A few more items from Black Wings:
"Usurpsed", by William Browning Spencer (author of the very unusual Lovecraftian novel, Résumé with Monsters) -- I've not read enough Spencer to know how close this is to his other work, but it certainly is different (in some ways) to the above-mentioned novel. It has all the eeriness of some portions of that book, but lacks the rather bizarrely humorous approach of others. In each case, I think it works well for the story, which is a genuinely disturbing and bizarre little piece... perhaps all the more so to me as Spencer, a native Austinite, places some of the action there, and makes it uncomfortably plausible....
"Denker's Book", by David J. Schow -- an odd blending of sf and Lovecraftian horrorwhere the Necronomicon itself is used as the source of power for an instrument exploring space-time and the fabric of reality. On the whole, rather good, but the ending, I must admit, left me quite cold....
"Inhabitants of Wraithwood", by W. H. Pugmire -- a different idiom for Wilum, in my view, and an expansion of the range of his authorial voice, represented by a not particularly likeable sort (coarse, vulgar, yet intelligent and with a refined background) who still can evoke sympathy as he finds himself, after breaking his probationary stipulations, as a guest/inhabitant of a strange place called "Wraithwood", where the inhabitants are even stranger.... As is usual with his work, Wilum here introduces us to a host of bizarre yet oddly attractive characters who definitely live outside the norm in nearly every way; he blends dream and reality with consummate skill; and introduces his trademark blending of horror, repulsion, and poignant, almost heartbreaking, empathy with these strange, twisted beings and the frightening yet alluring world which they inhabit. The connection to Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model", though explicit on one level, has other resonances which will delight fans of the Old Gent's tale... yet this piece is very definitely Wilum's own. A new milieu for his tales, but in its own odd way every bit as captivating as Sesqua Valley...
and "The Dome". by Mollie Burleson -- a very strange, almost elliptical tale which, somehow, manages to evoke a feeling of menace even through an almost painfully mundane set of circumstances... until the genuinely weird sets in. I don't think I'll ever be able to quite look at some of those flea market locales quite the same way again. My only complaint is the final image, which reminded me a shade too much of Gahan Wilson's "H.P.L.", and therefore was something of a jarring letdown.
Note for those expecting "Cthulhu Mythos" fiction -- this anthology ain't it! What these writers have done is take Lovecraftian ideas, themes, motifs, and approaches, but filtered through their own unique lenses, making for a set of original stories which nonetheless prove that, as S. T. Joshi says in the introduction, "the Lovecraftian idiom is adaptable to a variety of literary modes, as Borges's "There Are More Things"and Pynchon's Against the Day are alone sufficient to testify"....
