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A review by nghia
Swords v. Cthulhu by Jesse Bullington, Jonathan L. Howard, Natania Barron, Caleb Wilson, Jason Heller, Molly Tanzer, Remy Nakamura, Laurie Tom, Eneasz Brodski, L. Lark, Carrie Vaughn, Nathan Carson, Wendy N. Wagner, Andrew S. Fuller, Carlos Orsi, Jeremiah Tolbert, A. Scott Glancy, E. Catherine Tobler, Orrin Grey, John Hornor Jacobs, Michael Cisco, M.K. Sauer, Ben Stewart, John Langan
3.0
I read this collection of short stories slowly over several months. Any collection like this is bound to be uneven. 22 short stories by 22 authors all commissioned brand-new just for this anthology; they haven't scoured existing stories and selected the "best" of them. And I think the editors were brilliant to realize the overlap between old sword & sorcery stories -- with their dark gods and complicated morality -- and Lovecraft's own Cthulhu mythos and the potential of that intersection.
I think the best way to approach an anthology like this is to treat it like an expanded edition of one of the old pulp magazines of yesteryear. Weird Tales was published monthly and for 25ยข you got 12-15 stories. The vast majority were pretty low-quality and have been forgotten by history. They were never meant to be great literature. And you were intended, I think, to slowly read them over the course of the month until the next issue came out.
In those days, people didn't read 30 Cthulhu or 30 Conan the Barbarian stories back-to-back. You'd read one or two a month at most because that's all that were in this month's issue. When we binge them and them complain about the repetitiveness of their themes or structure or characters or whatever, I think we're somewhat missing the point.
These stories also come from a different kind of storytelling tradition. The concept of "character arcs" has come to completely dominate modern storytelling. It has even infested superhero movies, where we can talk about Iron Man's character arc over several movies from playboy bachelor to father.
But there's another tradition where the characters don't change. Instead they change the world around them. You can see this storytelling tradition in ancient Greek epics but also in the weekly/monthly heroes from the early days of mass media. Radio broadcasts of The Shadow or the Lone Ranger. Comics of Superman and Batman. Stories of detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Poirot.
The whole reason millions of people tuned in was because they never changed. They were a fixed point, a constant. The world changed but they never did. We see echoes of this same thing in sitcoms like Cheers and Seinfeld where the same characters in the same locations tell the same jokes 22 times a year for 10 years.
Instead of devouring Swords v. Cthulhu in a handful of sittings, spread it out. Don't binge this like it is modern prestige TV with character arcs and some overarching plot. It doesn't have any of those things. Dip into it leisurely.
A lot of the stories lean too heavily on Cthulhu's mythos. I had the same problem with [b:Hammers on Bone|30199328|Hammers on Bone (Persons Non Grata, #1)|Cassandra Khaw|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1464918942l/30199328._SY75_.jpg|50650411]. Of course one problem is simply they expect you to thrill at merely namechecking some reference from H.P. Lovecraft's writing. "Oh, it's a shub-niggurath!" But a bigger problem is it misunderstands a fundamental part of what Lovecraft was even trying to do. Why didn't Lovecraft just write about zombies and vampires and werewolves? They had all become too familiar and too formulaic to evoke true terror. In his short story "The Unnameable" he makes this point directly, that the true terrors of the universe aren't classifiable or nameable.
Yet too many of these stories rely on name-checking a classifiable terror.
But that's kind of okay. After all, just like those old issues of Weird Tales this book was never intended to be high literature. And as long as you don't read them back-to-back many of them can be quite fun.
I think the best way to approach an anthology like this is to treat it like an expanded edition of one of the old pulp magazines of yesteryear. Weird Tales was published monthly and for 25ยข you got 12-15 stories. The vast majority were pretty low-quality and have been forgotten by history. They were never meant to be great literature. And you were intended, I think, to slowly read them over the course of the month until the next issue came out.
In those days, people didn't read 30 Cthulhu or 30 Conan the Barbarian stories back-to-back. You'd read one or two a month at most because that's all that were in this month's issue. When we binge them and them complain about the repetitiveness of their themes or structure or characters or whatever, I think we're somewhat missing the point.
These stories also come from a different kind of storytelling tradition. The concept of "character arcs" has come to completely dominate modern storytelling. It has even infested superhero movies, where we can talk about Iron Man's character arc over several movies from playboy bachelor to father.
But there's another tradition where the characters don't change. Instead they change the world around them. You can see this storytelling tradition in ancient Greek epics but also in the weekly/monthly heroes from the early days of mass media. Radio broadcasts of The Shadow or the Lone Ranger. Comics of Superman and Batman. Stories of detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Poirot.
The whole reason millions of people tuned in was because they never changed. They were a fixed point, a constant. The world changed but they never did. We see echoes of this same thing in sitcoms like Cheers and Seinfeld where the same characters in the same locations tell the same jokes 22 times a year for 10 years.
Instead of devouring Swords v. Cthulhu in a handful of sittings, spread it out. Don't binge this like it is modern prestige TV with character arcs and some overarching plot. It doesn't have any of those things. Dip into it leisurely.
A lot of the stories lean too heavily on Cthulhu's mythos. I had the same problem with [b:Hammers on Bone|30199328|Hammers on Bone (Persons Non Grata, #1)|Cassandra Khaw|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1464918942l/30199328._SY75_.jpg|50650411]. Of course one problem is simply they expect you to thrill at merely namechecking some reference from H.P. Lovecraft's writing. "Oh, it's a shub-niggurath!" But a bigger problem is it misunderstands a fundamental part of what Lovecraft was even trying to do. Why didn't Lovecraft just write about zombies and vampires and werewolves? They had all become too familiar and too formulaic to evoke true terror. In his short story "The Unnameable" he makes this point directly, that the true terrors of the universe aren't classifiable or nameable.
Yet too many of these stories rely on name-checking a classifiable terror.
But that's kind of okay. After all, just like those old issues of Weird Tales this book was never intended to be high literature. And as long as you don't read them back-to-back many of them can be quite fun.