Reviews

World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories by Glynn Owen Barrass, Brian M. Sammons

pezski's review against another edition

2.0

It is rare that collections are not a mix of quality, all but the very best having a few misfires. This is quite the opposite, a generally low standard of fiction with a couple of stand-out good stories, no great ones, and a few that are quite painfully bad. Often, the stories were just not very interesting, and reading to the end of even these short works often a slog. It must be said, I got the distinct impression that part of the issue was in the editing; several of the stories seemed to contain clumsy sentences or word usage of the sort that I'd have though an editor - or even a proofreader - would have picked up on.


Cthulhu Mythos stories are quite difficult to do well, having to get the right balance of weirdness and cosmic terror and hopeless dread, and the proliferation of Lovecraftian works due to ever increasingly popularity over the last few years suggests an even greater preponderance of tripe than the general run of fiction. Sadly, this volume does nothing to dispel that. One of the pleasures of a short fiction collection is finding authors to seek out in the future, but there are only a couple from this who I would even consider seeking out, and some that would actively put me off should I see them included in an anthology.