That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents #1) by Dawn Vogel

That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents #1) Reviews

• 
  Amy Sturgis

  I received this book as part of the Goodreads First Reads program.
  
  I usually don't spare book covers a moment's notice, because I'm too focused on getting to the text, but the cover art by Shannon Legler is both beautiful and effective in setting the mood for these stories. I found myself staring at it more than once.
  
  That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley collects eighteen stories told from the point of view of characters who have encountered - lived in, worked in, or simply passed through - the fictional Miskatonic Valley region created by H.P. Lovecraft. The first-person witness aspect of the stories is underscored by the clever device of including a biographical statement at the end of each story relating the life (and in some cases mysterious death/disappearance) of each fictional narrator.
  
  In my experience, most collections include a few winners, a few disasters, and decent works in the middle. That Ain't Right really doesn't have any weak links. While several of the stories made a particularly strong impression and will stick with me a long time - "The Crumbling of Old Walls," "The Hill," "Arkquarium," "August and Autumn," "The Pull of the Sea" - I enjoyed every one of the tales in this book both as stories and as tributes to Lovecraft, and I can't point out any disappointments. That in itself is quite an accomplishment.
  
  Here's a brief breakdown of the tales.
  
  "A Matter of Scale" by Emily C. Skaftun is a shiver-inducing story of what's in the murky depths of Needle Lake, and how those touched by it "merge like mercury beads coming together" to reconstitute Cthulhu.
  
  "Goat" by Nathan Crowder puts a dark and wry spin on high school football rivalries by investigating the real meaning behind Dunwich High's mascot (the Black Goat).
  
  "The Crumbling of Old Walls" by Craig D. B. Patton is a very effective yarn that will haunt me a while, set during a winter storm blackout in the backwoods town of Aylesbury. So the locals are like family, are they? Well done indeed. Terrific sense of atmosphere here.
  
  When I first read of the premise of this collection, my first hopeful thought was of the Special Collections at Miskatonic University's library. (It honestly was.) "The Laughing Book" by Cliff Winnig took me there, and I wasn't disappointed.
  
  "Passenger" by Evan Purcell delivers the spookiness. Riding back from visiting her institutionalized father-in-law, a woman watches as her husband pulls over at the side of the road in the woods outside Arkham - and picks up a hitchhiker she can't see. The whole story unfolds as her statement to the police. Very nice atmosphere and execution (no pun intended).
  
  "The Hill" by Damir Salkovic provides some of the best writing and most effective chills thus far. It's a very clever marriage of Lovecraft's premise ("The Dunwich Horror") and 21st-century fears (toxic waste, widespread contamination). This works on every level. Another favorite.
  
  "In Defense of Professor Falcrovet" by Darin M. Bush suffers from somewhat uneven prose, but I'm definitely convinced that the Occult Studies professor from Miskatonic University (of the title) did *not* commit suicide. The final section paints a vivid and shudder-inducing picture that redeems any quibbles I have with the rest of the tale. Horrible stuff - and I mean that as a compliment.
  
  "Arkquarium" by Folly Blaine rocks a fantastic teen point of view and a super-creepy secret at the Arkham Aquarium. Fantastic!
  
  While the narrator's exaggerated dialect proved overly distracting as well as unconvincing, I still found "Dr. Circe and The Shadow over Swedish Innsmouth" by Erik Scott de Bie sufficiently Innsmouthian (that's praise, by the way) to keep me glued to each page.
  
  "A Dog Named Shallow" by Erick Mertz packs quite a punch for such a short tale. Impressive.
  
  Samuel Marzioli's "So Praise Him," depicting a revival held by the First Church of Arkham, comes to the perfect dark conclusion. The last line is a killer.
  
  "Ride into the Echo of Another Life" by Kelda Crich is unexpectedly poignant as well as chilling. I could hear Neil Young singing "Unknown Legend" in my head as I read this.
  
  "The Ghost Circus" by Philip C. Gonzales felt like Neil Gaiman collaborating with Lovecraft to create something both could agree was wrong - in the best possible way.
  
  Jenna M. Pitman's "August and Autumn" matches a deeply sympathetic point-of-view voice with an irresistible old-family-secret premise that works beautifully throughout. Just gorgeous.
  
  Kudos to Brian Hamilton for an effective tribute in "The Reservoir" to Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." I always take away from Lovecraft's story the message "Don't drink the water!" Hamilton follows this idea to its proper conclusion.
  
  "Hostel Night" by Brandon Barrows brings Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House," complete with a disturbingly nasty Brown Jenkin, to a nineteenth-century traveler's tale.
  
  Sean Frost's "The Pull of the Sea" may be my favorite story in the collection, although it has some very strong competition. A beautifully wrought and truly Gothic main character - the ghost of a teen killed by a car, rooted to the spot of the tragedy - relates how creatures from the sea periodically appear to devour the ghosts along the shore. Tragic and truly frightening. I think Lovecraft would have loved the atmosphere of this work.
  
  "Come Down, Ma Evenin' Star" by Sanford Allen cleverly moves the reader's focus to the twenty-second century. A starship captain takes a tourist group bound for Earth where they demand to go - and although they have "a whole dead planet" to choose from, they choose Arkham. But why? This ends the collection on a perfect note.
  
