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A review by johnwillson
Delta Green: Tales from Failed Anatomies by Dennis Detwiller
3.0
I really like the Delta Green setting/genre: secret agents meet cosmic horrors. Chris Carter either co-discovered the genre or ripped off Delta Green when he created The X-Files a year later.
But I really dislike the "agents must kill everyone and each other and themselves at the end of every story" conceit that DG inherited from its pappy, the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. And this collection of short stories leans hard into that conceit. It's gross and tiresome.
There are some cool nuggets of mythos lore in this volume. But they're buried in a lot of aimless prose and military wankery, and outnumbered by awful atrocities, lovingly described and slotted in between the senseless killing sprees and suicides. I'm not even talking about monsters from beyond the stars; that would be cool. I'm talking about the very worst things that human beings can do to each other. It spoiled my enjoyment of the book.
I recommend the stories "Dead, Death, Dying (1955)", "The Thing In the Pit (1977)", "Contingencies (1984)" and "Drowning in Sand (1997)". And I recommend skipping the rest.
But I really dislike the "agents must kill everyone and each other and themselves at the end of every story" conceit that DG inherited from its pappy, the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. And this collection of short stories leans hard into that conceit. It's gross and tiresome.
There are some cool nuggets of mythos lore in this volume. But they're buried in a lot of aimless prose and military wankery, and outnumbered by awful atrocities, lovingly described and slotted in between the senseless killing sprees and suicides. I'm not even talking about monsters from beyond the stars; that would be cool. I'm talking about the very worst things that human beings can do to each other. It spoiled my enjoyment of the book.
I recommend the stories "Dead, Death, Dying (1955)", "The Thing In the Pit (1977)", "Contingencies (1984)" and "Drowning in Sand (1997)". And I recommend skipping the rest.