mark monday's Reviews > The Thing From Lover's Lane

Lovecraftian bad times featuring two ill-fated teens in Misty Valley, situated between Dunwich and Innsmouth, circa the Eisenhower presidency. Unfortunately the thing that I enjoyed the most about this story was the title. Otherwise we have several two-dimensional characters whose cardboard qualities completely annoyed me, bland prose with a distinct lack of atmosphere, a very derivative story, and quite a lot of semen - certainly well beyond my comfort level. LOL?

However the major crime that reduced this from a *shrug* 2 stars to an *ugh, horrible* 1 star is the criminal misuse of certain Lovecraftian entities. The Lovecraft story that this springs from - "The Dunwich Horror" - features the misadventures of transdimensional loverboy Yog-Sothoth's sons. Collins inexplicably misidentifies rapey lothario Yog as the slatternly Shub-Niggurath, who of course is also known as "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young" - and is quite clearly a female. Shub doesn't roam around the woods raping girls, she's content to relax in her caverns, bubbling away, giving birth to her darling little monstrosities. It's Yogi Bear who has an eye for the ladies, and is armed with all of that cosmic semen. Good grief, what an embarrassing error! Painful to read.



This is the second story I've read by Collins; the first was the fantastic "From Hell's Heart" in the collection Classics Mutilated. I have several more stories by the author on my Kindle. Hopefully they take after my first experience rather than my second.