  Thanks to editors Jeremy Zimmerman and Dawn Vogel for an eldritch and enthralling ride. Other editors should take note: this is how you craft a thematic collection.
• 
  Frances

  Honestly, I expected a much more constrained set of stories, since I knew that the MSJ conceit was that they all needed to be presented as first-person accounts. However, the range of subject matter and story types was amazing, and in several cases I'm actively looking up other works by the authors. Highly recommended.
• 
  John

  Disclaimer: I am friends with the editors as well as some of the authors, and also backed the book's Kickstarter.
  
  This is a really solid collection of Lovecraftian or Lovecraft-inspired stories, assembled by the editors of the Mad Scientist Journal e-zine. For me it gets off to bit of a rocky start, with a couple tales that suffer from a flaw common to a lot of so-so horror fiction; describing the flaw would constitute spoilers, so I'll refrain. Then again, it could be just me that is bothered by this particular narrative choice.
  
  However, many of the later stories are excellent. The ones that stick out in my memory include "The Laughing Book" by Cliff Winnig, "In Defense of Professor Falcrovet" by Darin M. Bush, and "The Ghost Circus" by Phillip C. Gonzales. And the final tale in the collection, "Come Down, Ma Evenin' Star" by Sanford Allen, is a masterwork! Seamlessly blending far-future science fiction with magnificent, eldritch horror, all by itself it is worth the price of admission.
  
  In short, I'm extremely happy that the MSJ editors put together this printed volume, and I'm looking forward to supporting the Kickstarter for their next volume.
• 
  Skjam!

  Disclaimer: I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway on the premise that I would review it.
  
  Howard Phillips “H.P.” Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a minor writer of horror fiction in the early 20th Century. But thanks to a gift for purple prose, a strong philosophical unity in his stories’ viewpoints and (most importantly) a willingness to share his ideas, he’s been immensely influential in the development of the horror field. He’s best known for the Cthulhu Mythos, a series of stories involving cosmic “gods” that are implacably hostile to humanity as we know it, not out of malice as such, but because humans are irrelevant to the universe at large.
  
  A number of his stories were set in the Miskatonic Valley region of Massachusetts, a fictional backwater including such shadowed locations as Innsmouth, Dunwich and Arkham. That last one will be familiar to Batman fans.
  
  Which brings us to the book at hand, an anthology of first-person narratives set in the Miskatonic Valley. They range in time period from about the 1890s to the far future, and one is set in an alternate history. As is traditional in Lovecraft-inspired fiction, several of the narrators cannot be telling their stories to any living person, although none of them are quite to the level of that one Lovecraft protagonist who was still writing in his journal even as the monster was actually entering the room. An especially nice touch is that the fictional narrators have their own author bios at the end of the stories.
  
  Some standouts in the anthology include:
  
  “Arkquarium” by Folly Blaine: A high school student working part-time at the Arkham Aquarium tries to impress the girl he likes by sneaking into the locked laboratory section. Turns out there’s a reason no one is supposed to go in there. The protagonist shows some gumption, but isn’t unrealistically competent beyond the average teenager he is.
  
  “The Reservoir” by Brian Hamilton: A direct sequel to Lovecraft’s classic “The Colour Out of Space” which has a microbiologist investigating particles in the water of the title lake. He finds an old well still calling–or is it a hallucination of the deep?
  
  “The Pull of the Sea” by Sean Frost: A ghost learns that not even death can protect you from the worse horrors that come from the ocean. The story carefully sets up rules, then the creatures that break the rules come along.
  
  “The Laughing Book” by Cliff Winnig: A college student studies the title book in the restricted stacks of Miskatonic University. This story is more influenced by Lovecraft’s “Lord Dunsany” period of dark fantasy than his straight-up horror.
  
  The quality of writing is generally good, absent a couple of typos, and the annoying use of phonetic dialect in “Dr. Circe and the Shadow Over Swedish Innsmouth” by Erik Scott de Bie. Horror tends to be subjective as to whether it works for you or not; I found most of the stories nicely creepy, with a couple going a bit too much for the gore for my tastes.
  
  Recommended for fans of the Cthulhu Mythos, and the more literate horror fan in general.
• 
  Nick Nafpliotis

  A well curated collection of tales in a perfect setting for Lovecraftian fiction.
• 
  CJ Jones

  Full disclosure: I'm a friend of the editors.
  
  Given that, I feel confident saying that this is a satisfying and solid read--solid in that there aren't any filler stories propped up by the works around them. Each one of these is good on their own merit. I had concerns that I would have the same trouble with this as I do with Lovecraft, that it would devolve into a morass of malicious fogs, squamous shadows, things that couldn't be but definitely were, and everybody going quite quite mad. But these authors picked up on Lovecraft's weak link, the characters, and hoisted the literary tent on that pole.
• 
  Kate

  I stumbled over this book, and am very glad I took the time to download and read it. As a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, I found the 18 tales in this book to be a solid addition to the expanding universe of weird tales. Written as journal articles, each story explores a facet of life in the Miskatonic Valley as if it is being studied by academic researchers.
• 
  Deborah

  A bit uneven, but a "guilty pleasure" read nonetheless.
• 
  Elizabeth

  What a great anthology. Some were surprising fare others were more stereotypical of Cosmic horror but All the stories had creeping tension, questioned morality and plenty of madness.