Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales

Hplmythos.com #1

by Henrik Sandbeck Harksen (Editor), Paul S. Kemp, Linda Navroth

Lovecraftian horrors & Cthulhu Mythos monsters of insanity.
New tales of the gruesomely weird. Innsmouth, Sesqua Valley and other areas are tainted, countries as far apart as Australia and Denmark are tainted, and on continents like Asia you can't escape it either - no place is safe from the ultimate fear. From the deepest oceans to shadowy woods, dark cities, across wars and unspeakable realms of the unknown - to forbidden books, strange cultists, dread lore & mad, ancient Gods from beyond time & space. The world is not safe; no one is safe.
Welcome to this collection of ELDRITCH HORRORS: DARK TALES. Stories by Paul S. Kemp (of Forgotten Realms fame), W. H. Pugmire (with new Sesqua Valley tale!), Gary Hill, Thomas Strømsholt, Paul Mackintosh, Leigh Blackmore, Don Webb, Henrik Sandbeck Harksen, Dan Clore, Blake Wilson, Linda Navroth, Ron Shiflet, Simon Bleaken, Benjamin Szumskyj.
Cover and 14 interior b/w illustrations by Internationally acclaimed artist, Jørgen Mahler Elbang.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Cthulhu Mythos

306 pages, Paperback

First published December 24, 2008

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of short horror stories. Various time periods are represented, but all Lovecraftian in nature, even those set squarely in the present.

Tomas Gindeberg is the cover designer & he did a great job, but the artwork that begins each chapter by Jørgen Mahler Elbang is fantastic. Really good & worth staring at. If I had any complaint with the book it that these pieces are a bit too small. Their quality is unmistakable.

The quality of the writing is wonderful, too. They are short stories, a dozen to 20 pages each, yet each contains a compelling new universe. All are disquieting & some hold a disturbing sort of justice, especially the last.

A bit expensive to buy for me, only being available through Lulu Press, but worth every penny, especially if you're into Lovecraftian Horror. It's a must for any collection of that.

[Christina Stind · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been my year of reading Lovecraft. I've never read anything by him before but this year I've started slowly working my way through all his fiction as well as some fiction inspired by his writing.
This book is one example of Lovecraft inspired fiction. It's published by my dear friend, Henrik S. Harksen. Now, I'm not a fan of short stories and I'm not a fan of Lovecraft (yet) so I didn't quite know what to expect when I bought this book, filled with very different stories.
First of, the artwork in it are so cool. It's kind of reminiscent of HR Giger but still different and with the words surrounding each piece, it's really something. Just wish the pieces had been a bit bigger so you really could enjoy them...
Secondly, the stories. Some of them I liked - some I didn't, but that is to be expected (individual reviews below). Some were really good - my favourites were The Bibliophile, One Thousand and One Words and The Jest of Yig.
Several of the stories felt like I was missing something, like I didn't know enough to truly appreciate them and that bugged me - until when I was almost finished with the book, I got kind of an epiphany. Lovecraft wrote a huge pile of stories and novellas and these have inspired so many writers and have caused an entire mythology - and even a geography - to evolve around these stories and I find it so cool that there is this kind of other world where people share an interest and a bond and create new stories participating in the mythology and sometime expanding it and bringing it up to date. There is this huge, kind of shared world where people from all over the world dive in and exchange stories, both on an amateur and professional level - and how cool is that? This thought made me appreciate both this book (published by a small, Danish one-man publishing company), the stories in it and the entire Lovecraft oeuvre so much more.
Lovecraft wrote about a kind of other, a scary world just beyond ours that we can't really fathom - and his fiction and all the fiction inspired by him has truly created this other world that can be really scary to dive into - but also more rewarding that I had expected. Just don't read it late at night when you're home alone!

Individual reviews:

Recompense of Sorrow
This is a story of a woman who comes and lives with her brother to die. But the brother is being controlled by a man, who reads Necronomicon for fun - and may be some sort of fallen angel. The brother gives her up to this man and when she dies, he is there and baptises her...
I didn't get this story at all. I didn't feel like I really understood it - but from the editor's introduction, I can see that this man is a recurring figure in this author's fiction so maybe that's why I didn't get it...

One Thousand and One Words
The narrator is a former soldier turned photo journalist who gets the scoop of a lifetime when he gets invited to interview with Howard Doyle, noted recluse. But as the evening progress, it turns out that Doyle has something up his sleeves - or rather up in his observatorium - and the evening becomes something of a cat's toying with a mouse... Add to it that this takes place on what might be the end of the world and you get a very exiting story that I really enjoyed.

Ashanna's Whispers
Warning - if you hear someone whisper your name in a dark empty street, don't follow it through street after street untill you end up in a dark warehouse. And if you have been foolish enough to do this, do not take the narrow stairs down into the dark. If you don't want to listen to this rather common sense advice, this short story will teach you what happens next after you've reached the bottom of the stairs and they just disappear behind you and you find yourself in a forrest of impossible growth...
A rather okay story - but not as good as the previous one. I did like the play between reality and imagination - normally you would expect the experiences of our narrator to be pure imagination or hallucinations - but in the Lovecraftian world, your best bet is that it is very much - and scarily so - real.

Devouring Darkness Hovers
Well, well. This is a short story of the horrors of war - in this case a kind of half insect-half human creep that devours a group of soldiers in Iraq.
I didn't like this one that much - I kept seeing the Lizard King from The Mummy in front of me and that kind of ruined it for me. Besides that, I found the story rather weak. A lot of such stories have the same formula: Young man - often scientist, journalist or something similar - experiences something really scary and horrific and the story often ends up with medical, military or similar evidence most of the time confirming the story and making it scarier because it really was real. But if you want to use this formula, you have to rise above it and make it your own and make it great. And for me, this story fell short of that.

