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I was sent a review copy of this book by one of the contributors.
“Lovecraftian” is one of those overused adjectives that people trot out to mean a lot of different things.
The stories in this collection are linked by a common cosmology. The universe is home to ancient, vastly powerful alien intelligences that are inimical to all ephemeral living things (that would be us).
Yog-Sothoth is The Gate–an aware (but not alive) being that can control the shape of space-time. It is unimaginably powerful, absolutely alien, and hostile to humanity. Also insane.
Given that is the central premise of the collection, I found the stories to be surprisingly upbeat. They are Weird Adventure stories, more than Horror.
The collection takes an interesting approach. The stories take place in settings widely separated in space and time, from the Holy Land in the reign of Richard the First to a post-apocalyptic future. The style of the stories fits their individual time and place, rather than trying for the polysyllabic purple prose that characterizes one of the other usages of “Lovecraftian”. Nary a squamous or a rugose is to be found.
This approach suits the central conceit. An Elder God is eternal–the span from the Twelfth to the Twenty-Second Century is but the blink of one of its myriad eyes.
Despite that, the dangers the characters face are on a terrestrial scale. Monsters, and the walking dead, and servitors of the Elder Gods, but things that can still be dispatched by a man with his wits about him who is handy with steel and lead.
Tales Of Yog-Sothoth will be available on April 27th, 2021.
mishaburnett 