Above average anthology from the usually outstanding Datlow (the hardest working editor in horror). Avoids some traps by excluding some of the usual suspects you would expect in an anthology like this (I won't name them) and substituting others who I bet this was their first foray into Lovecraftiana. It mostly works. Some of the usuals are still here (Barron, Kiernan), but these are the ones that almost never deliver a substandard product.

There be monsters here. All these stories are themed around tangible (or at least sort of visible) monsters, not just eerie goings on. These things want to eat you, or at least be mean to you, in more ways than one. So most likely the thing you see coming out of the wall is really a thing coming out of the wall, and it doesn't intend to thank you for inadvertently calling it up. Even the more upbeat stories leave you with a final cosmic chill. There isn't much outright comedy here besides irony, which is a good thing since I hate Lovecraftian humor. It NEVER works for me.

All in all something worth reading even if you aren't into Lovecraft but are into monsters. ( )

An ok book. Some of the stories were chock full of Lovecraftian horror, which made for a fun read. Some barely had anything at all to do with Lovecraft, and made me wonder why they were even included in the collection. A couple even felt like they were left unfinished; not like a cliffhanger, but like the author just up and quit writing midway through the story.

This won't be a book I'll read again from cover to cover; instead I'll just read the couple of stories I'm interested in and leave it at that. ( )

SPOILERS
"Only the End of the World Again" by Neil Gaiman
A private investigator who is also a werewolf saves the world from the Deep Ones off Innsmouth while devouring the occasional innocent.
"Bulldozer" by Laird Barron
Barron contributes a rip-roaring detective-horror-western-noir tale of a Pinkerton man in an 1890s California mining town pursuing a nineteen-century version of Wilbur Whateley. Our hero narrates in first person, although he has conversations with many other Western types.
Bernard Clark handled these voices so well that I began to look up his other recordings on Audible. He kept to this high standard in the other tales, managing even to make women’s voices tolerable to me. Many male narrators can’t.
"Red Goat Black Goat" by Nadia Bulkin
An American author born abroad gives us an isolated rural family whose pact with some horrible Indonesian version of Shub-Niggurath comes apart.
"The Same Deep Waters as You" by Brian Hodge
A woman who can “whisper” to animals is whisked to an island where the imprisoned inhabitants of Innsmouth where the government wants her to establish contact with the fish hybrids’ leader. Of course, this doesn’t go well. I have respected Hodge’s grim endings in the past but this one is not only horrific but unconvincing.
"A Quarter to Three" by Kim Newman
The playful Mr. Newman brings us to Innsmouth for no better reason than to set up a bad joke. I laughed.
"The Dappled Things" by William Browning Spencer
The late William Browning Spencer wrote in a very old-fashioned manner that made his tales fresh. Here he has Victorian adventurers searching the jungle for a missing damsel and the cad who misled her, traveling up a river (and destroying the ecosystem) on a steampunk mechanical octopus. When he finds the two as guests of a lost tribe, he also finds a trapped shoggoth that could use a lift. Very entertaining and very subversive.
"Inelastic Collisions" by Elizabeth Bear
Two fallen angels get self-help advice on living as humans from a risen Deep One. Bear provides a gritty, even banal, background to underscore the angel’s rage at their loss.
"Remnants" by Fred Chappell
A team of young space aliens save the last humans on Earth from their mutual enemies, the Old Ones and their shoggoths, by making mental contact with an autistic girl and their dog. If this sounds a precis for a YA post-apocalyptic survival novel, know that Chappell at one point has a cliffhanger so intense that I couldn’t return to the anthology for months. He also provides a moving and convincing portrait of autism.
"Love is Forbidden, We Croak & Howl" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
“Once upon a time, there was a ghoul who fell in love with a daughter of Innsmouth.” This sounds like the beginning of a grotesque tale, but Kiernan makes the grotesque beautiful and touching.
"The Sect of the Idiot" by Thomas Ligotti
“I was no more than an irrelevant parcel of living tissue caught in a place I should not be, threatened with being snared in some great dredging net of doom, an incidental shred of flesh pulled out of its element of light and into an icy blackness.” Ligotti on cosmic horror.
“Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.” Ligotti on his world view.
I once enjoyed reading a Ligotti story so much that I squealed out loud in pleasure. He is in great form in this tale, as he uses Lovecraft’s Azathoth as a model for a cruel indifferent creator.
"Jar of Salts" by Gemma Files
Poetry?
"Black is the Pit From Pole to Pole" by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley
Frankenstein’s creature travels through the levels of the hollow earth, including worlds reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. P. Lovecraft, while nineteenth-century cranks waste their lives trying to convince others of their views. A good adventure yarn, although the creature remains grumpy throughout.
"Waiting at the Cross Roads Motel" by Steve Rasnic Tem
This very nihilistic tale has a human/monster hybrid awaiting his end with his half-species children and the human wife he despises.
"I've Come to Speak with You Again" by Karl Edward Wagner
The most famous contemporary writer of cosmic horror turns out to be a Lovecraftian monster in disguise. I was irritated that the author ended his story just when his protagonist was about to dine.
"The Bleeding Shadow" by Joe R. Lansdale
Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann” is retold, with an elderly German classical violinist in Paris being replaced by a young Black blues guitarist in Texas. Lansdale turns it into a noir tragedy, with realism so raw that I remembered the smells as much as anything.
"That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas
In a cave, teenagers hold a bull session on the subject of love as shoggoths approach to end them. Believable, sad.
"Haruspicy" by Gemma Files
Another poem, this one dedicated not only to Lovecraft but my favorite author Caitlin R. Kiernan.
"Children of the Fang" by John Langan
A bitter family tale as a grandfather tries to pass on a legacy from “The Nameless City” to his progeny.
Monster Index
In which the editor reveals that I was usually wrong in my guesses as to source material. ( )

