Around Eldritch Corners

by Christine Morgan

With strange aeons... where twin suns sink and towers rise behind the moon... in dark and lonely places when the stars are right... from the deadly light amidst black seas of infinity... unto a world which now trembles...



Yes, it's cosmic, it's mythos, it's Lovecraftian/Chambersian, it's overwrought language and indescribable horrors. But it's also twisted takes and irreverent pastiches, with weird kids and lovelorn sequels. It's ancient times, different histories, and distant futures. It's cats and cults and candles, odd architecture, mysterious tomes.



It's a collection of sixteen stories by Splatterpunk Award-winning author Christine Morgan, inviting you to take a peek...



AROUND ELDRITCH CORNERS

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

294 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 2024

Reviews

[Lisa Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bibliophilia Templum review
https://bibliophiliatemplum.wordpress.com/2024/09/17/around-eldritch-corners/

What an incredible collection of Eldritch tales! Christine Morgan has outdone herself with Around Eldritch Corners. These stories, though very different from each other, are all connected, subtly or overtly, by the tradition of the Lovecraftian style of suspense, terror, and things beyond our ken. In fact, the first story, “The Arkham-Town Musicians,” is a wonderful dark fairytale continuation of events after the famous happenings in Dunwich. It’s a fun little read.

However, the second story, “Pippa’s Crayons,” is a much darker type of cosmic horror, a very short, very chilling little tale. By contrast, “The Hounds of Tintagel” is an immersive and intense retelling of the events leading up to the birth of King Arthur, a tale of old gods, enigmatic women, and a disturbing elite group of warriors who are more than they seem.

And there is so much more. Christine Morgan’s genre-defying wordsmithing is on full display in this collection. The gut-clenching horrors of “Man of the House”; the suspenseful and visceral period piece “Brickwalk Mollies”; the twisted urban legend story of “Mary in the Mirror”; the fun dialogue in the ultimately dark “Ninesight” and the disturbing dialogue in the brilliantly crafted, ultimately shocking “Let Me Talk to Sarah”; the engrossing and unsettling prose of “The Mindhouse”; and everything before and after and in between proves Christine Morgan is the reigning queen of all things dark fiction.

And this is a collection for fans of all things dark fiction—genre-defying, remember. Morgan’s skillful and diverse storytelling will make you laugh out loud, gasp out loud, will chill you to the bone, and clench your innards and mind. And it’s all here, Around Eldritch Corners.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic collection with very interesting use of the lovecraftian lore and universe

★★★★★
The Arkham-Town Musicians

Pippa’s Crayons

The Hounds of Tintagel (I wish this was longer i would have read the whole book)

Professor Patriot and the Doom that came to Niceville

Ninesight

Let me talk to Sarah

★★★★
Man of the house

Incense and Insensibility

Waxen

When lavender is in bloom

At the crossroads

Keeper of memory

★★★
Brickwalk Mollies

The Mindhouse

Mary in the mirror

She walks in tatters

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essentially a formalist challenge--how many different ways can you invoke Lovecraftian tropes and end up with something unexpected? The first few are conceived as footnotes--a dark post-"Dunwich Horror" joke about the mutated animals that survived, "The Colour Out of Space" preserved in crayon, like that. We get a feminist #MeToo rewrite of "The Horror at Red Hook" that wraps Jack the Ripper into the mythology, a version of "The Rats in the Walls" through the eyes of a preteen (pretty good--as I was just thinking about, it can be hard for cosmic horror to actually horrify any more, and this manages the trick), and a Great-Old-Ones-as-Communists in a Tom Swift-type Red Scare kid story that makes a joke out of all the standard vocabulary, with the kids literally being taught "rugose," etc. as survival tools--though it's honestly not clear to me, if you took it literally, what help an ornate HPL word set would actually do for you. Her roads in are inventive, with the Bloody Mary story capturing the mood especially well.

The problem is that you've kind of got one go-to narrative move, and so in almost every story there's some moment where, yep, it's time for "black stars shining" and non-Euclidean corners and "starless skies" and "idiot piping" (was hoping somewhere on Youtube someone tried to convey how that might sound, but no luck--is that itself a Mythos story idea?) and the rest of the standard-issue vocab. I honestly don't know how many different ways you can write those sentences, ultimately, especially when they crop up in maybe three-quarters of the stories; Morgan gives it a go, and she finds a variety of approaches to these stories. It's just that you're kind of relegated by genre strictures to end up where you end up.