Worship the Night

by Jeffrey Thomas

THERE ARE MANY DENOMINATIONS OF HORROR
As Jeffrey Thomas says in his inrodcution to Worship The Night,, there is "a kind of loose theme at work in these stories: the notion of deities, hereafters, or otherwheres beyond the mortal plane."

"The Lost Family takes place in the Hell of Thomas' cult novel Letters From Hades, while "Counterclockwise" (set in his acclaimed milieu of Punktown) offers a glimpse into an alien belief system. "The Holy Bowl" invokes that tastiest of deities, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. "In Limbo" finds a man poised at the dismal way station betwen dmanantion and salvation. The protagonist of "About The Author" believes she has summoned tormenting entities from the netherworld. The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo" and Children of The Dragon" pay homage to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Finally, the main characaters of the novella The Sea of Flesh" face evil both in our world and within a mystical alternate realm.

You may be a doubting Thomas, but soon you will be a believer. In horror.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror

194 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2013

About the author

Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the acclaimed setting Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown, Voices from Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts of Punktown. Novels in that setting include Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, Red Cells, and The New God. Thomas’s other short story collections include The Unnamed Country, Gods of a Nameless Country, The Endless Fall, Haunted Worlds, Worship the Night, Thirteen Specimens, Nocturnal Emissions, Doomsdays, Terror Incognita, Unholy Dimensions, AAAIIIEEE!!!, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood, Carrion Men, Voices from Hades, The Return of Enoch Coffin, and Entering Gosston. His other novels include The American, Boneland, Subject 11, Letters From Hades, The Fall of Hades, The Exploded Soul, The Nought, Thought Forms, Beyond the Door, Lost in Darkness, and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers.

His work has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII (editor Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editors Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). At NecronomiCon 2024 Thomas received the Robert Bloch Award for his contributions to weird fiction.

Though he considers Viet Nam his second home, Thomas lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[T.E. Grau · Rating 4 out of 5]

It only took me one page to fall for Jeffrey Thomas.

It was several years back, and I had just received Unholy Dimensions - which is one of the best "concept collections" that I've ever read, Lovecraftian or otherwise - via the post as a gift from the author, and after choosing to remain undeterred by the rather uninspiring cover (as an admitted art/design snob, I always judge books, in whatever small way, by their covers), I dove in excitedly, based entirely on Thomas' reputation amongst fellow writers of the dark and Mythosy. The opening story in the collection was titled "Bones of the Old Ones," and by the time I'd finished that first page, I knew that I very much liked the way this Thomas fella put together a sentence, how he etched out a scene and drew up his characters. How he melded crime fiction with science fiction in one story, and how he paid homage to classic Weird lit in another. How he built his worlds and all the new and dark things that exist there. Punktown. Lords of the seven moons, how I swooned hard for Punktown.

Much like a woman knowing within the first five seconds of a blind date if they're ever going to disrobe with that person wiping their brow across from them, a reader often knows after that first page if they're on board with an author, or looking for the exit. For me, with Unholy Dimensions, it was love at first sight, and that affection has only grown with each new Jeffrey Thomas story, novella, and novel I've read since then, and there have been many.

In addition to being a precise stylist who weaves in enough poetry without turning purple, Thomas is one of those Big Creators, who has carved out vast swathes of newly tamed real estate from the jungle of the abyss, with the most famous of these being the above-mentioned Punktown, the fictional frontier planet that serves as a crossroads for a menagerie of races and entities all struggling to thrive and survive in a bleak, proto-Lovecraftian universe. And while Punktown put him on the map, and is his most recognizable brand, he's written so much more than that, including a series of stories and novels set in his version of an urbanized Hades, and dozens of other stories and books situated in more general Speculative Fiction arenas, that have been translated into numerous languages around the globe.

Thomas is an important writer of Horror Fiction, and based on his output, range, and immense talent, he deserves to be a household name in the genre, mentioned in concert with the elite writers of dark literature over the past two decades. Maybe he already is (I don't get out to conventions much), and if so, there is some justice in the cold creative world. I just know that writers like Thomas should be writing for a living. Full time. Cashing checks from Big Apple book deals that allow him a comfortable existence without the need for a distracting "day job," where each hour spent away from the keyboard is another hour ripped from the dark canon. Thomas was put here to write books of scary stories and Cosmic Horror. Black, unsettling stuff, and lots of it. He can surely shoulder the burden, based on his bibliography, as well as his recent and upcoming slate of projects. Hopefully, someday very soon, The Bigs will come calling, and Jeffrey Thomas' emergence in the shopping mall book store (do they even have those anymore) will finally come to pass. It has to work out that way. How can it not? I mean, Front Shelf writers belong on that Front Shelf, in the mall or otherwise.

