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Synopsis:
Ten-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Joe R. Lansdale (Bubba Ho-tep) returns with this wicked short story collection of his irreverent Lovecraftian tributes. Lansdale is scarily down-home in these tales, merging his classic gonzo stylings with the eldritch vibes of H. P. Lovecraft. Knowingly skewering Lovecraft’s paranoid mythos, Lansdale embarks upon haunting yet sly explorations of the unknown, capturing the essence of cosmic dread.
A sinister blues recording pressed on vinyl in blood conjures lethal shadows with its unearthly wails. In order to rescue Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn traverses the shifting horrors of the aptly named Dread Island. In the weird Wild West, Reverand Jebidiah Mercer rides into a possessed town to confront the unspeakable in the crawling sky. Legendary detective C. Auguste Dupin uncovers the gruesome secrets of both the blue lightning bug and the Necronomicon.
Exploring the darkest corners of the human psyche, here is a lethally entertaining journey through Joe Lansdale’s twisted landscape, where ancient evils lurk and sanity hangs by a rapidly fraying thread.
Review:
Joe R. Lansdale is a legend that does not need to hear my opinion on his writing. He has won several awards (including ten Bram Stoker Awards), has had his novels and stories adapted into movies and tv episodes, and his Hap and Leonard series of novels became a series that lasted three seasons. After publishing 40 novels and tons of short stories, my opinion is not going to change much. This is why when I look at his collection of Lovecraft inspired short stories, In the Mad Mountains, my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
There are many stories in this collection that did not really do much for me. Lovecraft mythos is not on the top of my list of horror I adore, but I thought that if anyone could make stories that are great additions to the collection of writers who are doing great things with Lovecraft’s world, Joe R. Lansdale would be one of them. Instead many of the stories are not terribly engaging. Lansdale does some interesting things with putting characters into Lovecraft’s world. In “Dread Island”, Huck Finn and Jim have to find Tom Sawyer on an island that only shows in the middle of the Mississippi River on random nights before the island disappears again. “The Gruesome Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning” places Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, with the Necronomicon. Two of the stories even bring his own characters from other books into his stories (“The Cast of the Stalking Shadow” and “The Crawling Sky”).
These stories are good, but there are not really that many great stories. I really enjoy the first story, “The Bleeding Shadow”, about a ex-lover Alma May who wants the main character to find her brother, Tootie, and the final story “In the Mad Mountains,” about a group of people shipwrecked in the ice and weird things start killing them all. The rest of the stories are okay, and many of them have been published in other anthologies, or in the case of “The Tall Grass” adapted into an episode of Love, Death + Robots. These stories might be stronger in these original anthologies, surrounded by a variety of different voices because with this collection, there does not seem to be much variation in voice or structure. Either way, Joe Lansdale is still a legend, and any book by him is worth reading. This one is just not his strongest.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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