Eldritch Embraces: Putting the Love Back in Lovecraft

by Michael Cieslak (Editor)

Combine the mind splintering horror of the Cthulhu Mythos and the heart shattering portion of that most terrible of emotions - love - and what do you have? You have Eldritch Embraces: Putting the Love Back in Lovecraft. This collection of short stories from some of the best working in the fields of horror and dark speculative fiction blends romance and Lovecraft in a way which will may make you sigh, smile, weep, or leave you the hollow shell of your former self.

366 pages, Paperback

First published February 29, 2016

About the author

Michael Cieslak is a lifetime reader and writer of horror, mystery, and speculative fiction. A native of Detroit, he lives with his wife and dog Tesla in a house that is covered in Halloween decorations in October and dragons the rest of the year. He is an officer in the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. His works have appeared in a number of collections including DOA: Extreme Horror, Dead Science, Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes, the GLAHW anthologies, and Alter Egos Vol 1. He is the Editor in Chief of Dragon's Roost Press, an independent publishing house dedicated to dark speculative fiction.

Reviews

[Werner]

Because this book was a gift, and a gift that I treated as a review copy, I genuinely wanted to finish it. I'd previously read my friend Andrew Seddon's excellent "Best in Show" (so I can definitely say the collection includes at least one outstanding selection --and truthfully, Michelle Ann King's "The Fine Art of Fortune Telling" is pretty good as well). But having read nine of the other 31 stories besides Andrew's, I'd gotten to the point where I was viewing picking up the book as a chore rather than a pleasure, and that's not how a person should approach his/her reading. For the most part, the stories are shallow, predictable, and almost always depressing. Whereas in Lovecraft's own writings, existential pessimism is usually a tacked-on moral, here it tends to be relentlessly in your face. And the anthology theme of "love" --not necessarily romantic; it can be maternal, or even a bond between man and dog-- is usually just interpreted as sex (heterosexual or homosexual, depending on the story). It's really hard to picture Lovecraft himself caring much for this anthology. It's a handsome volume, and I'm genuinely appreciative of the generosity of the gift. But for the most part, it's just not to my taste, so I'm setting aside with this explanation.

Personally, if a reader wants an anthology of Lovecraft-themed fiction (other than the master's own), I'd recommend Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and/or Shadows Over Baker Street, rather than this one. (And Andrew has a whole cycle of "Sheffield and Balthasar" stories as good as the one here, and plans eventually to publish them as a collection!)

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the interest of disclosure, I should start by saying that I wrote one of the stories in this anthology, so I acknowledge the slightly unseemly overlap between boosting the book as a whole and engaging in self-congratulation. But, in the interest of full and thorough disclosure, I offer the following additional information:

1, I was paid for my story up front, so I don't gain any direct material benefit at this point from convincing people to go pick themselves up a copy of the book. I have no skin in the sales game. On the other hand, I'm very much rooting for the book to sell like crazy, because a portion of the proceeds are being donated to the Last Day Dog Rescue charity.

2, I've been fortunate enough to have stories published in several different anthologies over the past couple of years, and I haven't reviewed or rabidly promoted all of them here on GoodReads. Largely that's due to a lack of both time and motivation, setting the bar fairly high for me to feel strongly enough to put together a proper review post.

But I'm happy to say I cleared that bar when I recently finished reading all of the stories not written by me in Eldritch Embraces. Front to back, this is an extremely entertaining collection of Cthulhu-and-other-Elder-Gods-inflected tales of love and heartbreak. As the editor wisely points out in his foreword, the very idea of a Lovecraftian romance anthology raises the grim specter of sanity-draining tentacle porn as far as the eye can see. Happily, Eldritch Embraces steers clear of that trap. Well, not entirely clear, there's a moment here and there of dwelling on the Venn diagram intersection between "erotic" and "batrachian". But by and large it's a wide-ranging survey of all sorts of stories: boy meets girl (or boy meets boy), boy loses girl, boy gets girl back as a corpse reanimated by unholy dark arts, girl's attempts at online dating lead her into lairs of black goat-worshiping cults, and on and on. The power that makes the world go round meets the powers that would callously bring life on Earth to a crashing halt, and every turn a new author takes enters a different dimension of love and horror. Self-serving or not, Eldritch Embraces gets my whole-hearted stamp of approval and recommendation.

[Stefanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased, as I have a story in here, but mine is just one of 32, and I skipped my story while reading the anthology because hey, I've read mine already. I was very impressed by the different approaches to the theme of "putting the love back in Lovecraft." Love appears in many guises, as do the horrors of Lovecraft's monsters. The writing is fantastic, and I had a hard time putting the book down. Well done!

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

My rating is biased, because my own short story, "Signs and Hortense" ("I assure you, Linda, Nyarlathotep is no stranger to the Publix produce section.") is in there, and it easily deserve 57 stars. The review that follows, however, is quite honest: while I wouldn't have picked this up normally (it would have fallen into the So Much Stuff to Choose From void), I'm glad I had a reason to read it — the writing here is excellent. The stories are a mix from classic horror (oh, no, the woman I love is an unspeakable monster!) to Lovecraftian rom-com (who knew that was a thing?), happy endings and grisly and (should this matter to anyone) several same-sex pairings (I think "Pickman's Canvas" was my favorite of those).