With that preachy preamble behind us, I can put away the soap box and move on to the topic at hand, which is Jeffrey Thomas' recent collection Worship The Night (Dark Renaissance Books, 2013). I say "recent" and not "latest," as I requested a review of the book not too long ago, when it was Thomas' newest release, coming out on the heels of Encounters With Enoch Coffin (written in collaboration with famed Lovecraftian scribe W.H. Pugmire). Today, as of press time, it is now his second most recent collection, as Ghosts of Punktown was released just last week. So, you see what I mean about the whole "prolific" thing.

In Worship The Night, Thomas gives us eight substantial tales that run the dark gamut while showing his range, in terms of tone, location, and POV. Starting with the cover image, many of the stories here seem intensely personal, revealing a candor that is refreshing in Horror Fiction, which can sometimes drape itself in a detached, Kubrickian facade while bloodlessly describing scenes of profound violence. For what I count as the strongest stories in this collection, Thomas digs deep into his own meat and bones to reveal fresh terrors told in that clean, elegant way that marks all of Jeffrey Thomas' work

"The Lost Family" opens the assembly, and features the seraphic protagonist from his novel Fall of Hades, picking up her trail somewhere midway through that book, giving it a feel of a unearthed chapter. Thomas' construction of the landscape (cityscape?) of Hell is incredibly interesting, and made somehow simultaneously more hopeful as well as hopeless than your usual portrayals of the Underworld. An eternal realm of endless terrain is compressed into a claustrophobic crawl through the machinery of damnation, in a realm that is more dangerous than I thought possible.

"Counterclockwise" is the collection's sole Punktown story, and it's a dandy, centering on the bizarre mechanics of one of the many alien cults that have taken up residence on this rough and tumble planet, in this case the mysterious Groi (hmm). A massive clock tower - "a nightmarish wedding cake of black metal, tiered layers that tapered to the huge clock face that surmounted it" - built across the street from an apartment building drives a tenant to distraction, and then to a whole lot more. Uninitiated readers also get an introduction to the Choom, the wide-mouthed species indigenous to Oasis (nicknamed "Punktown" - a local epithet that stuck) who collaborate with the human settlers now running the megalopolis, from shipping to shopping to the police force. Thomas' deft handling of alien races, and the unwholesome monuments they erect, is on full display in that yellowish green clock face of "Counterclockwise." gur... gur... gur..

"The Holy Bowl" flies in the face of its often comical ruling deity, and possesses a tone that reminds me of the works of Mark Samuels or Thomas Ligotti. Grim, mean, and hopelessly cold. I've never read a Jeffrey Thomas story like this, and was pleasantly surprised by the vague familiarity of the setting, and the brutality that waits therein.

"In Limbo," written specifically for this collection, is the first of the outwardly personal stories in Worship The Night, which lends the work a resonant weight that is as heart rending as it is chilling. Written during the confluence of Hurricane Sandy, Halloween, and what Thomas terms "Life itself" in 2012, "In Limbo" sets a story to which we can all relate in a setting we all recognize, and then drops that cozy, tattered quilt over the cliff into a ravine of nightmares, where the End of Everything might be just outside your door, and seeping into your home.

In "About the Author" and "The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo," you can see Thomas having fun, spoofing trope-chasing while celebrating truth being stranger than fiction in the former, and playing fast and Lovecraftian loose with gangland history in the latter. Oddly enough, I picked up The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the End of the Underworld from the library the same week as I received Worship The Night. I haven't yet read the Gallo book, but I'm certain - much to my chagrin - that I won't find any Mythos undertones, nor homages to S. T. Joshi in the official biography of this charismatic Mafioso.

With these light interludes concluded, the plate is cleared for the two remaining stories, both of which are sizable slabs of spitting darkness that seem to build off of each other. "Children of the Dragon" takes our male American protagonist (probably not-so-coincidentally named "French") to Vietnam, a country with which Thomas is intimately acquainted. In looking for strange, possibly mythical creatures in the haunted jungles and lakes of Southeast Asia, our cryptozoologist first falls for a local bar girl, who becomes his key to discovering hidden-in-plain-sight secrets he never dared imagine. "Children of the Dragon" is essentially a Lovecraftian piece, set in real world locations visited by Thomas himself, doused in a patina of cosmic dread. This, of course, grounds a darkly fantastical tale in the minutia of reality, giving it a vibe of being not only wholly possible, but most likely true.

