BOOK REVIEW | COLD WAR CTHULU | DARRELL SCHWEITZER

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The concept for COLD WAR CTHULHU is a narrower focus on the premise of my first PS anthology, THAT IS NOT DEAD. If the Old Ones have been lurking about since elder eons, people should have noticed in periods other the timeframe of the original Lovecraft stories. THAT IS NOT DEAD took the premise back into remote Antiquity. COLD WAR CTHULHU brings it forward to the period of about 1950-1989. Surely with all that spying and top secret research both the CIA and the KGB must have known something about the eldritch forces that haunt our planet and tried to make use of everything from dimensional gates to Deep Ones to shoggoths. But at the same time this is all secret history, not alternate history. Many of the readers lived through this period and we know that Cthulhu did not rise and devastate the world any more than Godzilla really stomped Tokyo. What really happened? The stories were required to dovetail into known and remembered history, even though what happened behind the scenes and undercover may be very different from what the public was aware of.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Nyarlathotep at Checkpoint Charlie — Darrell Schweitzer

Cold Warrior — Geoffrey Hart

Red Star at R’lyeh — Susan Shwartz

Beyond the Couch — Don Webb

Project NAHAB — Stephen Woodworth

A Resonant Darkness — Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Ghost Station Zero — Robert Jeschonek

Innsmouth Vulgaris — Tim Curran

The Skywatchers — Paul Di Filippo

The Iceworm Cometh — Gordon Linzner

Spheres — Harry Turtledove

The Cosmic Congregation — Will Murray

The Well — Tim Lees

L’Appel du Vide — Amdi Silvestri

The Endless Black Cathedral — Nicholas Kaufmann

A Simpler Solution — Frank Schildiner

Midnight Climax — Cody Goodfellow

My Best Friend the Spy — Darrell Schweitzer

Café of the World — Don Webb

The Deepwater Incident — Adrian Cole

REVIEW

Darrell Schweitzer (author of The Mask of the Sorceror, The Dragon House) gathers together a multitude of authors for this collection of stories cycling around Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos and set in the tumultuous times of the Cold War.

This is a great collection of stories that marries together the dark brooding aesthetics of cosmic horror with the paranoia of the Cold War  period. 

The stories themselves are a mix of alternate history, speculative fiction set within the period and even in one case a straight up spy story with eldritch beasts.

There are too many stories to dissect individually, but there are standout stories that worm their way into the consciousness. 

The collection opens with Cold Warrior by Geoffrey Hart, which has the psychic division of an unknown sector of the secret service battling an psychic incursion in Northern Alaska. The story has the isolative elements of The Thing running through it. The story ends with a glorious sting in the tail.

Red Star at R’lyeh gives an alternative explanation for the 1960’s Nedelin Catastrophe. The catastrophe occurred in 1960 when a missile backfired and exploded, causing 54 casualties. The story evokes the harshness of the soviet regime and the duplicitous nature of the soldiers. 

Then there is the master of alternative history Harry Turtledove’s story, which I absolutely loved. 

After reading the book, I am definitely going to be checking out some of the authors collected in the book. I have had The Mask of The Sorcerer by Daniel Schweitzer on my kindle for ages. In addition to this, Tim Curran’s story made me immediately check out his works.

Cold War Cthulu is a brilliant collection of eldritch beasts and cold war paranoia.