Happy 2013! With the arrival of the new year, two brand-new reviews of The Book of Cthulhu II have landed. The first comes from author Jesse Bullington (The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, The Enterprise of Death, and The Folly of the World), who writes, “It’s a great collection of both original and reprint stories, and a highly worthy follow-up to his first Book of Cthulhu, which I thought was one of the best Lovecraft-inspired anthologies I’ve ever read.” Bullington highlights stories by Neil Gaiman, Fritz Leiber, Caitlin R. Kiernan, W.H. Pugmire, Livia Llewellyn, Cody Goodfellow, William Browning Spencer, Molly Tanzer, and Orrin Grey, and concludes, “For those with the Innsmouth Look, this is a great addition to the canon, and for those who have prematurely dismissed HPL and his heirs as schlock, this should prove a persuasive refutation.” Read the full review Writers Read.
The second review of 2013 appears in the January issue of Locus, wherein reviewer Stefan Dziemianowicz has a great deal of praise for The Book of Cthulhu II. Dziemianowicz writes, “As he did for his previous anthology, Lockhart has cast his net far and wide to haul in outstanding stories from publications both well-known and obscure, none sampled more than once. He has also commissioned four new stories, several so good that they are likely to be selected for reprint anthologies in the future.” Singling out stories by Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, A. Scott Glancy, Stanley Sargent, Jonathan Wood, Cody Goodfellow, Michael Chabon, and Laird Barron, Dziemianowicz highly lauds Christopher Reynaga’s “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee,” saying the tale “so perfectly conflates Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ with Moby-Dick (albeit with a bit of Coleridge and Yeats thrown in for good measure) that it comes as a surprise that no writer had thought to do this before.” Read the full review in the January issue of Locus.