09.09.2020

“The Country of the Worm: Excursions Beyond the Wall of Sleep” by Gary Myers

Magick Matters

"Gary Myers first appeared on the Lovecraftian scene in 1970, when August Derleth’s Arkham House published his earliest Lovecraftian dreamworld fantasies in The Arkham Collector. He reached a peak some five years later, when Arkham House published his first collection, The House of the Worm. The Country of the Worm is Myers’s long-awaited follow-up to The House of the Worm. It contains that first book in a corrected edition, together with all the stories in the same fantastic vein that Myers has written in the forty-three years since. It includes literary tributes to Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith. It concludes with an early novella, a gothic nightmare appearing here for the first time....>>

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09.09.2020

“The House of the Worm” by Gary Myers

Magick Matters

"It is with special pride the publisher offers this first book by the young California writer Gary Myers. The imperially slim volume is an episodic novel, a collection of ten tales each a masterpiece of macabre fantasy structured to present the author’s own special insight into the Cthulhu Mythos – what Mr. Myers calls “an interesting heresy.” Brevity is the soul of Gary Myers’ style; his viewpoint is mordant, ironic and always perfect for striking a note of chilling terror. Whether he is being ocularly descriptive as with “The House of the Worm” and “The Maker of Gods,” in which the unrelenting terror is established as if a report from the pupil of the...>>

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09.09.2020

“Dark Wisdom” by Gary Myers

Magick Matters

"The evolution of the Cthulhu Mythos has been toward equal but opposite extremes of complexity and simplicity. Complexity, as the mythology of H. P. Lovecraft and his immediate circle was taken over by a band of enthusiastic later writers who elaborated and expanded it beyond all recognition. Simplicity, as in order to support this complicated structure, the distinctive elements of that mythology were diluted and blended into a truly amorphous whole. Dark Wisdom is a collection of modern Mythos stories that attempts to correct for both these extremes. Each of its twelve tales is written around one of the central tropes of the classic Mythos: a book like the Necronomicon, a race like the...>>

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09.09.2020

“Gray Magic” by Gary Myers

Magick Matters

"From the crowded shelf of Cthulhu Mythos grimoires, only the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred is consulted more frequently than The Book of Eibon. But Eibon himself is less well known. Clark Ashton Smith, the creator of Eibon and his book, wrote only one story about the Hyperborean wizard, and that one dealt with the end of his life. It has been left for Smith’s disciples to imagine the episodes of his earlier existence. Gray Magic is such an episode, and easily the most elaborate of the lot. For in the course of this one novel Eibon (and Cyron, his young apprentice) must take on an army of sorcerers and a brace of gods in...>>

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09.09.2020

“The Book of Eibon: Histories of the Elder Magi, Episodes of Eibon of Mhu Thulan, the Papyrus of the Dark Wisdom, Psalms of the Silent, and the Eibonic Rituals” by Clark Ashton Smith and Lin Carter

Magick Matters

"The Book of Eibon, the creation of Clark Ashton Smith, ranks behind Lovecraft's Necronomicon as a shunned repository of mystical horrors surviving blasphemously from elder eons. Not content with his own and Lovecraft's citations of the Book, Smith actually wrote two chapters of it, his famous stories "The Door to Saturn" and "The Coming of the White Worm." Lin Carter knew a good thing when he saw it and decided it would be fun to write and to read the remaining Eibonic chapters. So he took in hand to write a number of them, intending to finish the book one day. This he did not live to do, but others took up the fallen...>>

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