Darrell Schweitzer (editor), Cthulhu's Reign (Daw, 2010)
Most Lovecraft-themed anthologies exist in what could be called the "Discovery phase" of the great cosmic cycle of Cthulhu's return. While there are exceptions, generally what happens is that the protagonists stumble onto something spooky, get a little taste of the Necronomicon, barely manage to contain the eldritch outbreak, and are left with the understanding that there are Very Bad Things out there that don't give a fig about humanity. A statistically significant percentage of these stories also end in italics, with multiple exclamation points, and after a while one gets to wondering exactly how many academics and adventurers have independently discovered the existence of the various Cthulhu cults. Do they ever get together and compare notes? Have they thought about making some sort of preparation, or at least putting together a medical insurance pool that covers psychiatric issues caused by too many up-close-and-personal run-ins with shoggoths?
With Cthulhu's Reign, however, there's none of that. Edited by long-time Lovecraftphile Darrell Schweitzer, the book is a collection of stories depicting what happens after the stars have come right, sunken R'lyeh has risen, and Great Cthulhu and his minions have shambled forth to exercise their bloody dominion over the Earth. A few of them go so far as to include the events of the rising itself, but mostly this anthology is concerned with the aftermath.
Of course, that still leaves the contributors with a fairly broad territory to explore, which they do to greater or lesser effect, and sometimes with stunning originality. Chief among those is Brian Stableford's "The Holocaust of Ecstasy", which deftly spins a new take on the Lovecraftian uber-timeline while avoiding anything trite or clichéd. Matt Cardin's "The New Pauline Corpus" plays with that old Lovecraftian standby, the sacred text of cosmic evil, and comes up with something wickedly satirical. Mike Allen's "Her Acres of Pastoral Playground" is a moving but unsentimental look at how far love can drive a man, even in the face of doomsday, and it outshines the similarly themed but more conventional "This Is How the World Ends," courtesy of John R. Fultz. And Laird Barron's "Vastation" succeeds partly because of its unabashed ambition, and partly because the Lovecraftian apocalypse is just a part of the charismatic narrator's millennia-long tale.
Other efforts are less successful. Will Murray's "What Brings the Void" and Richard Lupoff's "Nothing Personal" are both heavy on the exposition and light on development, while Ian Watson's "The Walker in the Cemetery" fritters away a great premise and some truly excellent moodbuilding with a disappointing ending.
Clearly, this anthology is not the place for newcomers to Lovecraftiana to make their first inroads. There's too much assumed knowledge required to really get some of the stories, and the overall tone is almost unrelentingly grim. For more jaded readers of Cthulhiana, however, the relatively novel premise, as well as the quality of many of the stories, makes the book a worthwhile read. There's plenty of time -- and plenty of other places -- for intrepid supernatural investigators to stave off the end of the world. For the change of pace if nothing else, it's interesting to see well-fashioned takes on when they don't.
