Welcome to Week 119 of my horror short fiction review project! Today is our first week of Made in Goatswood, a Ramsey Campbell tribute anthology in which other authors write stories set in his Severn Valley setting, where all sorts of terrible things have been happening for a very long time. Of the four stories I’m reviewing today, my favorite was clear: “In the Shadow of Swords” by Cody Goodfellow. This is an absolutely perfect technothriller that uses the Cthulhu Mythos. What a dark, evocative story!
Made in Goatswood: New Tales of Horror in the Severn Valley, edited by Scott David Aniolowski (Chaosium, 1995)
“A Priestess of Nodens” by A. A. Attanasio
Evocatively written but I’m not sure what the point of it was. A pagan coven is worshipping in the Goatswood (part of Ramsey Campbell’s notorious Severn Valley) as they do every year. This year, they are joined by a woman named Dana Largo, who most of the local pagans had believed had died several years previously of cancer or some other chronic illness. Dana has returned at the peak of health, and says that she now worships the elder god Noden , who she eventually reveals restored her to full health. Dana leads the coven’s worship ceremony and uses Nodens’ power to restore the coven’s elderly priestess’ youth and vitality. Interesting enough, but…why? What was the point of it all? There’s a very brief and subtle hint that perhaps Nodens had some kind of dark purpose, but that’s it. Where’s the conflict? Where’s a clear sense of menace, or that the priestess is going to have to pay some terrible price for Nodens’ gift?
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books, 2014)
“The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven”
Not bad, but kind of a minor story for Barron, I think. A pair of lesbian lovers flee one of the women’s abusive husband and end up in a remote cabin in the woods. One of the women seems to be sort of directed there by an ancestor who had a nasty reputation for dabbling in the occult. There, she begins to use a tattered old pelt that the sinister ancestor used to transform himself into a werecoyote. She then uses it to tear apart the two people the husband sent to spy on them. My least favorite story in the collection thus far.
Legacy of the Reanimator, edited by Peter Rawlik and Brian M. Sammons (Chaosium, 2015)
“Herbert West—Reanimated: A Round Robin” by Robert M. Price, Peter H. Cannon, Will Murray, Donald R. Burleson, and Charles Hoffman
An interesting experiment, but also a case study in why these round robin stories rarely work. (Maybe I am just jaded because years ago I was involved in a round robin novel project that went off the rails and died before it was ever my turn.) This is a six-part novelette by five authors (Robert Price writes the opening and closing sections) exploring the further adventures of HPL’s mad scientist Herbert West that picks up where HPL left off. At the outset of the story, West is now a reanimated corpse who has sought out the help of his old assistant two years after the close of HPL’s original story. West needs the knowledge contained in the brain of a mummified Egyptian sorcerer, so they steal the mummy and transplant West’s brain into the mummy then retransplant it in West’s body, then travel to Egypt to acquire some exotic materials hidden by the ancient sorcerer in life. It’s that kind of story. They travel to Britain, and tangle with a reanimated bog mummy there, and are put on trial by a horde of the reanimated dead (including some that are mere reanimated body parts) before escaping. (This is a classic pulp trope with a show trial by villains, though usually it’s a hero who’s being subjected to this.) Then Herbert West realizes that even phlegm and vomit can be reanimated and granted malevolent sapience. West is consumed by his own reanimated vomit, which he then assumes control over. This section is Donald Burleson’s fault. Rather than being horrific, he’s devolves into absurdity and self-parody. Burleson’s collaborators find a way to extricate themselves from the ridiculous position that Burleson placed them in, and manage to salvage the story. West then discovers the means to transfer his consciousness to other bodies. Taking a cue from HPL in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” West inhabits the body of an attractive young woman and seduces and marries his old assistant before revealing himself. The point of all of this, as it turns out, was for West to have himself impregnated so that he could bear a male heir whose body he could take possession of. Some awkward twists and turns here—clearly each author had free reign to develop their portion of the story—but enjoyable and extremely pulpy. Burleson almost wrecked this story and Price and Hoffman must do yeoman work to set the story back on course after Burleson’s near-disastrous contribution, but I’d recommend this one nevertheless.
A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2015)
“In the Shadow of Swords” by Cody Goodfellow
Revell is an UN weapons inspector searching for chemical and biological weapons hidden in Iraq in the late 1990s. His group detects an emergency radio call at a hitherto unknown and unvisited site codenamed Tiamat that appears to be a covert chemical/biological weapons laboratory. They visit and eventually force their way in. The first half of the story is well-done technothriller. The second is where the Lovecraftian cosmic horror begins. The site is built on the remnants of a Sumerian facility that has deep, sinister purposes of cosmic horror. I’m going to spoil the hell out of what Revell finds here because it’s just too good not to share, so consider yourself forewarned. The Sumerians were descended from exiles or an offshoot of the inhabitants of K’n-yan (see HPL’s “The Mound,” which is amazing), a vast subterranean civilization of humanoids. For most authors, this would be enough of a revelation; not so for Goodfellow, who quickly moves past this to reveal deeper truths. This site is actually build over a kind of “hothouse” (which human myths have described as the Garden of Eden), which was built by Lovecraft’s Old Ones (see “At the Mountains of Madness”). This hothouse is a kind of automated facility that is designed to release an entirely new global ecosystem of various (horrifying) flora and fauna capable of supplanting all current species when certain environmental conditions are met. The implications of this are vast and well worth contemplating. This was a really, really good story that my terse description has not done justice to. This is how to write a Mythos technothriller. Goodfellow should be applauded for this one.
Buy the book on Amazon
Buy the book on Amazon
Buy the book on Amazon
Buy the book on Amazon
Tales from the Bookworm's Lair 