Do you like your Mythos horror repleat with the gods and creatures of the traditional canon, or do you like the author to discover all-new existential terrors to blight your sleepless nights? This great book gives you both! With two distinct stories, paced out in alternating chapters and linked only thematically, it's an unconventional format. But it works really well.
Stolze has taken two big risks with this offering: the unusual structure, and making cancer one of its bogeymen, even splashing the chilling word on the cover in all caps. We humans read about fictional horrors like vampires and shoggoths to exorcise our fears of real tragedies over which we have no control. A title promising the horrors of cancer may turn away some potential readers.
As always, Stolze's writing is completely engaging. I never felt fatigued or impatient while reading this book. His gift for witty banter is mainly displayed in the narration this time, rather than in dialogue. The ironic word choices and call-backs are there, buoying us along between the tense, dramatic and occasionally dire moments.
But I don't read a book like this for the laughs. I want fresh revelations: new, plausible, self-consistent and awful truths about the universe and the monsters that inhabit it. This volume delivers in spades. Stolze's contributions to the genre, including this one, are of high literary value, and make original and fascinating additions to the Mythos canon. What does cancer and an Antarctic expedition have to do with alien gods and our own cosmic insignificance? Gentle horror fan, read this book!
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