with her eyes. He acquires a cage that appears to be empty, but actually contains some creepy creature that can almost perfectly camouflage itself like a Predator. My understanding is that this story is part of a series of connected stories, and having that context might help make sense of this one. As it is, I can’t recommend this one without that larger context—it simply can’t stand on its own satisfyingly.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“The Medici Stiletto” by Janeen Webb

Why was this one set on a space station? No idea, as that doesn’t play any role in the story. And why is coffee forbidden/illegal in the future? No idea either, but the protagonist is a cyborg investigator (?) who runs an illegal coffee bar. She’s called in to investigate a theft/murder—a work of art id owned by a shady/disgraced Italian nobleman. The resolution of the mystery is just poorly written and confusing. And like almost all stories in the book, doesn’t fit the collection’s theme (there are neither supers nor any horror elements in the collection).

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“The Pawnshop” by Charles E. Fritch

A man named Carver has abducted another man (Davis) in order to torture and kill him in partial repayment for his soul, which Carver has sold to the Devil. Carver has, of course, selected the wrong victim. Not bad, this was a fun little story.

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Weekly Horror Short Story Review Project – Year 5 in Review

I began this project on February 16, 2017 and it’s been going strong ever since. I’m still enjoying reading and reviewing the tremendous body of horror-themed short fiction in my library and have lots left to go. Perhaps the biggest announcement I have to make in this post is that there will be (at least!) a Year Six of Reviews! As I’ve noted previously, this project has given me the excuse to really sit down and read it all systematically, working my way through a number of single-author collections and anthologies featuring stories by a wide variety of authors I probably should have read before now. While there were some periods where it was a struggle to keep going through a couple of less than stellar collections, on the whole, it has remained fun.

When you’re reviewing four stories a week, one from each of four books simultaneously, and doing this solidly for five years, you end up working your way through a lot of books. I have now completed reading and reviewing 53 story collections and am partially finished with four more. Here’s the complete list (collections that we’re still working on are bolded below):