‘Lovecraft‘s Monsters’ is a big anthology and this much gloom is probably best taken in small doses unless you‘re from Innsmouth. The very famous Neil Gaiman opens the billing but I’m heading up the review with ‘Remnants’, a short story by Fred Chappell. Fred Chappell! I mean no disrespect to the other great talents on display here but for me, a Fred Chappell story is a thing of glory. He writes beautifully, perhaps even more beautifully than Peter S. Beagle. He is a poet and has a poet’s ear for language and the rhythm of a sentence. I was mad for his ‘Shadow’ stories in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science-Fiction’ and intrigued to know what he would do with Lovecraft’s monsters. He doesn’t disappoint.

In the near future, Lovecraft’s Old Ones have invaded Earth, destroying most of the population with contemptuous ease, reshaping the Moon and setting about building monstrous machines for unknown cosmic purposes of their own. Remnants of humanity, small groups, hide out here and there. Vern, his mother and his autistic sister, Echo, scrape a bare living as hunter-gatherers in a wilderness area. Then Echo gets a telepathic message from somewhere but making sense of it with her limitations is difficult. She thinks in pictures, not words.

The best thing in this was the language used by the aliens, other remnants discarded by the Old Ones, who have picked up English from the libraries of relic human spaceships and don’t quite have it right. The first person narration by the alien captain, which alternates with a third person one from Vern, shows a masterful twisting of the lingo. You know what he means but he doesn’t say it how we would. Chappell is also proficient as describing the disorientating effect of the Old Ones’ machines on human senses. It’s a 45-page tale that deserves to be read in one sitting, as recommended by Poe. Wonderful.

‘That of Which We Speak When We Speak Of The Unspeakable’ by Nick Mamatas could be a prequel to Fred Chappell’s ‘Remnants’. Two men and a woman wait in a cave as the Elder Gods take over our Earth. China is already gone. I think it was Neil Gaiman who said that if Cthulhu showed up today we would nuke the bastard. Well, they tried that and it just made him glow. (Men and horses sweat, women and Cthulhu glow.) The conversation of the doomed is interesting, them being an odd trio.

Speaking of Neil Gaiman, his contribution is ‘Only The End Of The World Again’, set in Innsmouth, as are a few in this book. It seems to be a favourite venue for Lovecraft homages. Lawrence Talbot is an Adjustor and a werewolf who is trying to prevent the end of the world. The fishy folk of Innsmouth are determined to bring it on, Elder Gods swallowing the Moon and that type of thing. Gaiman writes beautifully and the atmosphere of dark menace is nicely undercut with a bit of wry humour from the protagonist.

Quite similar in style is ‘The Bleeding Shadow’ by Joe R. Lansdale, another good piece with a pervading atmosphere of menace and dark deeds that Lovecraft would have liked. Lansdale is much better at snappy dialogue and smart similes than the old master and, as with so many stories from the man who gave us ‘Bubba Ho-Tep’, there’s a strong sense of place – Texas! Both these tales could have been written by H.P. Chandler or Raymond Lovecraft. Not as far out an idea as it seems because Chandler would have preferred to write fantasy stories but thought they wouldn’t make a ’thin worn dime.’

The purest homage to Lovecraft, with not a taint of any other author detectable, is delivered by Thomas Ligotti. The first person narrator of ‘The Sect Of The Idiot’ won’t give his name or the name of the old town in which he sits in a high room looking through diamond-paned windows at its seemingly unending strangeness. Solitary, he enters into fantastic states of mind and has dreams that may be more than dreams. This is the most Lovecraftian piece in prose, tone and mood in the book and could have been written by the old master himself as part of his dream cycle. A masterpiece of homage and quite different from the other stories herein.

