A new collection from Gary Lovisi is out from Ramble House: Weird Stories: Shudder Pulp, Horror, & Lovecraft! It contains over 20 stories, most reprints from various small publications from the 1980s on, along with some poems. However, all the stories have been revised and expanded.
I haven’t read too much of Lovisi’s work, so looked forward to this one. The cover is by Lucille Cali, who I believe is Lovisi’s wife. It reminds me of some Weird Tales covers and is pretty nice.
The first four stories are all done in the style of shudder pulps or weird menace. This was a genre of stories started by Popular Publications in magazines like Dime Detective, Terror Tales, and Horror Stories, and picked up by Red Circle, Thrilling, and other pulp publishers. These stories have fear, horror, and terror with the feel of supernaturalism, which turns out not to be the case. Personally, this is a genre I have never gotten into.
Next, we get into more supernatural horror stories, the first several with a Lovecraftian element to them.
“The Thing’s Name Is, The Thing” is about a researcher who discovers the personification of evil. But he dies, and his friend is trying to get his research into the right hands. Can he succeed? “The Abominable Man” is told in first-person, by a man who moves into a home, and what he does after having found a book written by the prior owner. This one has clear links to the Cthulhu mythos.
“That Which Is Waiting” has two interesting characters trying save the world from what might come after an ancient abbey is torn down. I wouldn’t mind more stories with these two.
And “The Mound of Om-Ra” has a man who tells us of a mound near his town with legends about. Then he has a bizarre encounter with a strange old man that reveals more. “The Legend of the Lake” has someone looking for some kind of cryptid at a certain lake. Does he find it?
One of three poems is “Afternoons in Zothique,” which is clearly inspired by Clark Ashton Smith, as Zothique, the final continent on a dying Earth, is from his fiction.
We then get a story and poem, both titled “Scratch!,” about a man haunted by something(s) scratching behind the wall of his home. Will he discover what it is?
Then we get into stories with no H.P. Lovecraft influence.
In “Hands of the Dead,” we are at a funeral for a businessman, attended by his four associates. But all were involved in his death. Will they get away with it? Getting burned is a hell of a thing, as we learn in “Fire.” While “Five Fingers” deals with a cursed hand. Can its curse be avoided?
Murder and revenge, with the help of a witch, center in “The Mansion.” Deals with the devil are the center for both “For the Fear of Fear” and “The Devil You Know.” In “The Mer-Man’s Song,” mer-people and gorgons are at odds. Then they bring up the wrong mer-man. In “Teeth,” a man gets a new set of teeth from a back-alley dentist. Bad idea.
I enjoyed this collection, and there are other works by Lovisi that I plan on reading. For me, I enjoyed the more Lovecraftian stories. I wonder if Lovisi has enough to just do a collection of just those? I would like to see more of them. But this is a wide-ranging collection.
Ramble House has other works by him, including a trio of Sherlock Holmes collections that I plan on getting. If you are not familiar with them, if you contact them directly you can order from them at a slightly cheaper price than from Amazon.
Lovisi also runs Gryphon Books, where he both publishes and sells books. So check it out.
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