Glynn Owen Barrass

A decent collection of Cthulhu mythos stories taking place within some war-related context. Although the title might suggest the stories take place during World War I or World War II (or both), that’s not the case for most of them. Instead, we get a variety of times and places, including two set in the American Revolution, two in the Trojan War (one on each side), a Vietnam War story, a Cold War story or two, at least one set in a distant future war, and, I’m sure, several others I’m forgetting.

Having absorbed the Delta Green universe’s take in the mythos, many of these stories feel like they could take place in that world, or even be Delta Green ops themselves.

Unlike the DG universe, many of these stories end… well—at least for the immediate future if not for the main characters themselves. Generally, the mythos threats are being called up by the baddies, and we’re not especially sympathetic when things go wrong for them, but in some stories, mistakes are made, all sides suffer, and in some of the stories, some of the characters are, themselves, mythos creatures.… (más)

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Title: In the Court of the Yellow King
Series: The King in Yellow Anthology #2
Editor: Glynn Barrass
Rating: 4.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Cosmic Horror
Pages: 289
Words: 99.5K

Synopsis:

Table of Contents

These Harpies of Carcosa — W. H. Pugmire

The Viking in Yellow — Christine Morgan

Who Killed the King of Rock and Roll? — Edward Morris

Masque of the Queen — Stephen Mark Rainey

Grand Theft Hovercar — Jeffrey Thomas

The Girl with the Star-Stained Soul — Lucy A. Snyder

The Penumbra of Exquisite Foulness — Tim Curran

Yield — C. J. Henderson

Homeopathy — Greg Stolze

Bedlam in Yellow — William Meikle

A Jaundiced Light at the End — Brian M. Sammons

The Yellow Film — Gary McMahon

Lights Fade — Laurel Halbany

Future Imperfect — Glynn Owen Barrass

The Mask of the Yellow Death — Robert M. Price

The Sepia Prints — Pete Rawlik

Nigredo — Cody Goodfellow

MonoChrome — T. E. Grau

My Thoughts:

In the fantasy Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, there is a power called Saidin and Saidir. One half can be used by males and the other half by females. The male half, Saidin, was tainted by the Dark One thousands of years before the series starts. The main character, Rand, can use Saidin but is affected by the taint. He describes the experience as wrestling with fire and ice that is covered with a putrid oil. He never feels more alive than when using Saidin but the taint makes him sick and drives him insane.

That is how these two Cosmic Horror Series (Cthulhu & King in Yellow) seem to be affecting me.

I couldn't stop reading this. The stories dragged along relentlessly. I felt like I had jumped into a river and that it turned out to be way more powerful than anticipated. There were times I was in the center, speeding along, but then there were times when the stories pushed me into the banks or slammed me into hidden rocks beneath the surface. By the end of this I felt battered, emotionally and spiritually. Yet I had never felt so alive either.

It was an extremely disturbing dichotomic feeling. I had to stop and really ask myself if I was capable of reading more of this stuff. While I acknowledge that I have changed over the years, is the change engendered by reading stories like these the kind I want to voluntarily submit to? Whether I like to admit it or not, what we put into our minds does affect us.

Thankfully I don't have to make that decision right away. I've got another month before I cycle back to this cosmic horror duology.

★★★★✬… (más)

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.… (más)