Supernatural Tales

  'The Old Gods are dead - the Older Gods have returned!' As straplines go, that's pretty good. I was not aware of the Cthulhu Cymraeg series until I was asked if I would like a review copy (in ebook form). The presence of several familiar names won me over. I am normally wary of homages to the Mythos because they often stray into dull pastiche. That, or they offer conventional supernatural horror with grimoires and pentacles while invoking the Necronomicon at some point as window dressing. Fortunately, that's not what we have here. All of the authors are clearly aware that Lovecraft created a broad church within his original subgenre. It's a weird, ramshackle church with some bizarre geometry, but that's only to be expected.  And what - we inevitably ask - does Lovecratian mean anyway? I looked it up and found answers ranging from 'cosmic', which obviously doesn't apply to many of his stories, and 'eldritch', which is nice and roomy. Horror,...

  By all means purchase this excellent issue here... New stories by: Cliff McNish Katherine Haynes Sam Dawson Tim Jeffreys Steve Rasnic Tem Reggie Chamberlain-King Cover art by Sam Dawson

  On the top floor of a converted warehouse, the restaurant is a discreet venue, well away from the established haunts of the political power brokers and the press. The large windows overlook the river on one side and a strangely shaped late-modernist masterpiece made out of glass and steel on the other. The light is aggressively grey yet slick, as if everything it touches is in the process of being weaponised. Thus begins a strange novel , yet one that seems oddly familiar in so many of its themes and characters. Every Place Unlike Home is the story of a deeply unpleasant Tory politician facing a massive crisis as his sordid past threatens to destroy his career. Given that, you might expect it to be told in a fairly hard-boiled, almost journalistic fashion. But it is not. Instead, this book's antecedents seem to be - in no particular order - Robert Aickman's strange tales, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman , a light seasoning of Kafka, and perhaps a dash of Michael ...