And so to the last of the short stories in Stephen Jones' collection.
'To See the Sea', by Michael Marshall Smith, is a melancholy entry in which a man takes his wife to visit the coastal town near which her mother nearly drowned, in an attempt to cure her of her thalassophobia. The village, on the English coast, is as dreary and dismal as Innsmouth, and houses its own shadow; a shadow which calls to the wife.
'Dagon's Bell' is a classic piece of Brian Lumley mythos fiction, in which the cosmic horror of the opening gives way to action and it's shotguns ahoy in the bowels of the Earth to destroy with dynamite a vast and terrible bell the mere sound of which... well, gives people the heebie jeebies, but is disappointingly poor at actually shattering anyone's sanity, even at close range.
The final story, 'Only the End of the World Again', is Neil Gaiman's offering, in which a werewolf detective faces off against the Deep Ones in an oddly populous Innsmouth. It's not a bad story, but for my money it's not great mythos, as the monstrous protagonist lacks the necessary sense of alienation in the face of indescribable cosmic malevolence.
So there we have it. There are two more collections, but I'll leave those for another time. I'm a bit Mythossed out for the time being; I'm going to read about zombies instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment