Smashbomb

"Wallace is not for everyone, but he is for me. My blind spot in my own work is ‘the evil that men do.’ I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don’t know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don’t have the guts to admit that I do. Wallace writes brilliantly about hideous men and hideous women and the hideous culture that produces them. Reading Wallace for the first time was also about the hideous revelation of a talent a lot bigger than mine. You can take it when the competition is dead people—it’s harder when they’re alive. Wallace’s prose has brought me as much envy as it has joy over the years. He makes me more ambitious for myself."

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Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated The Private Life of Elder Things in Books

Aug 18, 2019 (Updated Aug 18, 2019)

Short story collection consisting of various riffs on elements from HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos; you probably have to be fairly familiar with Lovecraft and his acolytes to get the full effect, as this does almost turn into a game of Spot-the-Yithian in places. All the usual suspects appear, along with excursions into more obscure areas (there's some excellent Hastur-related wordplay in the story featuring that part of the mythos).

Of the three authors, Tchaikovsky is probably the best stylist, McDonald manages to find some humanity and depth in fairly unlikely places, while Gauntlett is the pulpiest. None of them attempt to actually copy Lovecraft's idiosyncratic prose style, which is probably a blessing. None of the stories are genuinely inspired, but they're usually very readable even if they sometimes get a touch bizarre.