Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales
Despite a glowing introduction from Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi, who calls Shea one of the few "successful practitioners of Cthulhu Mythos fiction," the eight stories in World Fantasy Award-winner Shea's collection don't live up to the hype. Instead of originality, the author offers mostly pallid mimicry, complete with fevered prose accompanied by the requisite exclamation point at the end (e.g., "They glared back at us with bulge-eyed pleas that we should prove it an hallucination, that cephalopod leviathan of boiling arms that pressed its colossal scrutiny upon them through the dizzying wheel of moon-fired glass!"). Shea can write well, as shown in the quiet opening of "Tsathoggua," about a down-and-out woman who finds some suggestive odors in the dingy laundry room of her housing project. Ironically, Joshi makes no mention of Shea's novel The Color Out of Time, a sequel to one of Lovecraft's most evocative works, that's superior to any of this volume's entries.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.