Call of Catthulhu, Book I: The Nekonomikon by Joel Sparks

While laden with allusions to the works of Lovecraft, this rule book focuses on simulating cats in the liminal zone between realistic and fantastical, very definitely giving it the feel of Eliot not Ulthar. The world faces many threats, from the mundane dog to the eldritch Snarlyhotep and Phatproggua. While saving civilisation from these threats …

The Green Flame Rises

By arcane tabulations and eldritch schemes, my wife and I have almost wrought our yearly Festival. All that remains is to face the most lively awefulness to summon forth those items that cannot endure long in this world, such as salad. To aid you in bastioning such winter celebrations as you correlate, a blessing from …

Ink For Blood by Kevin Weir

Weir blends a strong gothic aesthetic with fast-paced visceral fights and creepy mysteries, creating a baroque nightmare of addict-assassins fighting existential horrors with distilled angel blood and arcane machinery. A century ago, the Great Machine appeared on the English coast, offering a way to fight back against the mindless parasitic sludge called the Mire. Now …

Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror, ed. Lynne Jamneck

Jamneck applies a broad rather than narrow criteria to both female voice and Lovecraftian horror, resulting in a diverse range of stories. This anthology contains twenty short stories and novelettes that portray a female-perspective on an incomprehensible universe. “Shadows of the Evening” by Joyce Carol Oates. Escaping the tedium of life as her ageing aunt's …

There are No Monsters by Sebastian Leyendecker

Leyendecker blends the griminess and struggle of realistic espionage stories or noir with a hidden world of supernatural otherness, creating a novel that is both gritty thriller and cosmic horror. Decades ago, the Nocturne Society told Brockmann to stand down, their mission of destroying the monsters that used to plague humanity complete; however, when a …

Behind Superficial Mutability

On Saturday, I played through Bit Golem's Dagon game. As some of you will know, I am a casual player of computer games rather than one who seeks to speed run them or plays into the early hours of the morning; so my having completed the game the same day I started (in fact within …

The Peculiar Case of the Luminous Eye: A Paranormal Thriller by S.C. Barrus

Barrus combines the Victorian gentleman scientist with a threat that does not tidily fit into human assumptions about reality, creating a novella that evokes classic tales of paranormal detection and cosmic dread without feeling dry or stilted. Willem has devoted himself to the study of the liminal zone between biology, cryptology, and the aether sciences, …

Creepy Sheen by Rebecca Gransden

Embracing the aesthetic of Eighties US teen and sci-fi movies while also drawing on the darkness beneath the neon, Gransden creates alien perspectives that seem intimately familiar. This collection contains ten works by Gransden, each strongly displaying the tropes and mores of Eighties US culture but seen from odd angles or applied to unexpected situations. …

Outsiders Within Release

Outsiders Within, containing twelve tales of the dark gulf behind our pretence of a rational universe, is now available in ebook and paperback from major retailers. Summon forth your copy today. We fear discovery when we should fear what there is to discover. Lovecraft and his successors show a world where human civilisation is only …

Dreaming of the Red King

One of the many contested perspectives on Lovecraft's Yog-Sothothery is the idea that Azathoth currently sleeps and the world will end when he wakes. Lovecraft's own works do not state this, so where might it come from? Perhaps our own tendency to live in a dream of purpose rather than a reality of explicit facts. …