Leigh Kimmel’s Reviews > Lovecraft in a Time of Madness > Status Update

Not so sure about this one, with the guitarist. There seem to be a lot of quotes or near-quotes of popular songs -- I wonder how the author got away with that. Are they just close paraphrases, or did the author go and get permission (which is pricey for a short story that probably won't earn much)? Or is the author hoping to fly under the radar and the editor just didn't notice it?

A photographer who captures a monster that eats stars. The Matter of Britain meets the Cthulhu Mythos.

Not so sure about the second story. It's a bit more gruesome than I prefer, edging toward the splatterpunk subgenre of horror. It makes me realize just how genteel Lovecraft's own handling of horror was. We seldom see anything grisly -- the description of Wilbur Whateley's corpse being an exception -- but the shuddersome glimpses of wrongness at an ontological level can be more powerful than a dismembered corpse.

The robots are made to perform the famous play of the King in Yellow -- trope of fictional elements intruding into the real world, with horrific results. The next story deals with an asteroid on its way to earth. Armageddon, Deep Impact, and The Colour out of Space, anyone?

The protagonist is a robot with sophisticated AI driving it. An AI that can lie, that can let her patient avoid parts of his health routine, and who can go off on her own. This bodes ill.

Introduction includes reflections on the problematical elements of the Lovecraft tradition, and how present writers may deal with them. The first story appears to be about AI. I'm going to be interested in seeing where this goes.