Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft

by Don Webb

For nearly thirty years, Don Webb has been writing tales and poems that fuse the essence of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic vision with his own unique and idiosyncratic view of life and the universe. In this volume, which selects the best of Webb’s Lovecraftian writing, we find such distinctive stories as “The Man Who Scared Lovecraft” (about an obscure pulp writer whose work Lovecraft may or may not have revised, with baleful results), “The Megalith Plague” (about bizarre goings-on in a remote Texas locale), “The Doom That Came to Devil’s Reef” (in which a little-known cousin of Lovecraft suffers a hideous fate), and “Casting Call” (about strange doings on the set of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV show). The twenty other works in this book, in both prose and verse, vivify the Lovecraftian universe with the terror, perversity, and black humor born of Webb’s fertile and perverse imagination.

"The writers I most admire are those whose unique voice or imagination shines from the page -- radiating that sense of personality, of idiosyncrasy, that lets you know the robots didn't die-stamp this one. Don Webb is distinctly original, each of his stories a dark delight." -Jeffrey Thomas, author of Punktown

"I'm often awestruck by Don's literary flame. He is one of our darkest and most imaginative voices." -Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., author of Blood Will Have Its Season

"Don Webb has long been one of my favourite writers of the dark. His stories gleam with devilish wit, creeping dread, and a deep knowledge of the Mysteries. Webb is a genre unto himself." -Richard Gavin, author of At Fear's Altar

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Lovecraftian

252 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Don Webb teaches High School English in a reform school in rural Texas by day, Creative Writing for UCLA Extension by night. He has a had a mystery series at St. Martin's Press, a series of books on contemporary and Late Antique magical practice from Runa Raven Press, and more than 300 published short stories of SF/F/H. His work has been translated into 11 languages.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don Webb’s new collection is subtitled ‘Works inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’ – and how true that is, although not always obviously, and not at first glance. We get 24 stories and poems plus an introduction, “The Mythos and I” – which ends with the ringing call ‘Hail to the Ancient Dreams!’ And these are what Webb sets out to evoke. With a breathless mixture of fannish reverence and irreverent wit, Don Webb creates and reshapes Lovecraftian worlds – often Texas rather than New England – which are never pastiches, but homage, development, and just plain idiosyncratic fun. In “The Man Who Scared Lovecraft” the owner of a second-hand bookshop – an avid collector and scholar of pulp magazines and fiction – determines to find out more about a revision client of Lovecraft’s who had apparently vanished from the records, with predictably dire results. “The Codex” is based on the next generation, with Robert H. Barlow and William Burroughs as the main characters in a story setting which Webb’s Historical Note assures us is fact. The game in “A Game of Nine Pins” turns out to be scarcely that for a student writing his thesis on Washington Irving’s source material who finds a previously unknown source that would transform his research and make his name. “Powers of Air and Darkness” fitfully presents an extremely odd but intriguing alternate world suggestive of Wells (who is name-checked) and Shiel rather than Lovecraft. Through Dark Angles is a black and bleak comic parade, a series of excursions to places where Webb has intended, all along, to ‘abduct [the reader] from the workaday world into a place of weird realism’. And he succeeds admirably.

[Michael Fierce]

This ISBN# relates to Through Dark Angles by Don Webb

[Dan Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I found most of the stories enjoyable, there was something unpolished about them. The use of certain words and phrases as homage (or perhaps as an inside joke?) seemed more of a distraction than an addition.