• Weeks 1-17: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 1999)
• Weeks 1-55: The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1987)
• Weeks 1-18: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, by Stephen King (Scribner, 2015)
• Weeks 1-21: Black Wings of Cthulhu, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2010)
• Weeks 18-29: The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 2001)
• Weeks 19-33: Books of Blood, Volumes One to Three, by Clive Barker (Berkley, 1998)
• Weeks 22-39: Black Wings of Cthulhu 2, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2012)
• Weeks 30-50: The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 2004)
• Weeks 34-47: Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six, by Clive Barker (Sphere, 2007)
• Weeks 40-56: Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2015)
• Weeks 48-78: The Yellow Sign and Other Stories, by Robert W. Chambers (Chaosium, 2004)
• Weeks 51-76: The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Night Shade Books, 2011)
• Weeks 56-91: Alone With the Horrors by Ramsey Campbell (Tor, 2004)
• Weeks 57-74: Black Wings of Cthulhu 4, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2016)
• Weeks 75-99: Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, edited by Paula Guran (Running Press, 2016)
• Weeks 77-88: The Crawling Chaos and Others: The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft, Vol. 1, edited by S.T. Joshi (Arcane Wisdom, 2012)
• Weeks 79-89: The Hastur Cycle, Second Edition, edited by Robert M. Price (Chaosium, 1997)
• Weeks 89-106: Medusa’s Coil and Others: The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft, Vol. 2, edited by S.T. Joshi (Arcane Wisdom, 2012)
• Weeks 90-114: The King in Yellow Tales, Volume 1, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Lovecraft eZine Press, 2015)
• Weeks 92-95: Dark Feasts, by Ramsey Campbell (Robinson Publishing, 1987)
• Weeks 96-106: Cold Print, by Ramsey Campbell (Tor Books, 1987)
• Weeks 100-115: Madness on the Orient Express, edited by James Lowder (Chaosium, 2014)
• Weeks 107-118: Demons by Daylight, by Ramsey Campbell (Carroll & Graf, 1990)
• Weeks 107-126: A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2015)
• Weeks 115-124: Legacy of the Reanimator, edited by Peter Rawlik and Brian M. Sammons (Chaosium, 2015)
• Weeks 116-123: The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books, 2014)
• Weeks 119-136: Made in Goatswood: New Tales of Horror in the Severn Valley, edited by Scott David Aniolowski (Chaosium, 1995)
• Weeks 124-132: Behold the Void, by Philip Fracassi (Lovecraft eZine Press, 2018)
• Weeks 125-126: The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants, by Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing, 2018)
• Weeks 127-153: A Mythos Grimmly, edited by Jeremy Hochhalter (Wanderer’s Haven Publications, 2015)
• Weeks 127-136: The Red Brain: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2017)
• Weeks 133-154: The Madness of Dr. Caligari, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Fedogan & Bremer, 2016)
• Weeks 137-152: To Rouse Leviathan, by Matt Cardin (Hippocampus Press, 2019)
• Weeks 137-156: Degrees of Fear and Others, by C.J. Henderson (Dark Quest, 2011)
• Weeks 153-168: The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, edited by Stephen Jones (Skyhorse, 2019)
• Weeks 154-165: Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (DAW, 2010)
• Weeks 155-178: Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)
• Weeks 157-171: Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, by Ann K. Schwader (Hippocampus Press, 2015)
• Weeks 166-187: The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (Robinson, 2012)
• Weeks 169-185: Tales of Jack the Ripper, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Word Horde, 2013)
• Weeks 172-180: The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, by William Hope Hodgson (Wordsworth, 2006)
• Weeks 179-ongoing: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)
• Weeks 181-192: The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Aaron J. French (JournalStone, 2015)
• Weeks 186-196: Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, edited by Robert Arthur (Random House, 1965)
• Weeks 188-207: Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign, edited by James Chambers (Hippocampus Press, 2021)
• Weeks 193-203: The Skinless Face, by Donald Tyson (Weird House Press, 2020)
• Weeks 197-208: Young Mutants, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh (HarperCollins, 1984)
• Weeks 204-216: Just After Sunset, by Stephen King (Scribner, 2008)
• Weeks 208-237: Weird Vampire Tales, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg, (Gramercy Books, 1992)
• Weeks 209-219: Alfred Hitchcock’s Witch’s Brew (Random House, 1983)
• Weeks 217-228: Cthulhu 2000, edited by Jim Turner (Del Rey, 1999)
• Weeks 220-240: Hellbound Hearts, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (Pocket Books, 2009)
• Weeks 229-248: The Children of Cthulhu, edited by John Pelan and Benjamin Adams (Del Rey/Ballantine, 2002)
• Weeks 238-249: A Taste for Blood, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble Books, 1992)
• Weeks 241-ongoing: The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)
• Weeks 249-ongoing: Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)
• Weeks 250-ongoing: Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

Some general thoughts and reflections on the reviews and collections from Year Five in no particular order:

• This year almost broke me. There was a period where I was reading several less-than-stellar collections simultaneously. That took a toll on me. Caped Fear is a genuinely terrible collection of stories, objectively, based on the collection’s stated theme, and subjectively based on the quality of the stories. I have found The Weird, The Black Magic Omnibus, and Whispers to be highly uneven collections, filled with highs and lows. When you’re reading such uneven collections at the same time, it can really wear on you. There were a couple days where I read, say, three or four bad stories in a row and I almost said “forget this, it’s not worth it!” but I persisted and I’m glad I did.
• Having said that, there were some excellent collections this year, they just tended to be weighted toward the beginning and middle of the year. Among this list would be Stephen King’s Just After Sunset, Alfred Hitchcock’s Witch’s Brew, and Cthulhu 2000. I should also call out Hellbound Hearts and The Children of Cthulhu as also containing far more hits than misses. There are a lot of good new stories among the 200+ I reviewed this year.
• I have started posting all my Ligotti and Ligotti-adjacent story reviews before the end of the year, so I consider that a major personal victory. No need for these reviews to just sit on my hard drive.
• I still haven’t done a major update for the story index. It’s really a major effort and I am uncertain just how useful that would be for any readers. If you would find that particularly useful to you, please chime in here and let me know. I will read silence as apathy or disinterest in such an index. And on that note, if you’re enjoying the blog, please do let me know.

As I have mentioned previously, the life of a blogger is a sometimes lonely one, so let me know what you think of the reviews, or hit me with any other questions or comments you might have. As always, thanks for reading!

Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “The Troubles of Dr. Thoss” and “Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie”

I’m continuing my look at Thomas Ligotti’s work with the next two stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

“The Troubles of Dr. Thoss”

I feel a bit lukewarm toward this story and want to re-read it when I have a bit more temporal distance from it because I know that it’s a well-regarded Ligotti story. Alb Indys is a misanthropic artist who mostly, it seems, draws mundane still lifes. While Alb mostly stays in the self-imposed isolation of his apartment, he overhears people talking about Dr. Thoss (derived from the Egyptian god Thoth?), who seems to be a kind of local bogeyman, a legendary figure of uncertain origin, a physician who is said to have gone mad and turned murderous. Thoss, you will not be surprised to learn, is real, and ends up butchering Alb, whose own death becomes a new local urban legend. There is a great foreboding atmosphere to the story, it just seemed a bit scattered to me. I am hard-pressed to describe my reaction to this one in greater detail.

“Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie”

Here we have Thomas Ligotti dipping his toes into fantasy, the sword and sorcery sub-genre in particular. Faliol is a mercenary dressed as a jester, who also wears a pair of dark spectacles. We first encounter Faliol—who has arrived in a city experiencing a big annual masquerade festival (something like what New Orleans or Venice hosts every year)—in a tavern being accosted by thugs. Eventually Faliol is forced to respond, first by out-brutalizing them, then placing his spectacles on the thugs’ leader, who is promptly driven insane by whatever he sees through their dark lenses. Faliol then meets with his employer, a young prince whose fiancée has been abducted by a powerful sorcerer. The plan is for Faliol and the prince to attend a masquerade, rescue the young woman, destroy the sorcerer, and bring down the corrupt duke who is the sorcerer’s patron. They attend the event and rescue the young woman, but it turns out that the sorcerer is actually good. He created Faliol’s spectacles to dim the horror—caused by Faliol’s knowledge of the meaninglessness of existence—that had been driving Faliol insane. These visions of existential meaninglessness have been caused by an evil god seeking to shatter Faliol’s insanity. This evil deity manifests but Faliol is able to triumph in the end by killing himself and denying that to the god. I did not love this story. It’s the sort of sword and sorcery tale that only Ligotti could write, of course, but while it contained some elements I really enjoyed, I thought the story’s resolution fell a bit flat.

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Week 260 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Sologub, Cisco, Campbell, and Smyth

Welcome to Week 260 of my horror short fiction review project! This marks five full years, week in and week out, in which I’ve been reviewing four stories each week. Who knew it was going to last this long? Look for an end-of-year wrap-up blog post soon for a retrospective on the last year’s worth of story reviews. This week, while I really liked the ingeniously titled “The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man” by Robin Smyth, my favorite story was “The Genius of Assassins: Three Dreams of Murder in the First Person” by Michael Cisco. Very unsettling and surely not for all readers, this one was exactly what I was looking for.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“The Invoker of the Beast” by Feodor Sologub

Mostly incomprehensible to me. You may have better luck with this one than I did. A man named Gurov encounters strange beings who likely knew him in his previous lives/incarnations. There are tales of ancient pacts to slay demons. I very much wanted to like this one but just didn’t. I either needed much more context on this story or a better translation. This one just didn’t grab me, and based on the topic, it should have.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

[previously reviewed] “Details” by China Mieville

“The Genius of Assassins: Three Dreams of Murder in the First Person” by Michael Cisco

A dreamlike set of stories about what seem to be psychopathic serial killers in various settings and contexts. It’s not gruesome or bloody, as Cisco doesn’t linger over or elaborate on what it is that they do, but it’s still a deeply unsettling story. Produced a very powerful effect. I liked this one a lot.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Loveman’s Comeback” by Ramsey Campbell

While I am a big fan of Ramsey Campbell, I think that Campbell has written a number of misses in addition to his many hits, and that was especially true for his output in the 1970s. “Loveman’s Comeback” is one such story, despite that it has been reprinted in several other collections. I think it’s a genuinely terrible story. It also happens to not be on topic for this collection, but I long ago gave up hope that the editors of what I’ve come to realize is an atrocious collection cared about the stated theme of the collection: supers and horror. Here we have a female drug addict repeatedly dreaming about wandering around the city at night and being raped. Or perhaps she actually experiences this and just thinks it’s they’re dreams. She doesn’t know and neither do we. Then she meets a fellow junkie in a public library and entices him back to her squalid apartment and forces him to have sex with her. Awful.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man” by Robin Smyth

Very fun. A boy (“Boysie”) with an unwholesome love for his mother takes revenge on his stepfather for abusing his mother, then mother and son realize that lecherous men are an excellent source of meat that can be sold for pure profit….

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Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon