A Bright and Beautiful Eternal World

by James Chambers

You won’t find Knicksport, Long Island by any map, GPS, or main road. To get there, you must lose your way along lonely, tree-shadowed back roads that wind through grooves of time and reality, byways that trace the glacial hills, marshlands, and wooded pockets tucked into the suburban landscape growing like verdigris clinging to rock. You must step out of the daylit world into a town haunted by the lost and the missing, the hidden and the hunted—because Knicksport is full of witches and monsters. If you can find your way there, you can walk down Main Street, admire the ships moored in the harbor, stop in at Raker’s for a drink and soak up some of the local lore; stroll past the town’s historic buildings and houses—though you might not like what watches you from behind their curtains; sample the local fare—though you might not like how it changes you; dig into the local history—if you’re not afraid of dark secrets; and even hike the hills at night—if you’re not worried about ever finding your way back. A Bright and Beautiful Eternal World collects a dozen tales of cosmic horror and monstrosities lurking beneath the civilized veneer of this mythical town, where artists, fishermen, scientists, writers, and everyday people (not all of them entirely human) live in the shadows of entities and powers beyond their comprehension, where the echoes of history never cease ringing, and if you hike into the hills at night or linger too long by the harbor, you might never find your way back. Stories Odd Quahogs
A Song Left Behind in the Aztakea Hills
All’s Well that Ends
Refugees
Mother of Monsters
Dropped Signal
The House in the Picture
Echoes from the Ice
Stars on the Fringe of a Black Hole
The Private Estate
Basement Gin
A Bright and Beautiful Eternal World

306 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2023

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Barbara Cottrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Welcome to Knicksport, Long Island. Population: Terrified.
I love when an author fully explores a community. James Chambers does this with Knicksport, a town plagued by outbreaks of cosmic horror. From a doomed polar expedition (Echoes From The Ice) to a small time criminal trapped in a basement by monsters (Basement Gin) to an author who suspects his reality is an illusion (A Bright And Beautiful Eternal World), this short story collection has something for everyone. H.P. Lovecraft fans in particular will savor this modern take on a strange community.

[David Agranoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Musically I am a metal guy, but I spent most of my life being part of the hardcore scene, as I felt more kinship to folks in that scene. On paper, I am a Science Fiction guy, and much the same way I am a horror fiction scene guy. I have always loved the horror community. James Chambers is one of the bright examples of why I love the horror community. We first hung out at Borderlands Writers Boot Camp in 2011. It was way longer ago than I want to think about. Halloween People have kinship, SF people have a kinship, and I share both with Chambers. An active force in the HWA if you are a horror writer it is likely that James has impacted your work.

Now that stuff is out of the way let's talk about this beautiful special edition paperback. Graced with eight mostly full-color illustrations by artist KL Turner. This book looks better than any paperback has any right to. As it is a good-looking book, I should add you can judge this book by its excellent cover. The interior is filled with several Lovecraftian and Cosmic horror works anchored to the geography of the perfectly intentional cliche horror town known as Knicksport.

The horror town is often thought of as a New England town thanks to Castle Rock and Derry Maine, Charles Grant’s Ox-Run station and more. In a modern context, Josh Malerman has given us Goblin Michigan. Going back to Lovecraft’s fictional college towns the mythical horror towns are like a power cord in the genre. Knicksport Long Island just outside of the largest city on the east coast is Jim Chambers's fictional town and he has made the most of it.

The fictional town in horror is always a nexus point for horror and the unexplained, but in this case Knicksport is like a cosmic portal. The collection features 10 stories. I am not sure how many years they were written over but one thing I can say is the work is consistent throughout. There are mentions of Lovecraftian figures but the uses are tactical and minor, used like a fine spice and not hammering the reader over the head to make sure you know “this is LOVECRAFTIER than Lovecraft.” The mythos elements are subtle and perfect.

My two favorite stories are the title story and Song on the Fringe of a Black Hole. Both stories are haunting. Song on the Fringe of Black Hole has a split narrative that makes the story stand out. The title story is an entry in the cursed book subgenre, and it gets Meta. “There is one book, but many authors, and we have not told our stories well.

Why do those words haunt me? What is there one book?

A stray cloud passes across the face of the sun and darkens my window I flinch at the tepid gloom, but it passes in a moment.”

The vibe is a perfect for ending the book, and as The Dude would say it ties the room together. Along the way every story is solid, and at no time did I think the book would be stronger without one. Other favorites include Basement Gin and Dropped Signal. Throughout the book like lots of cosmic horror there are plenty of really powerful moments that come from the amazing prose. Consider this passage from the story Refugees. “Some nights as we lay in bed, sated, cradled in the rolling of the ship, Dagmar spoke to me of her dreams and theories, the two things inextricably intertwined around her conviction that a long-extinct intelligent species had once populated every major body of water on the planet. She spoke of legends and folklores, of strange artifacts lost to contemporary knowledge, of whispers among isolated tribes that suggested incredible powers beyond the scope of science. She told me of discredited orne account from Massachusetts and the rumor of immortality granted to unknown beasts of the sea that idea appealed to her the most I think.”

