Tales Out of Dunwich is a newly released book from Hippocampus Press. "Dunwich Dreams, Dunwich Screams" by Eddie Bertin is newly published with this book. Otherwise the remaining stories have all been released before. I have a pretty extensive library of mythos books and anthologies, but not of periodicals, and almost all of these stories were new to me. "Acute Spiritual Fear" by Robert Price was in the 2003 collection Disciples of Cthulhu II from Chaosium and "The Black Brat of Dunwich" was in Stanley Sargent's 2002 The Taint of Lovecraft from Mythos Books. Tales Out of Dunwich is a handsome trade paperback and costs $20.00. Although not discounted you can get it from Amazon where it is eligible for free shipping if you buy $25.00 worth of merchandise, but for downgraded shipping. Production qualities seem first rate. The page count is a generous 302...but this includes 9 pages of title page, table of contents, dedication and acknowledgements, and Robert Price's 4 page introduction. Yes, the editing and introduction are by the ubiquitous Robert Price. He nicely lays out the premise of the collection, which is to build on the previous Dunwich Cycle on the Chaosium label, with stories related to, inspired by or set around HPL's "The Dunwich Horror." Price being Price there is an overly erudite and, well, irrelevant discussion of the editing and authorship of the Bible. Ehhh, maybe not so irrelevant when we get to his own story he chose for this anthology. What I mean by overly erudite is that Price spends what seems to me an inordinate amount of time doing serious literary analysis on trifles. I remember in the movie The Kids Are Alright Roger Daltry telling a reporter something like "Rock and roll can't stand up to all that inspecting and detecting. So shut up." Or more to the point, I like to paraphrase a Shoe cartoon, where Shoe is talking to the Perfessor. This is only as accurate as my foggy memory allows.

Shoe: Whatcha reading Perfessor? Some science fiction junk?
Perfessor (suddenly incensed): Junk?! Science fiction is not junk! These authors are highly original and imaginative! This is not junk! This is philosophy, heavy, mind-expanding philosophy!
Shoe: So what's it called?
Perfessor: The Feast of the Khroobles. It's about a giant meatloaf that eats Toledo.

What I really would have liked, but only got from Bertin, are authors' notes about the stories. The cover art, by Phillip Fuller, shows a very bosomy brunette, dressed in Goth chick dominatrix outfit, with a come hither look, holding an ancient leather bound tome, no doubt the Necronomicon, with an ancient gabled house concealed mistily in the background. Need I say it has nothing at all to do with any of the stories? It sure isn't a picture of (deformed, albino) long suffering Lavinia Whateley. In fact it looks like the teen dream of a bespectacled loser who reads horror and fantasy, and comes uncomfortably close to the sort of picture that would have made the book fly off the shelf into my hands several decades ago before I started compulsively acquiring mythos titles. Maybe that's the point...

Spoilers may follow, so don't read any more if that will bother you. I will also level some harsh criticism at some of the stories, but let me say at the outset that I highly enjoyed this collection.

Harper Williams: "The Thing in the Woods" This novel (novella? What's the difference anyway?) comprises the bulk of the book. Per Price this was one of Lovecraft's direct antecedents for "the Dunwich Horror" in terms of setting, prose and the plot device of two mysterious brothers and their odd mother. As such it is of historical interest to the mythos fan but is not a mythos title at all. It is quite a find but only really necessary to the mythos completist. It fits in perfectly with Hippocampus' publication goals, which is to rediscover and disseminate books that were in HPL's library. Visit www.hippocampuspress.com for more details. The mysterious monster here is actually a lycanthrope, with nary a tentacle in sight. Two things stand out. First of all Williams was better at prose (but not cosmic concept) than Lovecraft, with more interesting and developed characters, and better dialogue. The story was well paced with tension well developed, even if it wasn't very scary. The second is that Williams' 1924 racism is particularly virulent and spiteful, making Lovecraft's own tendencies seem positively genteel. The politest phrase used for blacks was a racist epithet. Other more vicious epithets appear. And the depiction of the one black character is quite derisive. This was so matter of fact in the text that it was positively jarring and will no doubt make many modern readers squirm. I am including this comment in my review because it might give some readers second thoughts about buying the book.

Jack Williamson: "The Mark of the Monster" This story is from 1937, is non mythos, is not set in Dunwich and has perhaps a tenuous connection to HPL, perhaps. Or perhaps none at all. It could have easily been deleted, as it was also the least accomplished prose in the book.

