Review of 'A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
3.5? 3.75? This was a hard one to rate. I've given it a lot of thought and am still unsure where it falls.
Anthologies, as I (and countless others on Goodreads) have noted before, are by their very nature a mixed bag, and A Mountain Walked is no exception. I'm reminded of the old nursery rhyme:
There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good,
She was very, very good.
And when she was bad she was horrid.
For the most part AMW succeeds admirably: most of the stories were new to me (a pleasantly surprising situation!) and were of a uniformly high-quality, engagingly written and creepy. There is a broad representation of authors, and the editor (S. T. Joshi, always a pleasure) goes out of his way to select stories that don't merely ape Lovecraft but …
3.5? 3.75? This was a hard one to rate. I've given it a lot of thought and am still unsure where it falls.
Anthologies, as I (and countless others on Goodreads) have noted before, are by their very nature a mixed bag, and A Mountain Walked is no exception. I'm reminded of the old nursery rhyme:
There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good,
She was very, very good.
And when she was bad she was horrid.
For the most part AMW succeeds admirably: most of the stories were new to me (a pleasantly surprising situation!) and were of a uniformly high-quality, engagingly written and creepy. There is a broad representation of authors, and the editor (S. T. Joshi, always a pleasure) goes out of his way to select stories that don't merely ape Lovecraft but use the mythos as a launching point for something new. I'm really pleased to have discovered several new authors to check out.
So when the stories work, they really, really work. Those that don't, however....oy. 50-60 page novellas that only tangentially relate to Lovecraft or, indeed, anything to do with horror, simply don't belong. One story (the name of which escapes me at the moment) was a lengthy dissertation on military action in the Middle East. I read 30 pages of this--during which there was NOTHING about cosmic horror, etc., even casually mentioned--and finally skipped ahead. It was dull, it was poorly written, and it was seemingly irrelevant to the topic of the anthology.
Even some of the more established authors (Pugmire, Kiernan) turned in less than stellar entries here.
So it's yet another strange anthology: wonderful, exciting, awful, and boring...all at the same time.