Rapture of the Deep and Other Lovecraftian Tales

Cody Goodfellow has emerged as one of the most dynamic writers of neo-Lovecraftian fiction in recent years. This volume gathers the many provocative tales he has written over the past decade or more, including several novellas that lavishly expand upon core Lovecraftian themes and motifs. Chief among these, perhaps, is "In the Shadow of Swords," strikingly set in Iraq, where American soldiers during the Iraq War encounter entities far more baleful than the terrorists of the Taliban. A similar setting is used in "Archons," which features a denouement both horrific and poignant. Other stories play imaginative riffs on other Lovecraftian ideas. "The Anatomy Lesson," set in the 19th century, is an ingenious take-off of "Pickman's Model." "To Skin a Corpse" transmutes the central idea of "Herbert West—Reanimator" into a gritty 1930s hard-boiled idiom. The key Lovecraftian notion of dreams is the basis of the pensive story "Broken Sleep." And a spectacular and previously unpublished story, "Swinging," employs "The Shadow out of Time" as the springboard for an extraordinary excursion into space and time. Goodfellow is gifted with a prose style of exceptional lyricism and evocativeness, and his narratives are infused with all the compelling readability and cumulative terror that distinguish Lovecraft's own. Vibrantly contemporary in setting and expression, they nonetheless constitute a fitting homage of the dreamer from Providence.

From Publishers Weekly

Horrors inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's fiction and Cthulhu mythos run riot in the 12 wildly imaginative entries in Goodfellow's fourth story collection. "The Anatomy Lesson" and "To Skin a Corpse" both reference Lovecraft's "Herbert West—Reanimator" and "Pickman's Model" in their accounts of ghouls and gangsters mixing it up with mad scientists and resuscitated corpses. Though "Swinging" takes a page from Lovecraft's "The Shadow out of Time," it's a highly original love story in which a couple achieve "the most deliciously maddening perversion of intimacy" by displacing their consciousnesses into each other's bodies. "In the Shadow of Swords" and "Garden of the Gods" are the two best of a handful of stories in which the horrors of war in contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan provide context for cosmic horrors that emerge out of those countries' cultures and ancient histories. Although Goodfellow (Strategies Against Nature) regularly tips his hat to his inspirations, he approaches their themes so inventively that his stories never bog down with the derivativeness in which so much mythos fiction is mired. Fans of Lovecraftian horror will find Goodfellow's stories strong examples of how, as he writes in his introduction, "the Mythos frame gives seven-league boots and bionic limbs to the storyteller's ability not only to suspend disbelief, but to hurl it into a stable orbit with little effort." (Mar.) \n

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