In the Mad Mountains

August 5, 2024
Cosmic horror is alive and well in this eerie collection of what Bram Stoker Award winner Lansdale (Moon Lake) considers to be his eight best Lovecraftian tales, each with different settings and styles and often pulling from other authors’ oeuvres as well. “Dread Island” riffs on Mark Twain, opening with the line “this here story is as true as that other story that was written down about me and Jim,” and going on to tell of how Huck Finn risks his life to save Tom Sawyer from a mysterious evil. Lansdale’s mimicry extends to Edgar Allan Poe as well; “The Gruesome Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning” is a new C. Auguste Dupin exploit, in which the sleuth looks into eyewitness accounts of oddly colored lightning. A third highlight, “The Tall Grass,” evokes Algernon Blackwood, as a businessman traveling in the West has an unsettling experience when his train stops after midnight in the middle of a patch of unusually tall prairie grass that “shifted in the moonlight like waves of gold-green seawater pulled by the tide-making forces of the moon.” Lansdale fans and Lovecraft devotees alike will be impressed.

September 27, 2024
Lansdale has captured the hearts of readers with his quirky characters, sardonic wit, and gritty tone. His latest collection gathers eight stories, published in various anthologies since 2009, which he describes in the book's introduction as the "best" Lovecraft-inspired works he has written. Taking on the troublesome racism and sexism of the classic author head-on, Lansdale also actively eschews Lovecraft's use of cumbersome prose, instead employing his own trademark direct and folksy narrative voice to the Lovecraftian concept of the Old Ones, terrifying but alluring beings from another realm who are trying to intrude upon our world. The result is a collection that makes the enduring appeal of Lovecraft's brand of existential dread and terrifying nihilism more accessible to today's readers. Looking into well-mined tropes such as selling your soul, the supernatural detective, and a stranded polar ship, Lansdale adds a layer of cosmic horror which makes these stories both familiar and fresh at the same time. There are even characters from across the literary landscape that make some fun appearances, from Huck Finn to Auguste Dupin to his own Dana Roberts and more. Readers new to Lovecraftian horror should start with "The Tall Grass," the shortest story in the volume, and one that perfectly captures the visceral and immersive pull of cosmic horror as a subgenre. In it, a man steps off a train, gets lost in a field, and experiences a terror like he has never known. Lansdale has a wide fan base for good reason, but this book presents a wonderful opportunity to expand it even further by suggesting this collection to fans of twenty-first century cosmic horror authors such as Hailey Piper and Lucy Snyder.

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