John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with ten tales of cosmic horror. In these stories, he continues to chart the course of 21st Century weird fiction, from the unfamiliar to the familial, the unfathomably distant to the intimate.
A Halloween haunted house becomes a conduit to something ancient and uncanny.
The effigy of a movie monster becomes instrumental in a young man’'s defence against a bully.
A family diminishes while visiting a seaside town, leaving only one to remember what changed.
Lured in by fate, a father explores a mysterious tower, and the monster imprisoned within.
Mourning his death, a young man travels to his father’'s hometown, seeking closure, but finds himself beset by dreams of mythic bargains and a primaeval, corpse-eating titan.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213796568-corpsemouth-and-other-autobiographies
Damn, but I hated The Fisherman. It was such a lazy bait and switch. I just don’t understand the rave reviews of that thing. I found it insultingly stupid.
The story arc was a bit like a Matryoshka doll. With a bunch of different stories nested literally one inside the other. But it had some interesting plots.
Yeah, but the outside layer of that doll made no sense. The vast majority of the narrative was meant to be related in the words of some random guy running a diner that the two “main characters” walked into.
The whole bargain-bin Van Helsing narrative is supposedly told to them by this diner guy for what I have to assume must have been HOURS, without them interjecting once. And this guy knew every tiny detail of what happened a hundred years ago, right down to the contents of those peoples’ pantries.
The longer it went on, the madder I got.
I totally agree that some parts could be shorter. Also the whole “dive-in narration” cut the initial story for so long, you basically forget the two first characters at some point.
Love Langan. Has to be one of the most intellectual voices in horror right now.