The specimen
A story of the madness of scientists - how they sometime become obsessed with obtaining knowledge that they forget to act humane. I actually rather liked this one - it felt very Lovecraftian to me (and not only becase of the mentioning of Arkham and Innsmouth).

Rest in Peace, Jeremy Crandall
I really loved the idea of this one - that aliens are making us pollute the earth so it becomes habitable for them at some point in the future.

The Bibliophile
A young man is tempted by a dangerous book found in a hidden chamber in a bookstore. He steals it - and is slowly consumed by it before he realises the danger and tries to escape.
This one I liked. I liked that it was so current and I thought it was very well-written and that the author really used the language to show how the protagonist's mind was unravelling. I've read parts of it before - the author (and editor of this book) is one of my best friends and I am rather partial to his writings. And I liked how he used parts of his daily life in the story. Being as objective as I can be under the circumstances, this is so far my favourite of the stories.

A Haunting from Beyond
A story about a haunted house that is so evil it causes people's heads to implode. But not everything is what it seems ...
I wanted to like this one - but it seems to me there was some inconsistencies in it that puzzled me. The idea was good - it just didn't really come together.

The Door to Nowhere
A camping trip goes horribly wrong. 5 young people decide to go camping. They hear about a mysterious door on a hill, put there by a cult who believed if they prayed enough, the door would open to let them into Heaven. All the cult members disappeared suddenly - and the door's still there... and Heaven is not the only place it opens to...
I liked this story - but it didn't have a Lovecraftian feel to me...

Out of the Frying Pan
This one was just weird. After a bank robbery gone wrong, Jake Higgins wanders into the woods and happens to find a shack - and Mother Shub. Mother Shub seems to know things and even though Higgins is sure he's in charge, he's in for a bit of a surprise. Don't mess with little old ladies and their goats!

The Dying God
For me, this was almost unreadable in parts. It felt so long. Too much back-history, not enough action. About a young man getting involved with a cult.

The People on the Island
One of the longest stories in this collection. A man lives on an island and discovers a secret that the people on the island want to hide - and he has to flee for his life. But even though he gets away, not all was left on the island ... Didn't particularly like this story either - but the escape sequence was good.

The Return of Zoth-Ommog
The narrator gets kidnapped and put on a boat to work. He manages to escape, only to be caught by some natives that plan to use him as a human sacrifice to their god, one of the elders. Great scary story.

The Jest of Yig
A group of college friends tried to make it as authors. Years later, one of them did - by writing a kind of self-help books, inspired by a snake cult. The narrator visits him - and finds that snakes are not the only things shedding skin ... The books cause quite a stir and when a journalist visiting, goes mad, the narrator decides to do something about it...
Liked this one. It was engaging throughout, felt more current than a lot of the other stories and was creepy in just the right amount as well.

[John Mayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

_Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales_, edited by Henrik Harksen, was a great delight in seeing what modern writers are doing with H.P. Lovecraft‘s and C.A. Smith’s great Cthulhu religion. Henrik has gathered together a number of new additions to the tradition here. There is a Baker’s Thirteen stories here – that is, fourteen – plus an introduction.

I don’t know if this is Henrik’s first anthology in English or not, but I’ll say, to begin, that the production values are very good: good slick, large format paperback with white (acid-free?) pages and very eldritch artwork on the cover and in the interior art. As a former artist myself, it does my heart good to find an editor who still appreciates the value of illustrations.

This is not to be a true review as I cannot objectively evaluate the work of my three internet friends Benjamin Szumskyj, Leigh Blackmoore and Henrik Harksen himself. My bias in mind, I will say that I enjoyed all three of their stories. Ben’s and Henrik’s both had disturbing nightmare qualities whereas Leigh’s was more of an old-fashioned adventure/horror with an entirely unexpected ending.

Of the remaining stories, the crowning jewel was “One Thousand and One Words” by Paul S. Kemp, an author previously unknown to me, but whose work is so polished I’d be very surprised to learn this was his first appearance in print. This story establishes early on an unremitting sense of world-wide menace, of a looming threat to all mankind, and the smaller horror takes place within this larger one. Very nicely done.

“The Door to Nowhere” by Blake Wilson was also excellent, good old-fashioned story telling set in modern Australia, with an effective ending. “Out of the Frying Pan” was also well-written and engaging, though the ending left me puzzled. The last of my favorites was “The People of the Island,” again, a nice, old-fashioned tale, though set just off modern Hong-Kong, an area author Paul Mackintosh seems to know something about. He does a good job of transporting us to an exotic locale and then convincing us we’d really rather have stayed home.

Others, of course, might prefer others of the stories. All in all, the book is a worthy effort. Kudos to Henrik Harksen for continuing to keep Lovecraft’s spirit lamp burning and continuing to cast its unholy light.

~ John Mayer

[Henrik]

I am the editor as well as the publisher, so no review from me;-)

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved every story in this book. Got it thru the Goodreads first reads giveaways, but it's worth paying actual $$ for. Highly recommended if you like dark and twisted.

[Anne-sophie Olsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a few good ones in there, but mostly I was not that impressed. I liked the danish ones a lot better.
At one point, one of the stories simply got so long and irritating that I almost stopped reading it, but I persevered only to discover the most obvious ending.. ugh