In the Mad Mountains: Stories Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft

Cosmic horror is alive and well in this eerie collection of what Bram Stoker Award winner Lansdale (Moon Lake) considers to be his eight best Lovecraftian tales, each with different settings and styles and often pulling from other authors’ oeuvres as well. “Dread Island” riffs on Mark Twain, opening with the line “this here story is as true as that other story that was written down about me and Jim,” and going on to tell of how Huck Finn risks his life to save Tom Sawyer from a mysterious evil. Lansdale’s mimicry extends to Edgar Allan Poe as well; “The Gruesome Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning” is a new C. Auguste Dupin exploit, in which the sleuth looks into eyewitness accounts of oddly colored lightning. A third highlight, “The Tall Grass,” evokes Algernon Blackwood, as a businessman traveling in the West has an unsettling experience when his train stops after midnight in the middle of a patch of unusually tall prairie grass that “shifted in the moonlight like waves of gold-green seawater pulled by the tide-making forces of the moon.” Lansdale fans and Lovecraft devotees alike will be impressed. (Oct.)