Brian Lumley - The Compleat Crow

[andydecker]

Brian Lumley - The Compleat Crow (W. Paul Ganley, 1987, this edition NEL, 1997, 276 pages)

Introduction
Inception
Lord of the Worms
The Caller of the Black
The Viking´s Stone
The Mirror of Nitocris
An Item of Supporting Evidence
Billy´s Oak
Darghud´s Doll
De Marigny´s Clock
Name and Number
The Black Recalled


These are all Titus Crow stories. Some longer ones, some really short ones written for The Arkham Collector. I like Lord of the Worms in which Crow after the war works for occultist Julian Carstairs until he realizes he is supposed to be the sacrifice for some demon. I still think the story was better when Clark Ashton Smith wrote it as Return of the Sorcerer, but it is a nice yarn. And some of the other stories are also a nice read; nothing clever or big, but fun.

Personally I am on the fence about Lumley. I like his early Necroscope novels a lot and thought some of the later one virtually unreadable. His marriage of Lovecraft and the A-Bomb is also a sore point with me as a reader; mostly I think it misses the point of the Mythos. Still I have a soft spot for Titus Crow; maybe because he is such a cliche of all those occult detectives.

[shonokin]

I have the Paul Ganley edition with the Stephen Fabien illustrations. I thought much like you, that the Crow stories were good but a lot of Lumley's other Mythos works especially post mid-1980s starts to get pretty weak. For instance the Dreamland books are OK light fantasy, but by the time of Elysia it is utter garbage.

[lemming13]

I have to agree; I like a lot of Lumley's early work, but it does get rather weak later. Seems to run out of steam, or possibly just to be milking veins of material which have proved profitable long past any possibility of producing original or interesting work.