David Conyers

This one feels more self-indulgent and less comprehensible. Read soon after Freeze Frame, or not at all. It does very little hand-holding from the prior book (do I even remember the conspirators?) and the scenery is entirely astronomical imaginings. If Freeze Frame felt too hard sci-fi, this is the diamond sci-fi version.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_09_14_reprint/

A truly non-spoilery example of the indulgent writing, put under spoilers for brevity:

Not this time. This time we’re just another one of Hakim’s holiday ornaments, dangling from a thread in a hurricane. According to the Chimp, that thread should hold. There are error bars, though, and not a lot of empirical observation to hang them on. The database on singularities nested inside asteroids nested inside incinerating ice giants is pretty heavy on the handwaving.

And that’s just the problem within the problem. Atmospheric docking with a world falling at two hundred kilometers a second is downright trivial next to predicting Thule’s course inside the star: the drag inflicted by a millionth of a red-hot gram per cubic centimeter, stellar winds and thermohaline mixing, the deep magnetic torque of fossil helium. It’s tough enough figuring out what “inside” even means when the gradient from vacuum to degenerate matter blurs across three million kilometers. Depending on your definition we might already be in the damn thing.

Merged review:

This one feels more self-indulgent and less comprehensible. Read soon after Freeze Frame, or not at all. It does very little hand-holding from the prior book (do I even remember the conspirators?) and the scenery is entirely astronomical imaginings. If Freeze Frame felt too hard sci-fi, this is the diamond sci-fi version.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_09_14_reprint/

A truly non-spoilery example of the indulgent writing, put under spoilers for brevity:

Not this time. This time we’re just another one of Hakim’s holiday ornaments, dangling from a thread in a hurricane. According to the Chimp, that thread should hold. There are error bars, though, and not a lot of empirical observation to hang them on. The database on singularities nested inside asteroids nested inside incinerating ice giants is pretty heavy on the handwaving.

And that’s just the problem within the problem. Atmospheric docking with a world falling at two hundred kilometers a second is downright trivial next to predicting Thule’s course inside the star: the drag inflicted by a millionth of a red-hot gram per cubic centimeter, stellar winds and thermohaline mixing, the deep magnetic torque of fossil helium. It’s tough enough figuring out what “inside” even means when the gradient from vacuum to degenerate matter blurs across three million kilometers. Depending on your definition we might already be in the damn thing.… (more)

One character in this book says, “Questions are a burden, answers are a prison”.

After finishing it, making notes, skimming parts of it again, I still feel somewhat burdened and not totally imprisoned.

Whether it’s my deficiencies as a reader or because it’s a deliberately and resolutely mysterious work, I’m not sure I completely understood what happened.

However, I can unreservedly recommend three of its four stories.

Having always meant to return to David Conyers’ Harrison Peel series after reading “The Eye of Infinity”, I was pleased to see Peel show up in Conyers’ “Broken Singularity”. It’s the oddity here, broken up into four parts, starting and ending the book and in between the stories, and often casting some dim light on their events.

Peel awakens naked from a pod to join three other people. There’s a drill-instructor like voice yelling them to get into their spacesuits and get working or the oxygen privileges will end. The work is to explore an airless planetoid and bring back information. None of the four can remember how they got there. Peel may be the primitive one here since the rest are posthumans, but his military training kicks in, and he takes command while the rest dawdle. Not that the party lasts long after seeing the oddity of a Humvee on the surface. Approaching it, it morphs, launches weapons, and reduces two of the party to cubes of their constituent chemical components.

Debriefed on the mission, he meets a woman who seems familiar. Well, part of her: a disembodied head and arm. She hints that maybe he should check out the connections on the pod he emerged from.

Peel does and wakens again, this time with memories of his last mission. The same can not be said of the survivor of the last mission who also wakes along with two strangers. Another slaughter occurs, but Peel manages to find a strange, singularity-like object under the surface of the world, and the reason for this strange prison world begin to be revealed.

I’ve been lukewarm towards Matthew Davenport’s Andrew Dolan series, but I liked “The Prisoner from Beyond”, probably because it’s a weird western and not Indiana Jones crossed with the Cthulhu Mythos. Narrator Hiram Cartwright is a member of the Esoteric Cavalry founded in 1841 by President Martin van Buren to combat menaces “not of this world”. Cartwright fought in the American Civil War which saw both sides using magic to a limited extent which devastated the Cavalry. Now Hiram is charged with patrolling the empty lands of western America (the story is set in Nebraska Territory) and recruiting people including his older brother Buford. They are dispatched to Barrenstand to investigate the outbreak of a seemingly unearthly plague tied to a fog that appears every night.

