Rapture of the Deep and Other Lovecraftian Tales

Cody Goodfellow. Hippocampus, $20 (304p) ISBN 978-1-61498-155-8

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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.)