Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales

Rocked by the gentle sea, the City sleeps; but its dreams are not its own...With eight psychotropic visions of damnation and transformation in the urban coral reef of San Francisco, COPPING SQUID forms a mosaic of otherworldly menace shot through with glimpses of awe-inspiring majesty: of invisible outsiders and self-medicating seekers whose desperate prayers and hidden rituals lead them to behold their alien reflections in the all-seeing eyes of the secret masters of creation.With the deceptive ease and streetwise enlightenment of a weird storytelling master, Michael Shea fearlessly sounds the unplumbed depths of the Cthulhu Mythos to witness visions from which traditional cosmic horror has always averted its dark-adapted gaze.

From Publishers Weekly

Despite a glowing introduction from Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi, who calls Shea one of the few "successful practitioners of Cthulhu Mythos fiction," the eight stories in World Fantasy Award-winner Shea's collection don't live up to the hype. Instead of originality, the author offers mostly pallid mimicry, complete with fevered prose accompanied by the requisite exclamation point at the end (e.g., "They glared back at us with bulge-eyed pleas that we should prove it an hallucination, that cephalopod leviathan of boiling arms that pressed its colossal scrutiny upon them through the dizzying wheel of moon-fired glass!"). Shea can write well, as shown in the quiet opening of "Tsathoggua," about a down-and-out woman who finds some suggestive odors in the dingy laundry room of her housing project. Ironically, Joshi makes no mention of Shea's novel The Color Out of Time, a sequel to one of Lovecraft's most evocative works, that's superior to any of this volume's entries. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Michael Shea catapulted into the Lovecraftian firmament with The Color Out Of Time, a sequel to Lovecraft's The Colour Out Of Space. He is also the author of the four-volume Nifft The Lean series, the first of which won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. His short stories have been collected in Polyphemus and The Autopsy & Other Tales. Shea lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the artist/author Lynn Cesar, and his globe trotting children, Adele and Jacob.

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