Status Updates From A Vintage from Atlantis

“The God of the Asteroid”

The first part of this story is basically a retelling of Lovecraft’s submarine horror but on a spaceship. Then it turns from a more or less regular horror story to something more psychological as one of the astronauts is entombed alive in the wreck of his ship and treated like a God by the insect-people who inhabit the asteroid. And THEN, well, who knows for sure?

“The Colossus of Ylourgne”

An Averoigne tale where a horrid necromancer raids grave after grave in order to build an enormous flesh golem that he inhabits. His reign of terror reminds me of Barker’s “Rawhead Rex”, just with significantly less gore (I mean, compared to Barker) and leaving the most twisted tortures to the reader’s imagination.

“The Supernumerary Corpse”

A bizarre not quite horror story where a chemist tailors a super-poison to get one over on his rival, only to find that somehow or other it resulted in the creation of a second corpse in its own house. The story skirts a fine line between psychological (the MC’s triumph was a hallucination) or just plain weird, in which case, what is the mechanism for the extra body???

“The Plutonian Drug”

A cool sci-fi piece where a man takes a space drug that lets him see five hours into both his past AND his future. Except, well, his future dead-ends into the void in an alleyway he was going to use to get to his next engagement. Gentle reader, what do YOU think is going to happen to the sculptor? The fun meta is a discussion on what the “present” is and what we are actually perceiving.

“The Doubled Shadow”

Atlantis / Hyperborea with two sorcerors, one of who is obsessed with uncovering the secrets of a tablet that washed ashore near their waverly place. They eventually find out that it belongs to the serpent-men of pre-PRE-history and, against the MC’s better judgment, his master translates the tablet and they cast the spell. Kids, don’t use
the lost sorceries of the serpent people.

“Ubbo-Sathla”

Hyperborea, past-life, and cosmic horror. The big show here is the title entity, the origin of all life “native” to Earth. The most recognizable fantasy motif is the danger of looking too long into magic crystals, also seen in The Lord of the Rings and Wizard and Glass. The idea of tracing the thread of your past lives to the moment of creation is interesting.

“The Second Interment”

Smith’s spin on buried alive stories builds on the mc having recently just been buried alive and having reason to suspect that his brother is not aligned against his premature burial. The blow-by-blow of the MC’s senses as he starts to succumb, psychologically and physically, is pretty good. It’s so extra but his poetic nature shines forth at the climax.

“The Seed of the Sepulcher”

A stunner of the horror story that felt like reading a Junji Ito manga short. It’s also, morbidly amusingly, another story where Smith appears to have it out for botanists. Two guys in Venezuela go to check out a fabled ruin but one of them was too sick to go. The other brings back a different sort of sickness and the struggle commences between the horror and a man too ill to fight.

“The Empire of the Necromancers”

Umm, thousands of years into the Earth’s future it is a dying planet with one continent, named Zothique. This grimdark and squicky story details the predations of two necromancers who enslave the dead of a kingdom to satisfy their egos, including 😬necrophilia 😬. They get theirs in the end, but not before we have gotten a full blast of Zothique nihilism.