The Man who Never was

The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft My rating: 3 of 5 stars Rating 3 out of 5| Grade C+; When your baby daddy is way, way out of town The Dunwich Horror is not one of those stories which doesn't gets better on rereading. The Patriarch of the Whateley family, who dabbled in the occult, wants to herald the arrival of an old god onto our plain. And in doing so, tear down everything man has built and replace it with a new world order, where he and his family would be the nobility. For this purpose, he used the age old trick that all dark magicians have been using since time immemorial. To have his daughter sacrificed to serve as the surrogate for an unholy conception of its heralds. Wilber Whateley is born premature & deformed, and none in town known of his birth father. What they know is that the boy seems more beast than man, and is growing at an unnatural pace. At 12 years old, he is already a grown man in body & mind. And after the passi...

The Color Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft My rating: 4 of 5 stars Rating 4 out of 5| Grade B+; Thalassophobia & ichthyophobia at its glorious worst Enough with the 'Fishy Smell' for Shaggoth's Sake ! When one treads through the vast collection of Lovecraftian literature, a disturbing picture begins to emerge. One in regards to its sheltered & neurotic author. One who was afraid of, pretty much everything. From racist fears like fear of other ethnicities & race-mixing, to frankly hilarious ones, such as fear of non-Euclidian geometry, gelatinous structures & the color gray. Nowhere is this more apparent, than in one of the author's more enduring tales, 'The Shadow over Innsmouth'. The premise of the story is, as usual, a gaunt depressed white guy, a stand in for the author, living in Arkham (God's gift to the world), who goes searching for his roots in the mysterious town of Innsmouth, filled with its dist...

The Lovecraft Anthology, Volume 1 by H.P. Lovecraft My rating: 4 of 5 stars Rating 4 out of 5 | Grade A; Scary things which go bump in the night Warning: Graphical Violence, Blood, Gore, Body Horror & much more; Reader Discretion advised I chanced upon a series of Graphical novels, adaptations of well known Lovecraftian tales, and I thought, Great. Now I get a chance to revisit those tales of eldritch horrors, without having to wade through the doom and nihilistic gloom of the written form, which would give Edar Allan Poe the chills. And I’ve to say, Lovecraft’s short stories lend themselves quite well to illustrated mediums. There is so much to explore, and present, and the artists can go wild coming up with all manner of horrifying illustrations & landscapes, the types of which only a troubled mind such as Lovecraft was capable of conjuring up. For those whose first foray this is unto the writer’s body of work, bewarned. This is one of those, ‘you hav...

Nyarlathotep by Julien Noirel My rating: 2 of 5 stars Rating 2 out 5 | Grade: D-; Mildly interesting After reading Nyarlathotep one comes to the conclusion that this is not one of Lovecraft's more inspired stories. With no context, a being known as Nyarlathotep, posing as Egyptian nobility, goes around building mysterious machines with grass and metal. It calls for performances where the audience are made to watch some form of sinister phenomenon involving electricity, which give them visions of a world brought to ruin by some great calamity. Following which, the participants all wander off, their perception of the world being corrupted by the alternate vision of the ruined one, and one by one all succumb to insanity. It is hard not to make the comparison with another person who lived in the timeframe who made bizarre machines, and held sinister performances involving electricity. I don't know if Lovecraft had some negative reservations...

A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman My rating: 5 of 5 stars Rating 5 out of 5 | Sometimes it's OK to be taken for an unexpected ride; provided it's an entertaining one Gaiman you eloquent bastard, you got me again? Every time I go into one of your books, expecting something un-expected. Yet every time, you manage to hoodwink me like a magician with their pretty assistants. Even this time, when I went into the story looking for something suspicious, you used the familiarity of the reader with the subject matter to subvert their expectations, with a twist, which in hindsight should’ve been seen from a mile away. Anyways, I won’t discuss the specifics, as I don’t want to ruin the experience for prospective new readers. But still, a Spoiler alert just in case. Synopsis It is the turn of the twentieth century, Albion (Great Britain). A Detective & his companion, the Major are consulted to solve the crime of the murder of one of royal blood. Onl...