mellonbread reviews Shotguns vs Cthulhu

Shotguns Vs Cthulhu is a 2012 short story collection by Pelgrane Press, full of pulp action stories where humans fight supernatural forces. I won't be providing full plot summaries because I believe reviews like this are only fun for people who have already read the story.

Who Looks Back?

What a great introduction to the collection. The setting is cool and the clues on offer are evocative while not quite fitting together, suggesting multiple solutions to the mystery. There's a Polyp, but there's also something angular hunting the Polyp, and the Polyp is hunting something else. The dude lashes out and tries to kill the scientists. Does he recognize that they're possessed by the Great Race and their presence is drawing the hunters, necessitating their death to save his own life? Is he possessed, lashing out against mythos-fighters posing as environmental scientists? Are they normal people and he's just insane? I love the ending. Favorite.

 
Old Wave

Years ago I wrote a Delta Green splat called Moss Covered Arrowhead about mythos fighting tribesmen in the neolithic. Old Wave is Moss Covered Arrowhead if it was good. It's a perfect distillation of the collection's thesis: Monsters can be killed, but there are always more and they could come back at any time. You can either maintain a constant state of readiness and be unable to function normally, or you can go back to your parody of a real life and be devoured. Whatever you choose, everyone in your life will hate or abandon you for not being the person you were. And like Who Looks Back you go the whole time without anyone vomiting exposition or using the names of "canonical" mythos creatures. This is the best entry in Shotguns vs Cthulhu. Favorite.

Lithic

A strong entry in the vein of Laird Barron. A blue collar slob in a dying postindustrial logging town, a hill covered in ancient standing stones, memory problems... Detwiller's grasp of imagery is not quite on Barron's level but he can actually write dialogue worth a damn. I would have preferred slightly less detail about the monster encounter. The hole full of squirming tentacles is trite compared to how good everything else is (the human lure swimming in circles endlessly). Favorite. 

 

Snack Time

The prose sucks, the dialogue is cheesy, the plot is paper thin, the twist ending is okay. Is it fair for me to even complain? This is action schlock in a collection called Shotguns vs Cthulhu. Not everything needs to be a meditation on PTSD. Still, I don't like it. 

 

The Host From The Hill

I used to dislike Dreams in the Witch House and the Black Man and all the other vanilla Christian devilry stuff, but over the years I've really come round to it. I don't think it works as well in a Cthulhu/Delta Green type setting as it does in a film or one-off horror story, because in the mythos it's all just a masquerade stapled over your typical Great Old Ones/Old Gods type deal. The characters can have a crisis of faith but the reader knows the score, removing the central tension from something like The VVitch or Longlegs. Still The Host combines early modern occultism with fun historical adventure 

 

Breaking Through

This one has a very strong intro but the rest isn't all that memorable. I recall the guy taking the drug and getting "stuck" in the posters in his room, falling endlessly into a black hole, which is cool.

 

Last Things Last

Glancy has a lot of Delta Green play reports dressed up as short stories. The most famous is Once More From The Top, which I think is overrated as hell. I feel similarly about this one. It's a solid retelling of the scenario let down by the need to slather the whole thing in continuity elements. Do we really need to pause the action so the tutorial character can list every guy in a Lovecraft story who tried to live forever? Many such cases.

 

One Small, Valuable Thing

A wonderful Cody Goodfellow style adaptation of The Terrible Old Man, pulled off without a single overt textual reference to a mythos creature or lore element. Monsters, gore, sex, greed, magic, transformation and rebirth. When I said I expected pulp action slop from a collection called Shotguns vs Cthulhu, this is what I wanted. Favorite.

Wuji

A filibuster of exposition followed by a short action sequence.  Copy paste my complaints about Snack Time. One of the reasons I like the first couple stories is they understand the audience they're writing for. People who pick up a collection called Shotguns vs Cthulhu do not need a lore dump about the Necronomicon. The fun part is seeing the familiar elements mixed up and redeployed in novel ways. Reinterpreting the magic spells in the Al Azif as unstoppable martial arts techniques is a fun twist, but not enough to save this one.

 

The One In The Swamp

A Cthulhu by Gaslight/Raiders of R'lyeh type adventure story with monster hunting gunslingers and super-science. It follows your typical monster movie or RPG scenario arc of using all your knowledge skills to determine the monster's weakness, then hunting it down and blowing it up. I didn't think it was all that great.

Infernal Devices

A great Warhammer Fantasy/Brothers Grossbart style early modern gunpowder witch hunt with a lovely frame narrative. This is the only interpretation of the Lloigor that I've ever liked, Tim Powers style djinn with a weakness for unusual topology. The Delta Green devs could have learned a lot from Infernal Devices, or just thrown Colin Wilson in the trash where he belongs. Favorite. 

 

 

Walker

A cool Delta Green style adventure in the vein of Alien Raiders or They Live, with low rent monster hunters battling aliens hiding among the populace. The action sequences aren't great but the atmosphere is strong. It helps that the story is set on familiar ground and the author knows enough about the geography to write it believably. Every social problem described in the story (mass homelessness, SPD shooting everyone with impunity but doing nothing about actual crimes) has only gotten worse since it was written (2012), and since the original time period it takes place (2000).

And I Feel Fine

A good old ones rising story. It's got gore and monster battles but the overall atmosphere is closer to the end of the original Nyarlathotep story (one of my favorites) where the POV character emerges into the silent wasteland after the world has already been destroyed.

 

Welcome to Cthulhuville

Starts out similar to And I Feel Fine, before veering into sword and sorcery monster/cultist combat in the vein of Smith, Derleth and Howard. By the ending where everyone starts betraying each other I'd already lost interest.

 

End of White

What an amazing premise and intro, what a great setting, what a letdown at the end. All that atmosphere and buildup, wasted on yet another "the monster ate everyone" ending.

Good collection. I'll check out Swords vs Cthulhu next.