The citizens are suffering from visions of “worms” that appear in the air. But they are real enough to bite people, and the citizens also suffer from bad dreams. Eventually, the brothers track down a wizard in town who has been making some experiments with “essential salts” and hybrid creatures. Gunplay, explosions, and magic ensue.

I liked how the brothers are marked by their war experiences and how they are surprisingly reluctant to cut loose with their revolvers.

It’s a return to David Hambling’s Stubbsverse with “The Body Snatchers” in which Harry Stubbs not only gets to show off his talents as a boxer but also as a logician and empathetic negotiator. It not only has some passing links to previous Stubbs’ stories but mentions some characters from Hambling’s The Dulwich Horror and Other Stories.

Stubbs is approached by an acquaintance, Smith, on a delicate matter. Smith is still working at the local mental asylum, a job he took up to aid Stubbs in Master of Chaos. A recent patient brought in by the police is a man who claims to be a carpenter named Edward Haywood. Their due diligence put an end to his claims. None of his roommates recognized him though there was that strange bit where he denounced someone with them as an imposter. The strange thing is that a man named Haywood was employed by Smith’s girlfriend at her pub, and the putative Haywood knows all the details of that acquaintance.

Transfers of mind are just the sort of thing that one Dr. Estelle de Vere, a psychologist with visiting privileges at the asylum, would be interested in. And you really don’t want to draw de Vere’s attention or that of her fearsome TDS organization. Determined to stamp out offworld intrusions on Earth, their operational policy is a dead-men-tell-no-tales one. All of which puts Stubbs in a rather precarious position because TDS is his real “employer” under decidedly coercive terms. So, Smith and Stubbs want this whole matter resolved before de Vere gets wind of it.

Stubbs investigation will lead him to encounter a reputed occult master and his menacing German student, an astrologer conman, and a menacing doctor and her very burly assistant and reaches a climax in the West Norwood Cemetery. It’s another winning combination of Stubbs’ simple and clear narration, occult history, and intrigue. I particularly liked Stubb’s reverie on the boxing greats buried in the cemetery.

If the archetypal Lovecraft story is somebody delving into the occult or their family genealogy, the previous three stories deviate from that. Davenport’s is a straight-up occult-tinged adventure story. Conyers’ is a military-tinged story that sees the Cthulhu “deities” in terms of forces from advanced physics. Hambling’s is an intricate mystery mixing history and the occult.

But John DeLaughter’s “Leng’s Labyrinth” does use that template – at first. Then it becomes, rather like his “The Terror Out of Time”, a corporate-military espionage story involving what you might term the Deepest State. At this point, the astute Lovecraft fan will know which of his tales other stories in this book draw from. DeLaughter’s debt is to Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” given the narrator is one Francois Luc DeLapont, a member of the same family featured in that story.

He’s a foreign exchange from Massachusetts studying in France. One Hallow’s Eve, he and a friend decide to walk the Labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral. Said friend gets ripped apart by figures emerging from the shadows, and Francois flees. A genealogical report reveals to him the sordid past of his ancestors and extended family. Weird dreams drive him to a Jungian Institute and a session in an isolation tank.

And there the plot thickens – and I had a couple of problems. The narration shifts from first person to some parts in third person. Now, this can work, but it was jarring, and I don’t think DeLaughter quite pulled it off after spending so long with Francois.

Francois finds himself kidnapped to work on a secret government project – allegedly seeking extraterrestrial life via remote viewing – in a complex near K2. And here I had my second problem with one action scene going on longer than needed to provide the tie into a bit from Conyers’ story. (Though I found the training and indoctrination for Francois’ new job a bit amusing.)

The ending was a puzzle too.

I’m not sure what to make of this story, but, despite the above problems, I still liked it.

But then I’m still not quite clear about everything in the anthology or the anthology’s overarching plot. But fans of the Mythos, especially of the more puzzling sort of story, should like this one.… (more)

More than most of the Chaosium "Call of Cthulhu Fiction" volumes I've read, this one is tied down to the pulp-era setting of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. The tales share a common emphasis on the presence of cults dedicated to the praeternatural entities of Yog-Sothothery. There is a fair amount of variety among the contributions, and some of them are genuinely disturbing.

Many of these stories use ethnicity and "race" as a distinction in order to foster fear by "othering" the cultists. Every central protagonist, without exception, is white (although there are a couple of darker-hued sidekicks), and villainous cults include Arabs, Chinese, tribal Africans, etc. As if uneasy with this feature himself, editor David Conyers makes an apology for it in his foreword, mentioning that it follows from the culture of the period in which the stories are set. Still, the argument falls flat with me. To recognize and illustrate the racism of the period does not mean that fantasy horror narratives need to validate it in the way that these do.