In "The Sea of Flesh," we see the United States - specifically, Salem, Massachusetts - through the eyes of an American-born child of Vietnamese immigrants, and her struggles with identity in two worlds that don't fully embrace her. This is a 40 page novelette, which could have been expanded out into a full-on novel with just a tad bit of padding, but thankful stays mean and lean and included as the final story in Worship The Night. "The Sea of Flesh" is a big, layered story populated by complex, multi-dimensional characters that struggle with job and family, secret desires and the dangers of shared dreaming. Especially in Salem, around Halloween, days after a rotting hulk of fleshy matter washes up into the harbor. It's an award-worthy work of Horror Fiction, and I found myself hoping that the story would never end, partly out of a desire to stay in that bluish world of sporadic joy and crushing sadness, but also because I could see the clouds of doom building on the horizon, and wanted to keep them at bay before they could overtake the land and flatten the souls living there. Some people deserve happiness, and never get it. Some find it, and then have it taken from them. Both are cruel, but the latter is the cruelest.

[Suresh S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prior to this I had read Unholy Dimensions, a collection of Jeffrey Thomas stories inspired by the Cthulhu mythos. While I liked that one a good bit on the whole, it did seemed a little constrained by the theme to fit in tentacled creatures into as many stories as possible. In contrast, variety is the name of the game here, and while some common lines of theme or setting run through the stories, they are a lot more individually satisfying and the mood varies from playful to tragic to scary, sometimes all in the same tale. This is an almost all-killer no-filler deal where each story delivers its own concise flavor. The one story that didn't sit well with me was The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo, whose attempts to mix Lovecraftian mythos with mafia turf wars results in an uneasy mash.
Conversely the final entry, a long story titled The Sea of Flesh, seamlessly blends a relationship drama between connected characters with high fantasy sequences a la Clark Ashton Smith. The characters are well-written and very likable, and a genuine sense of fear / pathos is created when the story threatens bad things to happen to them. Certain elements are deliberately repeated to create a sense of rhythm, but with enough variation to keep the reader's interest going. The imagination and style of writing here is, in a word, immaculate (and that's true for most of the book). I will definitely be looking forward to reading more of the author's work.

[Gab · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an anthology of short stories by Jeffrey Thomas, though keep in mind than more than half this book is a novella; so it's really more a novella plus a handful of short stories.
Thomas writes very well and has fresh ideas, the only thing that made me like this anthology less than it could have are the choices on what to include in.

For example: we have a story called 'The Lost Family,' which focuses on the protagonist of Jeffrey's novel 'The Fall of Hades.' In this anthology's introduction, Jeffrey explains how this short story's events don't take place prior to or after the events of 'Fall of Hades', but somewhat in the middle of the novel. He goes on saying "for that reason, I might just as well have titled this story The Lost Chapter. But it is also meant to work as a stand-alone story, if you haven't read that novel."
Now, I didn't read that novel (my own stupid fault, I know,) and I don't think it worked too well as a stand-alone, because I found myself shoved into a world which rules I don't know, following a character I haven't been introduced to and therefore I don't really care about.

Another choice that I see very often that I personally would prefer not to, is in the story 'Children of the Dragon.' To cut to the chase, is a Lovecraftian story. I love cosmic horror per se, but I personally find this fashion of keep recycling the Deep Ones and all the Lovecraftian pantheon a bit boring, as Lovecraft's stories had already been written by Lovecraft. As much as Jeffrey definitely puts his own twist to it and as refreshing as it is to read about Deep Ones without some sudden Lovecraft's white supremacist rant, I find derivative stuff, well... derivative. I would like to see your stuff, new stuff. Please, don't get me wrong: I know everybody and their mother do that and it's not fair on Jeffrey for me to rant about it here, but that's just my opinion. Imagine if every fantasy writer wrote about people three foot tall who have to destroy a ring with the help of a wizard, or else an evil overlord will take over the land with his army of orcs. See what I mean?

The reason why I feel so strongly about it is especially because, again, Jeffrey can really write.
The story 'In Limbo' is a great example of cosmic horror wrote by him that I enjoyed a lot. And more than anything, I think 'The Holy Bowl' was a masterpiece: the premise and the execution. Its pace, its slowly reveal... I was sorry it wasn't loner.

To cut it short: this anthology has a couple of choices that in my opinion detract from it, but these are absolutely subjective opinions based on personal taste. What is objective, is that Jeffrey definitely knows the craft and this is a strong anthology.

[Aurora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as strong artistically as some of Jeffrey Thomas's other work, but still a good piece. I felt that the symbolism was too blatant, shoving its "meaning" in the reader's face instead of being revealed as the story developed. Other than that, I enjoyed this novella fairly well.