Nancy A. Collins - "The Thing from Lover's Lane" I am unfamiliar with Collins' work. Maybe someone could fill me in about whether she has any other mythos titles to her credit. This was a story tangentially related to Dunwich, set in the Misty Valley as opposed to the Miskatonic. Dunwich is mentioned in passing as a similar setting where weird things happen. Definitely this is a mythos title where a girl is impregnated by an outré being, namely an avatar of Shub Niggurath (not the more Dunwichian Yog Sothoth). Interestingly in this story Shub Niggurath avatar is depicted as a male goat creature, instead of the more usual female. The prose was well crafted and the story enjoyable.

Robert M. Price: "Acute Spiritual Fear" Price is well known to mythos fans. Usually I don't like Price's writing but this is perhaps his best story, with a great premise. At good ole Miskatonic University there is a cult that views Wilbur Whateley as the second coming. After all he had a supernatural father and was despised of men. Of course they are not too interested in the common good...The prose is quite good, the plotting deft and overall was top notch.

Stanley C. Sargent: "Black Brat of Dunwich" Stanley Sargent has many published mythos stories. A lot of Sargent's earliest mythos stuff seems pastiche-esque to me. This particular story, however, was very good. It was an original take on "The Dunwich Horror," casting poor old Wilbur as well meaning and misunderstood, and Armitage as a crazy evil coot, all as related years after the horror by Wilbur's now elderly tutor. As in most of Sargent's fiction there is a strong homoerotic element. Sometimes in Sargent's stories this particular theme is shoehorned unnaturally into the story, just because he wants it there in a very 80s kind of in your face gesture. But is "Black Brat of Dunwich" it is a more organic element of the story and may explain the tutor's long standing loyalty to the Whateleys. However it bugged me that this tutor was trying to get the interest of a young teen Whateley (granted 7 feet tall, inhuman, alien, goat like with extra eyes and tentacles, but the tutor seemed to think he was just human). The illustration of this scene in The Taint of Lovecraft makes it look even more explicit. This is not the first such image from Sargent. For example consider the sheriff's brief mental image in "The Paladin of Worms" from Ancient Exhumation +2, which was quite gratuitous to the story.

Brian McNaughton: "The Dunwich Lodger" McNaughton wrote the excellent collection The Throne of Bones, ghoulish instead of Lovecraftian. He had an accomplished hand at prose and evocative imagery. This was a terrific little story of eldritch goings on in a seedy family in a seedy motel in Dunwich. There is a good ghoulish denouement.

Richard A. Lupoff: "The Doom that Came to Dunwich" Lupoff is a well published author of horror and science fiction. He has several mythos titles to his credit, and I'm sure these are due to be compiled in the upcoming Terrors from Elder Signs Press. His story "Dingbats" in Horrors Beyond was not mythos. In this particular tale an undecayed Whateley (only a Lovecraft fan will understand the reference!) returns to Dunwich years after the horror to find that those crazy locals are still trying to draw Yog Sothoth's attention. I really liked this story.

Don D'Ammassa: "The Dunwich Gate" Don D'Ammassa is also widely published. For example, his excellent story "Dominion" appeared in New Mythos Legends, the 1999 collection from Marietta Publishing. A traveler accidentally ends up in Dunwich, and falls into the middle of the ongoing conflict between those who want Yog Sothoth's gate opened and those who desire to keep it closed. Another excellent story.

Gerard E. Giannattasio: "The N-Scale Horror" This is my first encounter with Gerard Giannattasio's fiction. I want him to do more mythos fiction! Especially like this highly original and highly enjoyable work. A young man into model railroading makes a scale model of the Miskatonic Valley Railway. It includes a scale model of the Whateley estate....

Eddy C. Bertin: "Dunwich Dreams, Dunwich Screams" Eddy Bertin is a new name to me. This is his homage piece to Lovecraft, with HPL's fiction mentioned in the text explicitly as fiction (usually a plot device I don't like). It is set in the original Dunwich in England, and is a story within a story about a tourist paying homage to HPL's Dunwich's namesake village, and the fate of the original Dunwich centuries before when it fell into the sea. Some of the story is fiction centered on Dagon and some of it actually happened to the real Dunwich way back when. One of the main characters in the flashback is named Sarah Lovecraft, although it is not explicitly stated whether she is an ancestor of HPL. Maybe it was just another part of the tribute. I look forward to more of Mr. Bertin's fiction.

That's about it! For the mythos fan there are many good stories here, making the purchase worthwhile. However the racism by Williams (Hippocampus is trying to preserve historical influences on Lovecraft himself, and, for what it's worth, this was one of them) and brief allusion to adults and teens by Sargent may prompt some readers to pass this title by. I will be interested in other opinions. ( )