Juho Pohjalainen’s Reviews > That is not Dead: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos through the Centuries > Status Update

Saving the best for last. Harry Turtledove makes all these other contributors seem little better than children fumbling on a mechanical typewriter without yet knowing how to read. His story has a far more lighthearted style than anything Lovecraft wrote outside Sweet Ermengarde, but it has soul to it, a purpose, and the prose is in its own way a delight to read.

The first of today's stories is all right, if a bit pointless. There's not too much of a narrative or tension there - just two people exchanging thoughts and philosophies. It falls quite short of the particular Lovecraft story it's emulating.

The second seems to choose to draw more from the Dreamlands, but it's quite poorly written and plain preachy. It doesn't get much across. One of my least favourites.

This one almost gets it. Out of all the authors presented in this book, John R. Fultz is the only one so far I could actually believe has read Lovecraft's work and understood them to their core. The writing style is similar, and the plot itself offers the same brand of subtle horror.

But it's still much too visceral. I was never convinced by all those mutants, and the story floundered a bit near the middle.

The first story was all right, more than a little predictable but getting a bit of good characterization of the priest and the Aztec and the former's slow corruption. It felt believable enough. Not actually written all that well, though.

The second was worse overall - worse writing, poor use of Nyarlathotep again - but ended on a comparatively high note.

Whatever you think of Lovecraft or his work, his mastery of English cannot be denied. Such wooden flavourless tripe as this should not have come anywhere near his work. I was hoping it was on purpose, the story's subject matter of translation and all, and that it would get blasphemously better towards the end, but no.

The story itself is good, though. Suspenseful, thrilling, adds to the Mythos. Weird contrast there.

Here's the first story I actually liked. I could feel the despair of the characters as the worlds they knew, their faiths, were torn asunder.

This one was decent on its own, but really there was very little Lovecraftian in it as well. Just some of the familiar monsters.

This story has figured out a couple more things about Lovecraft that the last two lacked - for one thing, long paragraphs of text. There's quite a less substance to these, mostly just meandering on about the story itself rather than building up tension, but I would be lying if I said it was completely ineffective. The flavour is much closer and it occasionally gets tense.

Best of the shorts so far.

The first story was okay, if a bit too focused on gore and bloodshed for my tastes. Far more visceral and physical than what Lovecraft liked to do. The wizard battle felt more like Clark Ashton Smith's fare, also.

The second was plain terrible. Modern-day witticisms and phrasings in the Bronze Age, awful prose, attempts to make comedy at Cthulhu's expense. Sex comedy.

So far, I'm not impressed.

The foreword seems to be getting the gist of Lovecraft and his fiction well enough, but it also rather repeats itself. Still, it gives me hope for what's to come. Or fear, but the good kind.