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_moth_'s review against another edition
3.0
It's an anthology, so as one might expect there are a mix of stories which are going to appeal to you and those which will not. I really enjoyed about half of this collection, some of the stories were excellent, and others were difficult to get through. As a whole, if you're a fan of Lovecraft, then it's totally worth the read.
lynchian_ahab's review
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.75
mike_brough's review against another edition
5.0
This is a solid compilation of big-hitter horror authors, each giving us their take on the Innsmouth mythos. The contents page is a genre who's who - Copper, Campbell, Newman, Stableford, Lumley, Gaiman and more. Not forgetting old HPL, himself.
There isn't a dud story in the book but the most memorable are Jack Yeovil's The Big Fish and Nichola Royle's The Homecoming - Cthulhu as a Romanian dictator!
I have the other two volumes but I'll be keeping them for the autumn and winter nights.
There isn't a dud story in the book but the most memorable are Jack Yeovil's The Big Fish and Nichola Royle's The Homecoming - Cthulhu as a Romanian dictator!
I have the other two volumes but I'll be keeping them for the autumn and winter nights.
will_cherico's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.75
Lovecraft, Lumley, Stableford, and Gaiman are unfortunately the only reasons to read this book. Every other story seems to lack a certain something that makes a cosmic horror story good, and as a result most of the stories were absolute chores to get through (it took me over a month to read this because there would be times where I'd finish a story, put it down, and just not want to pick it back up again). Most of the authors do nothing to expand on Lovecraft's themes of the slow and somber nature of time and how humans decay, and the ones that do try and lean into the Innsmouth setting wind up feeling soulless, a cross between fan service ("they'll remember Innsmouth, right? And they go crazy for the Cthulhu namedrop") and pure laziness (most of these stories are very unsatisfying narratively, which would be fine if they were at all thought provoking. They are not). I would really only recommend the original story of all of the works in this collection, the rest were so rough.
esotericorder's review against another edition
4.0
One of the better Cthulhu Mythos anthologies out there, the only negatives are the repetitive theme (duh!) That's makes this pretty hard to go through in one sitting, and the fact that this collection is so old now, that the majority of the stories can be found elsewhere and the connoisseur will have probably read the majority in other collections.
pat32's review against another edition
5.0
Love these stories, they all really had that H.P Lovecraft feel.
jlaney's review
3.0
As everyone else has said, this is a mixed bag. I thoroughly enjoyed it up until about 65% where it started to go slightly down hill and then I hit 70% where it became a slog. It was actually okay as a story by itself I suppose, but as part of a collection I kept waiting for how The Homecoming tied into the mythos. It took forever to get there. Deepnet was fucked up and not in a fun creepy Cthulu way. Even if you ignore the distasteful ending of books focusing on computers and the internet tend to be eyeroll inducing and boring, no matter when they're written.