Dawn Vogel

Disclaimer: I am friends with the editors as well as some of the authors, and also backed the book's Kickstarter.

This is a really solid collection of Lovecraftian or Lovecraft-inspired stories, assembled by the editors of the Mad Scientist Journal e-zine. For me it gets off to bit of a rocky start, with a couple tales that suffer from a flaw common to a lot of so-so horror fiction; describing the flaw would constitute spoilers, so I'll refrain. Then again, it could be just me that is bothered by this particular narrative choice.

However, many of the later stories are excellent. The ones that stick out in my memory include "The Laughing Book" by Cliff Winnig, "In Defense of Professor Falcrovet" by Darin M. Bush, and "The Ghost Circus" by Phillip C. Gonzales. And the final tale in the collection, "Come Down, Ma Evenin' Star" by Sanford Allen, is a masterwork! Seamlessly blending far-future science fiction with magnificent, eldritch horror, all by itself it is worth the price of admission.

In short, I'm extremely happy that the MSJ editors put together this printed volume, and I'm looking forward to supporting the Kickstarter for their next volume.… (más)

The editors of this collection are friends of mine, and I was a Kickstarter backer of this book as well as their previous four collections, so perhaps I'm a bit biased. But I have to say I thought this is their strongest collection yet. The previous anthologies were themed by situation (apocalypse, haunted/weird locations, "monsters" in society, ...), but since this collection's theme is women leaders, there is a breadth of style and genre I haven't seen in these before, and it's delightful. All the stories keep to the first-person format of "Mad Scientist Journal", the quarterly zine the editors put out, but they range from mythological Ethiopia to Napoleonic France to revolutionary Mexico, and from fantasy to cyberpunk dystopia to generation ship. It made for a very fun read, which is why I'm excited to see that the editors have launched the kickstarter for their next anthology, I Didn't Break the Lamp. I'm looking forward to that one already.… (más)