New Mythos Legends

by Bruce Gehweiler, C.J. Henderson, Tom Piccirilli

A collection of 16 dynamic short stories inspired by the towering imagination of H.P. Lovecraft. This book takes the Mythos to a new level, building new worlds, creating new creatures, discovering new realms where unknown forces lurk beyond the rim of our perceptions. Stories by Hugh B. Cave, Norman Partridge, Tom Piccirilli, C.J. Henderson, Don D'Ammassa, Del Stone,Jr., Stephen Mark Rainey, W.H. Pugmire, James S. Dorr, Jeffrey Thomas, Bruce Gehweiler, Stephen Antczak, James Shimkus, and Richard Flanagan.

Genres: Horror, Lovecraftian, Short Stories, Anthologies

329 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Mike Mclatchey · Rating 3 out of 5]

My personal delineation tends to go something like Cthulhu Mythos stories (where there's at least some specific mention of an HPL deity, book, monster etc), Lovecraftian fiction (which at least parallels a similar kind of cosmic horror), weird fiction (which can cover a ton of things) and then horror fiction (much wider field). Strangely while the title of this anthology implies the former, at least half if not more of it falls in the latter category. Most of the stories here are passable and entertaining enough but the only notable mythos story is really Jeffrey Thomas' "Cellar Gods" and the only two other stories I thought were truly solid were the entries by Norman Partridge and Tom Piccirili, both of which I think would at least be classified as weird fiction due to dealing with sorcery, but only the Piccirilli was remotely Lovecraftian. There is a lot of science fiction or action/horror, some weird/noir with Lovecraft connections, etc. but really not much of it is explicitly mythos. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the last story was really well off target and kind of cheesy, like Frank Peretti meets the detective story. There are better anthologies for sure, but it was entertaining enough.

[Nathan Shumate · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a few stories in here which hit it right out of the park -- the caveat being that the better a story is, the less Mythos-related it seems to be. In fact, if this anthology were published under another name, I doubt most readers would suspect that it had been assembled with anything like a Lovecraftian theme in mind.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Except the very-very few action-oriented and plot-driven stories, the rest are utterly devoid of anything that can be considered readable. Rubbish (and mostly NON-MYTHOS as well), but what surprised me most is the piece of ***t produced by Norman Partridge! Even God has bad days.

[Stephen Antczak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a story in this book: "Worm in a Bottle."