The Taint

The Taint and Other Novellas: A Cthulhu Mythos Collection
By Brian Lumley
Published in October 2008
416 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 1/5

I am a big fan of HP Lovecraft, but I’ve read almost all of his works (including some half assed ones he wrote as a teenager). In my quest to find more follow on works and further explore his universe, I have been delving more broadly into the corpus of other works who contributed to the Lovecraft Mythos.

Brain Lumley reads like a Reddit fanfiction version of Loveraft. It clumsily attempts to replicate the horror elements, while eschewing the very things that make Lovecraft so interesting - the exploration of archaic mysteries.

The first story I read took place in a mental asylum. The main character is an employee who is an aspiring writer - an obvious self insert of the author. The environment is so contrived that it feels designed to generate a cosmic horror.

Likewise, the second story “Born to the Winds” feels similarly contrived. The main character goes north. All exposition is clunky and obvious. The action was so predictable that it made the conclusion borderline comical. 

Finally I skipped and read a story about a character called Titus Crow. He is a mary sue action hero inside of a Lovecraft-ish world. While the other two stories were simply boring and predictable, this one was outright cringy. Titus Crow somehow is a genius occultist who can escape and effortless beat anything that the mythos throws at him. Once again, a very predictable and clunky setup - creepy old man hires Crow to clean his library, and locks him into a haunted house.

I didn’t even finish the third story before I decided to quit while I was still ahead.

My conclusion is that Lumley’s short stories are to Lovecraft what Netflix Star Trek is to real Star Trek or Disney Star Wars is to real Star Wars. Tragic.

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