My favorite story in the book, which did not partake of this particular fault, was Penelope Love's "The Whisperer of Ancient Secrets." Conyers supplies the final story of the volume, in which he explicitly ties together most of others into a single continuity. I was impressed with how artfully he pulled that off.… (more)

The flavor of most of these stories is that of a pulp adventure story, with occult overtones, rather than horror. But that’s ok. The 1920s and 1930s, the setting of all these stories, was a grand time for those kind of stories. There were plenty of unexplored corners of the world. Transportation virtually anywhere was available – but not easy or common. Communication meant finding a local radio station, telegraph office, or pay phone – not whipping out your cell phone. There was the political and human wreckage of one world war with sides being drawn up for another.

Rich enough by itself but throw in some sinister cults, extraterrestrial “gods”, blasphemous books, and strange sorcery and you’ve got the potential for some good stories. And that potential is realized with most of the stories here even if, as I said, not all are really horror stories.

Conyers has even arranged some crossover unity in the stories which, while all standalones, sometimes reference characters and events of other stories in the collection.

Familiarity with the inspiration for the project, the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, is not necessary to enjoy any of these stories.

“The Eternal Champion” in David Conyers’ story is one Lang-Fu (I assume a recurring character from the game). He wants a magic talisman back. The narrator, a sailor handy with a knife, has been hired by his magician cousin to stop him. This was just an ok story with the main interest being one Mama Tropos who runs a club in San Francisco which is sort of neutral ground for the warring parties.

“Captains of Industry” by John Goodrich interestingly sets itself against the labor unrest of the 1920s in the United States. A couple of labor organizers infiltrate a club to get warning of the next move in a brutal campaign of union suppression by the club’s members. Of course, there is a bit more going on at the Lodge of the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight.

David Witteveen’s “Perfect Skin” is a nice atmospheric effort set in 1922 Istanbul. A newlywed woman begins to learn all sorts of unpleasant things about the activities of her new – and now vanished – husband.

Rudolph Pearson, hero of William Jones’ The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson, tangles with a race of ghouls in 1923 New York City. Professor Pearson’s fight with the ghouls has an unusual – but quite Lovecraftian – ending in “Covenant of Darkness”.

The ending of Penelope Love’s “The Whisperer of Ancient Secrets” may be hurt by its vague ending but the story, the surrealistic account of a man changed by his encounter with a meteorite and the experiments he is performing in an underground facility in the Australian Outback (this collection has a group of strong Australian writers), is disturbing in its casual depravity and madness.

Told in the letters of the hero to his dead wife, Peter Worthy’s “Old Ghost” is one of those stories with a strong mystery pulp feeling except here, of course, there really is something supernatural going on. The narrator, an ex-minister, is befriended by an old sea captain. But, when the captain disappears, he begins to learn about something called the Order of the Bloated Woman and a Chinese gangster who has risen from the dead.

While Oscar Rios’ “The Nature of Faith” is set in Dunwich about the same time as Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” there is little reference to that story, and the settings of the stories do not seem to share much in detail or atmosphere. This is one of those man-wanders-into-small-town-with-a-secret stories. Here the man is a college professor who thinks Dunwich may have evidence of an ancient Celtic migration to America. And then he meets an exotic and beautiful looking girl and love seems possible.

“The Devil’s Diamonds” from Cody Goodfellow was one of my favorite stories. A British Army officer is dispatched to Kenya to investigate the mistreatment of native workers in the Lucky Kate diamond mine. Oh, they’re digging for something there, but it isn’t diamonds. And the investors in the mine are unusual too.

Continuing the trend of saving the best stories for last is Shane Jiraiya Cummings’ “Requiem for the Burning God”. Its hero is an ex-British aviator from World War One who joins a mercenary company to help New World Incorporated take back a mine from insurgents in Peru. Of course, almost nothing good is done underground in a Cthulhu Mythos story, This is also another story where the horror element was almost entirely overshadowed by a well-done action adventure plot.

Editor David Conyers references a lot of the earlier stories with his “Sister of the Sands”. Its hero, a British intelligence officer, encounters a strange, beautiful, and naked woman in the Egyptian desert. Of course, she’s not what she seems. And this story ends on an oddly hopeful and human moment for a Mythos story. Another enjoyable effort.

So, gaming considerations aside, this collection is worth a look for all Mythos fans – as long as they don’t insist on horror, cosmic or other wise, in every story.… (more)