Spoilers ahead!!!!
By far the best Mythos book I've ever read. THIS WAS AWESOME. I bought it months ago when I was on a drunk buying spree, but was so tired of Mythos stuff by the time I got around to it I just let it sit there for months more. I loved the cover, though. I finally started reading it a few days ago, and was totally hooked. Not nearly as wordy or atmospheric as a lot of Mythos writing is, and not nearly as much irony as, say, Nick Mamatas' recent book, these stories are told pretty directly, no florid writing (except in one of the parody pieces), but tons of excellent plots. These stories run as a rule pretty short, no fat and gristle, just lean, mean badass stories. I can't believe I'd never read this guy before.
Some of my favorites:
"The Bones/Avatars/Young of the Old Ones": These are the first three consecutive stories that are all linked together. They take place in the future on another planet in a place called Paxton (I think?) but colloquially called Punktown. It's kind of like Shadowrun, alien races living together, crime, magic, sci-fi all rolled into one. The PERFECT setting for a Mythos story that never ever would have occurred to me. I was really excited to learn that this writer has written a ton of stuff about Punktown, so I'll be jumping up and down with need-to-pee excitement to read those.
"I Married a Shoggoth": You'd think with a title like this it would be a parody, but it was actually a really good story, not parody at all, and about a dude using a shoggoth for a really sensible purpose, hahahaha. Again, something I never would have thought of.
"Conglomerate": Watch out for multi-billion dollar conglomerates buying up buildings that could connect together on a map into a beastly symbol that would raise aeon-aged giant aliens.
"Book Worm": A neat twist on the trope of the locked book. Awesome background with the mafia and awesome ending.
"Through the Obscure Glass": One very terrifying scene where this woman hears some scratching at glass sounds underneath a tarp out in a shed and lifts it up, and her husband, who knows what's going on, shouts out, "Don't let them see you!"
"The Servitors": WAY out there story about these creatures who slave away keeping the wound of a planet-sized alien open to dump slops into it for food. Really disgusting, and really neat dimension-jumping into our world.
"Out of the Belly of Sheol": A retelling of the Biblical Jonah story. It wasn't a whale that swallowed him and spat him out a few days later... This was just pure genius, too.
"The Face of Baphomet": A short story that somehow became something like the Da Vinci Code, about the Knights Templar actually being Shub Niggurath-worshiping homosexuals.
"Cells": A sad story about a scientist racing against the clock to grow a blobby cell culture for his wife who's dying of cancer to inhabit when she dies. It ends badly.
"The House on the Plain": Spooky story about astronauts in the far future landing on a totally desolate, lifeless planet and finding an entire Victorian house sitting there, and they go inside. This one was SUCH a great idea.
"The Fourth Utterance": Man, Jeffrey Thomas is just full of ideas. This one is kind of reminiscent of the movie Miracle Mile, the story getting kicked off with someone hearing something on a phone that was a wrong number. In this case, it's messages left on an answering machine. The entire plot takes place over 5 or 6 phone messages that are all really short (remember answering machines cutting you off mid-sentence in the 90s?), and is absolutely genius in its compactness. What is just hinted at (because the person who should have gotten the messages knows enough to fill in the blanks), in true Lovecraft fashion, forces your imagination to create something far creepier than anything that could have been described. My favorite story in the book.
"Pazuzu's Children": Another INCREDIBLY unlikely setting for a story like this, this one during Desert Storm, a shot-down (was he SHOT down, really?) pilot is interrogated by Iraqis that don't quite seem like your typical Muslim soldiers, wanting to know why the Americans have ordered this particular site to be attacked. There is a scene where a troupe of dudes are running down the hall with a severed black tentacle the size of a tree, and the ending, again, fantastic.
"What Washes Ashore": Short story about a woman who wanders off in a beach town and finds a seemingly abandoned souvenir shop selling random crap that washes up on the shore, mainly shells. She takes the wrong one.
"The Cellar Gods": Incredible finish to the book, a longer story about a medical student who takes in a beautiful, mysterious Asian (Asian?) girl after her people are persecuted by a lynch mob and all killed and burned. Again in classic Lovecraft boxing moves, the hints and feints freak you out more than what is told. There were reports of giant stone heads sticking out of the floor of the basement in the warehouse that was burned down, a giant black cow-like thing that burrowed into the ground in the middle of a snowfield seen from afar in the middle of the night, an ominous CRACK that begins to appear in the face of the main character's beloved, the slow retreat of the mysterious girl into her locked cellar room, refusing to see anyone, and finally, the whipcrack of an ending when the main character and his father break into the locked room after not hearing anything from the other side for a day. In that one scene there is so much scary s***, and the tragic, sad ending had me hitting the "home" button on my Kindle afterward in a bleak depression.
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