Look at the way Chambers puts forward several ideas with a classic method. The relationship between the lead characters who are researching this ancient. In classic tales the method of telling the tale was often straight-up. The long-extinct species that exists in whispers. Knicksport is a city haunted by a chorus of whispers.

From the story dropped signals “The TV man bled and moaned on the barn floor his terrified expression did not fool Marshall. The old man knew well from his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him how to recognize the crawling chaos when he saw it, no matter what avatar the messenger displayed. The black man. The faceless god. The man and the waxing mask. Or some monstrous, nameless, horrifying creature none of it deceived Marshall he knew well Nyarlathtep’s many possible forms when the TV man, who smiled too much and lied with every word he spoke, arrived that morning he recognized the dreaming void in his eyes, since the dimming darkness seeping from the man's brain saw the prepubescent haze it formed in the air above his head as it escaped his skull.”

And there he is the great deceiver straight from Lovecraft a subtle mention that puts this straight into the tradition stretching back to weird tales spread in pulps and letters in the 1930s. Here is a perfectly calibrated entry in the mythos set in Chamber's own creation Knicksport, NY

With plenty of creepy moments like this one taken from Basement Gin: The corpse shifted in the soil. More shell cracked. It's Bony roots dragged themselves out of the dirt. It rolled to one side than the other, freeing itself. It's left arm rose, its hands spreading its fingers, more shelled chips raining from it the tendril softening, uncoiling. Where they pulled free of earth, water welled up from the holes. It coated the bottom of the grave, soaked into the corpse, restored life to it, softened the shells so they cracked less as they moved.”

A Bright and Beautiful Eternal World is a creepy collection of masterfully written cosmic horror not only in the mythos tradition but also a fine example of what modern innovations can bring to the classic genre. A must-read work for cosmic horror fans that ends with the strongest story in the collection and will have you dying for more.

[Milt Theo · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Chambers’ new short story collection, ‘A Bright and Beautiful Eternal World,’ includes twelve brilliant tales based on the Lovecraftian mythos of the Old Ones: those immensely ancient, godly, monstrous creatures lurking for their chance to take back the universe as humans perceive it.
This is not simply another Lovecraftian-inspired anthology. I’ll go on a limb here and say outright that all of the stories are better than anything Lovecraft himself ever wrote, though it’s unthinkable these stories would exist if Lovecraft hadn’t put pen on paper. What’s more, you don’t need to be steeped in the Lovecraftian universe to enjoy Chambers’ stories: they are character-driven, almost always standalone, glances into the history of the fictional Knicksport, admittedly with some major connections to Lovecraft’s fictional Innsmouth and Arkham, some significant nods to Dagon and his amphibian-like progeny, and that cursed book, the Necronomicon, but these are mostly for those in the know. The stories break new ground, fortunately without introducing further complications into an already overdone universe; on the contrary, they take what’s already there and create superb, scary journeys into dark places we ourselves are too afraid to go: the mind of a war veteran, the boat of an unsuspecting fisherman, the attic of a madman, the non-Euclidean geometries of the sound produced by a psychedelic folk rock band, the fictional universe created by a horror writer’s book series, to mention just a few (and you get cameos from Jack Kerouac to the writer of The Little Prince). The words describing the monstrosities, the alien presences, are amazing, captivating, they explode on the page like fireworks (and it would be amiss not to praise K L. Turner's art: that roach thing will give me nightmares!)

Indeed, to top it all off, there's Chambers’ memorable prose - I honestly couldn’t have enough of it:
“The sight of Cthulhu fascinates him. Nothing of his world remains except my desk, my computer, and my door. And Cthulhu. One world cannot contain him. Erase his world, and he persists; he exists beyond the concept of worlds. The dead made their sacrifices, fueled engines started not by gods, but by men who aspired to godhood and achieved only insanity. Not even Alhazred, first to shape the Necronomicon, knew exactly what the engines might create...”

It is all done with so much skill, it’s like falling in love with cosmic horror all over again. Highly, very highly recommended!

[Becky Spratford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review in the November 1 & 15 issue of Booklist and on the blog: https://raforall.blogspot.com/2023/11... (link live 11/16/23 at 7am central)

Three Words That Describe This Book: Cosmic Horror, Strong Sense of Place, Engaging Narration

Notes:
LI setting– North shore. Waters that are easily swum from RI for the Elder Gods.

Set from 1950s to present.

Providence, Arkham, Knicksport....

Realistically diverse cast of characters.

Illustrations are an awesome addition

A few of these stories are good enough to be nominated for awards.