Cult of the Dead and Other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales
Lois H. Gresh
Hippocampus Press
August 2015
Reviewed by David Goudsward
New York Times bestselling author Lois H. Gresh is a triple threat as a writer. She writes nonfiction guides such topics as The Science of Superheroes, and companions to everything from Twilight and The Hunger Games to The Mortal Instruments and The Spiderwick Chronicles. She also writes science fiction such as Blood and Ice with hibernating alien vampires in Antartica. And she writes horror. Her first horror collection, Eldritch Evolution was released by Chaosium in 2011.
Hippocampus has wisely chose to issue a new collection, Cult of the Dead. Her companion guides and her science fiction demonstrate her comfortableness with technology and science. In her short horror, Gresh integrates science into her supernatural in a variety of ways that seamlessly add to the building tension. In the titular story, the ossuary catacombs beneath Lima’s San Francisco monastery are the background to both a tale of death cults that are quite dead and social inequity. There are no happy endings in Peru, but there is a satisfactory denouement.
And having considered the morbid side of archaeology, Gresh launches into tales of the aftermath of nanotechnology run amok, A tale of the Wild West, Lovecraft style, foot fetishes gone bad, regretful angels of death, swords and sorcery, and several tales of dystopic futures where technology has created a new form of normal that is beyond disquieting. Underlying all the tales is also an underlying theme that family, biological, acquired, or evolved, is the best defense against evil, even if it’s only a delaying tactic or motivation to fight.
If there is one shortcoming in the collection, and it is minor at best, is the inclusion of fairly new stories, including from her previous collection, and one from Joshi’s Searchers After Horror, an anthology published barely a year ago. I would have much preferred to see the space utilized for less recent tales from Gresh’s prolific library of tales available. Still over all, it is an outstanding collection of work from one of the justifiably popular horror writers currently in the field.
