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Histories Of Mgo

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There is a place.

Somewhere...

Histories of Mgo is the forbidden progeny of existence and negative space, the birth of so many wrong worlds. Between here and Mgo, you will be guided along destructive paths.

Desolate lives and several deaths.

What is forgotten and what never was.

181 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 29, 2024

34 people want to read

About the author

Edwin Callihan

8 books3 followers

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5 stars
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3 (17%)
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4 (23%)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Profile Image for Sam.
Author 44 books105 followers
May 31, 2024
Histories of Mgo is my favorite book I've read so far this year and I have no doubt it will end up in my top 3 by the year's end, if not retaining it's place at #1.
Callihan writes like a man desperate to share the importance of obscure visions given to him in a bout of madness. These glimpses of Mgo never give us a full understanding of what or where it is, but rather work together to help build and bolster the questions we have of it.
In the best way, this book reads like something you've read before and yet is also unlike anything else. Like a book you read twenty years ago that you can't find any information on or verification that it even exists but for your hazy, time-warped memories.
In a just world, Histories of Mgo will be found by an expanding readership in the coming months, and in five years, we'll still all be talking about it.
There are some minor formatting issues, especially in the last story, but that aside, this book is destined to become a classic of the weird fiction/cosmic horror genre.
Grimy, strange, unsettling.
Author 5 books43 followers
April 1, 2025
Favorite story was IT WORKS EVERY TIME.
Profile Image for Madison McSweeney.
Author 32 books19 followers
March 20, 2024
Weird fiction in all its variations, from modern cosmic horror to sword & sorcery of the most sinister kind. Many of the stories feel like heavy metal albums come to life. Others suggest we were wrong about the dinosaurs.

What’s especially cool about this book is Callihan’s experimentations with setting. Some of the tales echo each other, but the linkages are hazy, so you’re never sure if they’re set in the same universe or perhaps a circuit of possible universes that feed into each other. Mgo has many variations, sometimes a physical place and sometimes a state of mind; in some stories it presents as an ancient civilization lost to time, while in others it exists alongside a futuristic dystopia. Some of its descendants worship Billy Dee Williams.

This book will lend itself well to re-reads as readers try to tease out the through-lines and piece together the truth of Mgo, secure in the knowledge that - like Lovecraft’s elder gods - much of that truth will remain beyond our comprehension.
Profile Image for Books For Decaying Millennials.
215 reviews39 followers
February 16, 2024
Notes from a Decaying Millenial:
Thanks to Castaigne Publishing for graciously providing an advanced Readers Copy for me to absorb into my brain matter.
While I have, as yet, not met Edwin Callihan in the flesh, he and his publishing ventures have had a tremendous impact on my creative life over the past few years. Ed's magazine Gravely Unusual was one of the first publications to print my drawings (some on the back cover no less). Gravely Unusual Magazine was the ancient cobweb incrusted door that, once opened, led me into the world of Indy Horror and weird fiction creative spaces that I love so dear.
That said...THIS IS NOT A PAID REVIEW, I'm sure if i filled this review with lies, un-named horrors would come for me in the wee hours and leave nothing but my flesh crafted into the likeness of a rattan chair of unspeakable proportion and shape.
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Sometimes you luck out, sometimes you hit the jackpot, and in so doing seal your fate. Sometimes your favorite local band, off touring the state, the globe, the 6 known realms of sense and dream, come home for a concert at your favorite Bar. They play all the songs that, over time, have become the mental soundtrack that fuels your slog through late-stage capitalism.
But the concert is different, you're favorite songs are screamed out with feral blood lust. But new songs are presented. By concerts end, the walls of the bar are bleeding, the merch table is nothing but a pile of festering worms. You slip out the back door, fresh band shirt clutched in your sweating fists. The Histories of Mgo have been revealed to you. Do you look back at what follows you? Or do you push forward working to forget the night?
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So, we take the plunge in to the chasm of HoM.. A Forward by Evan Dean Shelton (of Grave Gnosis and The Lurking Transmission podcast) serves not to warmly welcome the reader. Evan is the gate keeper. By sickly lantern light, he warns the reader of what is to come, while forcefully working a strange bronze key into the gates to the Land of Mgo.

Histories of Mgo is more than an anthology. Words have power. HOM brings together stories published in zines and other anthologies (some of which lurk on my own bookshelf). Ed grasps these tales and weaves them together with whispered lore, until now unpublished. The alchemical prose process succeeds in birthing into the readers mind a tapestry of strange grandeur.

Throughout the pages of this book, Mgo is present, in story, in setting and in the ominous cold shadows of the imagination.
I have no doubt that more tales from Mgo will bubble forth, out of the stinking ooze that is Edwin Callihan's brain.
Profile Image for William.
4 reviews1 follower
March 8, 2024
Dark, grimy, unsettling, grotesque. All the things I appreciate in good writing.
Profile Image for Coy Hall.
Author 35 books232 followers
February 1, 2024
Callihan writes with the vision of a rust belt Ligotti, equally concerned with slow-rot poverty and the liminality of the dark. A genuinely inspired collection of horror tales.
12 reviews
January 8, 2025
The ones that were good were really good however the majority of the book was not
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews

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