Don Webb, When They Came (Temporary Culture, 2006 )
Cthulhu does Austin in this well-crafted and highly entertaining collection of Lovecraft-inspired horror and fantasy short stories by Don Webb, an Austin-based science fiction and mystery writer who also edits the Webzine, Bewildering Stories
How does Cthulhu survive the transition from New England fog and chill to the Texas heat and sunshine? Pretty well, though Don Webb's tone is definitely lighter than Lovecraft's.
Webb doesn't use Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary; he writes in spare, economical language. Despite his uncluttered prose style, Webb still can conjure up horrors worthy of the Master, "Their flesh began to melt from their bones, falling off in greasy semi-liquid ribbons."
Webb's protagonists aren't the dessicated, doom-haunted New England eccentrics Lovecraft loved to portray. Instead Webb focuses on a world of bored computer geeks cruising suburbia in their SUVs in search of cheap thrills. While Lovecraft's characters were driven by a thirst for knowledge and encountered Cthulhu through the perusal of ancient, forbidden books such as The Necronomicon "by the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred," Webb's characters are slackers who make acquaintance with The Scaly One through designer drugs, New Age cults and self-help books. In Webb's stories, Lovecraft's carefully cultivated sense of implacable doom is replaced by a sense of implacable messiness -- shit happens -- all the time.
Most importantly, Webb's depiction of The Old Ones varies wildly from Lovecraft's concept. While Lovecraft's Old Ones are austere and horrible beings who bedevil humanity through an insatiable hunger for power and fresh meat, Webb's Old Ones are practical jokers who just want to have fun. Observing human suffering, for them, is like watching Jerry Lewis movies, a constant source of cornball comedy.
Lovecraftian stories are the main attraction here and Webb writes many good ones. The standout is "Souvenirs From a Damnation." "Souvenirs" is an annotated list of everyday objects that, when taken as a whole, yields a Lovecraftian tale of Evil amphibian half breeds, forbidden books of knowledge and beautiful downtown Innsmouth in all its eldritch glory.
An entire book of Lovecraft-inspired work can be a bit too much of good thing -- though I'm not sure that "good" is the appropriate word to use in this context -- and Webb has wisely added some fantasy tales that are not explicitly Lovecraftian. The best of the lot is a retelling of the Greek myth of Medusa, "The Source and the Stone." In Webb's version of the myth, Perseus is a flame-haired princess disguised as a boy. It is only when the princess remembers her true name that she is able to slay Medusa, resurrect and marry her mentor and usher in a reign of peace and prosperity for her people. "Ool Athang" seems to be a homage to Lord Dunsany. Ferin, the Dreamer's search for forbidden knowledge takes him past the Seas That Bleed and the Mountain's Who Sing to the cursed land of Ool Athang. Ool Athang boasts a portal to another doomed, sacred city -- New Orleans. (In 2004, when the story was written, Webb could not have realized how closely New Orleans' fate would mirror that of his fictitious Lost City).
As in any good Mythos-inspired collection, Webb's stories allude not only to The Mythos but to one another. Ferin, The Dreamer, morphs into Ferin, the artist, in another story and the self-help book, The Yellow Flower, appears in a number of stories bringing riots, murders and obscene transformations in its wake.
The typography used in When They Came is overly cute. The spine of the book is deliberately printed upside down so I keep opening the book wrong side up. The font used throughout the book is extremely annoying. The ligature between the "s" and the "t" pulled me out of the story every time. Poor proofreading gives rise to many typos and misspellings and to the Daliesque image of a Green Man, "Naked save for a green clock that flowed from his shoulders!"
These 23 tales are a worthy addition to the Lovecraft mythos and your bookshelf as well.
Further information on When They Came can be found at Temporary Culture's Web site.
