Red Right Hand

The Cthulhu mythos is a ripe setting for this urban fantasy from Black (a pseudonym for James R. Tuck), but it’s squandered in a series of gruesome, nonstop fight scenes that blur into each other, never coalescing into a cohesive, or even interesting, whole. Charlotte “Charlie” Moore just wants to live her life (in an unnamed location that may be present-day America) in peace, but all hope of that vanishes when she’s attacked by hellhounds. A mysterious man with a red right hand steps in to save her. It turns out that he’s an elder god named Nyarlathotep, and he needs Charlie and her latent magic, which gives her the ability to “see through the veil between worlds,” to keep the other Old Ones from destroying the human race. Charlie is horrified to discover that Nyarlathotep’s seeming altruism is only because he doesn’t want to share the fun of tormenting humans, but when he threatens her love interest, she knows she has no choice but to help him. Charlie’s histrionic internal dialogue is all that passes for character development. Even diehard fans of H.P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu will want to skip Black’s underwhelming, sloppy novel. Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency. (July)