Victor Heck

When I was on a recent business trip I started the short novel A Darkness Inbred by Victor Heck. I found it a bigger let down than Nightmare's Disciple. So far I have only managed to get about half way through and may just let it lapse into permanently unread status.

For those who haven't read it some spoilers follow, but only mild ones as I don't have the gumption for a complete review of a book I disliked, and also because, well, I still don't know how it ends.

My first complaint is that the novel is puported to be a Cthulhu mythos novel and, well, dammit, it isn't! Nyarlathotep is invoked as the source of an evil breeding program but there is nothing Lovecraftian about it! Similar to Nightmare's Disciple the name of an entity does not the mythos make. For me the mythos is all about atmosphere, a sense of otherness, dawning of terror beyond imagining lurking at the fringes of the world, comprehension that the understood natural order of the universe isn't the reality, a sudden sense of the trivial status of humanity in the universe. The inbred clan is inbred and deformed before they ever discover the floating coffin, they are evil before corrupted by contact with an alien entity. Frankly there is nothing about the story that required using a mythos name except maybe marketing.

Some other beefs: the characters are completely disinteresting. There is nothing about them that makes you care one way or another, or even makes you bother trying to keep their names straight.
I could have lived without the scene where the degenerate evil patriarch sodomized his retarded daughter.

I would say this is a schlocky gorefest kind of novel, but one without a captivating plot, characters with depth, particularly catchy prose or Lovecraftian atmophere. Now please, I don't mind gore if it has a point. And well done prose that makes me shiver with disgust is always appreciated. For example, Throne of Bones, the novella that gives this story collection its name, had pages of grotesque imagery of ghoulish feasting and sex. It wasn't horrific, but a well thought out unpredictable plot, inventive prose and fun characters made it a fine read. And it is not a Lovecraftish story. Alas, for me, A Darkness Inbred did not deliver the goods.

Not a mythos novel by a longshot. What do you think makes a story Lovecraftian?… (meer)