Lovecraft’s Monsters by Ellen Datlow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you want a collection of stories where more than a few people have “that Innsmouth look,” then Lovecraft’s Monsters will leave you happy as a shoggoth.
Most of the stories are as weird or horrifying as you’d expect, as the various authors draw on Lovecraft’s pantheon on Old Ones, Great Ones, Elder Gods and more, but a few are lighter in tone, most notably Neil Gaiman’s opener, a tale of a werewolf in Innsmouth, with a healthy (?) mix of arcane rituals, fish people and time-to-change-into-a-hairy-eating-machine thrown in.
One of my favorites is “The Same Deep Waters as You” which tells of an animal behavior specialist conscripted by the U.S. government to go to an island off the coast of Washington state in order to communicate with people (?) who have been held there since 1928, people with “that Innsmouth look.” It takes one of the established and best-known parts of Lovecraft’s lore–the fishy doings in and around Innsmouth–and tackles it as a scientific problem (that also worries the military). I felt the end, which takes a turn more into straight-up Lovecraft weirdness, was a bit of a letdown but the story as a whole remains strong.
Laird Barron’s “Bulldozer” features the usual rumpled pile of machismo protagonist with the heart of a poet. When he’s not ladling on metaphors, he’s swinging his fists or firing his pistol. Barron also continues to be a big believer in eschewing the whole “you can’t tell the story from first person POV if the character ends up dead/rendered unable to communicate to the reader because of various non-Euclidean horrors.” The story actually picks up steam as it progresses, so the excesses end up not feeling as excessive.
There’s a bunch of other stories here and most of them are worth a read. There’s even a few poems if you’ve ever wanted to see someone try to rhyme something with “Cthulhu.” (I’m kidding, no one does that, though I wish they had.) Overall there’s 21 stories and poems, enough to sate the appetite of any Lovecraft fan looking for stories drawn from the mythos he created, but pruned of the purple prose and occasional racism.
On a scale of five star-tipped tentacles, Lovecraft’s monsters rates four out of five tentacles.