Richo Reviews: Wonder & Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction - Various Authors, Nick Mamatas Ed. (Dover Publications)

It is inside me now. The seed has burrowed deep and I feel it beginning to sprout. My transformation cannot be far away. I tremble, though I know not if it is in fear or anticipation. 

As soon as I heard about this collection I knew I had to read it. As a lifelong cosmic horror fan, a collection which focuses on the element of the sublime in horror - the sense of encountering something vast, unknowable, alien - was an easy sell. The wondrous can be much more chilling than the base or more overtly grotesque, exposing as it does the absurdity of existence and the irrelevance of the human, of humanity, in a vast and limitless universe. This collection takes that idea as a focus, and it's a fantastic theme.

Too easily did I allow myself to be led on that path. For so long had I searched for something more, something greater, than this existence, and it was so tantalisingly close.

The first thing that stands out to the reader is Mamatas' confident and nuanced understanding of the tales within and cosmic horror as a genre. His brief introduction compresses a lot of food for thought into a couple of pages, and he has a paragraph before each story which all effectively prime the reader for what is to come. That mastery is evident in the selection of the stories too - this is a collection more diverse than perhaps the heavy theming would suggest, from classics of the genre to more recent fare, yet each story is well-chosen and adds to a cohesive whole.

Now I began to see the world in a new light. As the new truths which had been revealed to me shook the scales from my eyes, even what had once been known and familiar took on wondrous, terrible new weight.

The collection is bookended by two classic stories - HP Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, from whose ominous closing words the book's title is taken, and Clark Ashton Smith's The City of the Singing Flame. Of course I've read The Shadow Over Innsmouth before, but to read it again with a focus on the wonder of the transformations taking place was an interesting experience and it acts as a solid opening to the collection. I confess I've not read as much of Clark Ashton Smith as I should, and this story was new to me, but I'm glad I got the chance to read it here. It effectively blends encounters with the bizarre, unaccountable compulsion, and explorations of new horizons both external and internal, and this is a compelling coda to the preceding tales.

Wherever I looked, I could now see the blossom of the seed inside me, wheeling through the mundane world, transforming what it touched, creating the new and reconfiguring the old into wondrous forms.

Either Nadia Bulkin or Laird Barron would sell me a collection on the strength of their name alone, and to have both in these pages is a real treat. I'd actually read both of their stories in this volume previously - in fact, this is the third time I've read Barron's Vastation this year alone - but I certainly didn't regret reading them again, especially looking at them specifically through the lens of this collection and Mamatas' thoughts.

Erica Satifka's You Will Never Be The Same, despite its brevity, brilliantly conjures a bleakly terrifying vision of humanity journeying out into that vast universe, and other, stranger realms beside. Night Voices, Night Journeys by Masahiko Inoue is playful and haunting, yet meditative. This leads us in to Mamatas' own story, Farewell Performance, an ichor-dark evocation of futility and collapse.

Michael Cisco is another author I'm not as well-acquainted with as I'd like to be, and his urgently compelling Translation makes me kick myself for what I've been missing. It's hard to pick stand out stories in such a well-curated collection but this burnt into me (and put my thus far untouched copy of The Narrator straight to the top of my reading list).

Fred Chappell's Weird Tales is a horror story about Lovecraft himself, but only in a sense. While this could easily be distasteful, as Mamatas discusses, it avoids the pulp trappings it could easily fall prey to in favour of something less definable. Livia Llewellyn's Bright Crown of Joy is a vision of collapse and the end of the world that juxtaposes the supernatural with the environmental brilliantly, showing us the absurdity as well as the dark wonders of the end times and the times after the end times. It's just excellent.

Victor LaValle's Ghost Story is a fascinating addition, a 'Lovecraftian' story with nothing supernatural, only the cosmic horror of human existence, and ably demonstrating that that's what we're really scared of anyway. Last before we close with The City of the Singing Flame is Molly Tanzer's Go,Go, Go, Said the Byakhee, which shares themes of transformation with several other stories in this volume but runs with them in a way that is completely unique and horribly joyous.

I will never escape it now. It is within me and without, and all is touched by that seed and forever will be.

This collection did not disappoint. If you're looking for horror that invokes awe, that provokes you to gaze, for better or for worse, with new eyes at the world around you, that touches what is - dare I say it - numinous, then pick up this book, await your transformation, and prepare to dwell in wonder and glory forever.