For decades, Darrell Schweitzer has been prominent in studying and elaborating upon the work of H. P. Lovecraft. As critic, poet, and fiction writer he has analyzed and expanded upon Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos without compromising his own distinctive voice.
In this new collection of tales, Schweitzer draws upon the fictional realm that he has made his own-Chorazin, a village in rural Pennsylvania where all manner of strange events occur. The strangeness lies not only in the incursion of extraterrestrial entities but in the very souls of its reclusive inhabitants. Just as Lovecraft fused the cosmic and the human in his evocation of such sinister locales as Arkham, Innsmouth, and Dunwich, so Schweitzer creates his own sub-Mythos in a region long familiar to him.
Other stories in the book present novel improvisations on other aspects of Lovecraft's work. "Down to a Sunless Sea" elaborates upon Lovecraft's Antarctic novella At the Mountains of Madness; "Not in the Card Catalog" is a riff on the "forbidden book" theme; and in "The Return of the Night-Gaunts" Schweitzer puts Lovecraft himself on stage as a literary character.
In all these tales, Darrell Schweitzer combines horror, pathos, and emotional intensity to bring a new dimension to the neo-Lovecraftian tale, where the anomalies of the human psyche are as terrifying as the incursion of alien entities from the depths of space.