In ‘The Same Deep Waters As You’, Kerry Larimer, an animal whisperer, is recruited by Homeland Security and taken to a remote island prison. There are sixty-three prisoners who have been held there since 1928, a fact unknown to most of the last fifteen presidents, she is told, because ‘There are security levels above the office of President. Politicians come and go. Career military and intelligence, we stick around.’ That certainly has the ring of truth. Larimer’s task is to communicate with the prisoners, a fishy bunch who like it damp. This is one of the best stories in the book thanks to Brian Hodge’s clear writing and a good plot with a great ending.

‘The Dappled Thing’ by William Browning Spencer has a team of adventurers searching the African jungles for Lord Addison’s missing daughter in Her Glory of Empire, a spherical kind of steampunk tank with tentacles. The author pastiches Victorian prose beautifully and the Lovecraftian theme comes in near the end. I was a bit dubious about this at first but liked it a lot by the time the last page was reached.

A similar Victorian style adventure is ‘Black As The Pit, From Pole To Pole’ by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley, a long story about Frankenstein’s monster journeying to the centre of the Earth. It opens with information about John Cleves Symmes and his hollow Earth theories and is interspersed with paragraphs about Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein. So its metafiction, playing with the fact that we know this is a story. Usually, this kind of thing is not to my liking and, in the beginning, I thought it was a bit boring. By the end, I was fond of the piece. It’s well written and, as far as I can tell, the authors have a good knowledge of the background material. I read ‘Frankenstein’ once because a friend told me it was impossible. It wasn’t easy, but neither is Lovecraft.

‘Bulldozer’ by Laird Barron is about a Pinkerton man on the trail of a bad guy called Hicks who was a circus strongman. I would like to quote a whole chapter: ‘Chapter 19. Maggots.’ ’Bulldozer’ is not quite ruined by having twenty-six chapters in twenty-eight pages because it’s a good yarn. To be fair, short stories are the place for stylistic experiments but this one didn’t really work for me. On the other hand, what’s good for an author might work for a reviewer, too.

The following brief paragraphs cover the shorter stories in Lovecraft’s Monsters.

‘I’ve Come To Talk With You Again’ by Karl Edward Wagner features a horror writer meeting some fans in an English pub. All is not what it seems.

‘Red Goat, Black Goat’ is that rare thing, a horror story about goats. Aided by the exotic setting, Nadia Bulkin manages to make it scary.

‘Inelastic Collisions’ by Elizabeth Bear is about creatures from a different plane trapped in human form. Bear writes stylishly but often leaves me puzzled, as here. I don’t know what actually happened at the end but getting there was okay, I guess.

‘A Quarter To Three’ by Kim Newman is just one scene really, about a young man working the graveyard shift at a 24-hour diner in Innsmouth when a heavily pregnant woman comes in. No real surprises but an excellent sense of atmosphere, lively writing (It’s H.P. Chandler again) and a jukebox that’s almost a character in itself. Very good.

‘Love Is Forbidden, We Croak And Howl’ by Caitlín R. Kiernan is an amusing tale about a ghoul who falls for one of the fishy daughters of Innsmouth. Not quite ‘Romeo And Juliet’ but the narrator admits that. Nice descriptions of the daily life of monsters and enjoyable dark humour.

‘Waiting At The Crossroads Motel’ by Steve Rasnic Tem has Walker doing what it says in the title. His wife and two kids are waiting with him but he doesn’t have the usual feelings about them. In fact, he’s a very unusual man. An air of real menace makes this uncomfortable reading, which is the point, I guess.

‘Jar Of Salts’ And ‘Haruspicy’ are poems by Gemma Files that are successfully Lovecraftian in mood.

The last tale in the book is a novelette, ‘Children Of The Fang’ by John Langan about Rachel and Josh and their family. Grandad lives on the top floor of the house and keeps something locked in a freezer in the basement. Rachel and Josh find tape recordings of Grandad telling their Uncle Jim, now vanished, about a lost cave city in the deserts of the Middle East with strange writings on the walls. This has all the classic ingredients of pulp horror fiction (The thing in the basement! The lost city!) so a brief description makes it sound like corny old rubbish. It certainly is not. The family saga is rich with realistic details and there’s a neat twist at the end. A fitting conclusion to a quality collection.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/ ( )

This is a tribute anthology to the master of weird horror, H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories have become legend: the massive, tentacled Cthulhu, who lurks beneath the sea waiting for his moment to rise; the demon Sultan Azathoth, who lies babbling at the center of the universe, mad beyond imagining; the Deep Ones, who come to shore to breed with mortal men; etc. All these stories in Datlow’s anthology are themed around this, being as tangible (or at least sort of visible) monsters, not just eerie goings on. Some of the stories were slow or dull, but I liked the book overall! ( )