James Nicoll Reviews

Matt Ruff’s 2023 The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country is the second in the Lovecraft Country historical cosmic-horror series.

African American Atticus Turner, his family, and his friends, might have hoped that with Caleb Braithwhite’s banishment, their occult adventures had come to an end. To quote Doctor Jon Osterman, ​“Nothing ever ends.” Their adventures were only beginning!

Adventure is, of course, someone other than the reader having a terrible time.

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2016’s¹ Lovecraft Country is the first volume in Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country series.

Atticus Turner heads north from Florida to Chicago, summoned by a concerning letter from his estranged father Montrose. Atticus isn’t unhappy to leave the South behind. Atticus is many things (including an SF fan) but the thing that has the greatest impact on his personal safety is that he is African American.

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2022’s The Void Ascendant is the third and final volume in Premee Mohamed’s Beneath the Rising trilogy.

Nick Prasad survived the destruction of Earth at the manipulative limbs of cosmic horrors. He survived tumbling through dimensions. Arriving on alien Aradec, he embraced the role of designated prophet. True, he has had to enable some terrible things, but as long as his superiors do not tire of him, playing prophet allows him to put off his death. It’s not much but it’s all Nick can hope for.

Now, it seems that even personal survival may be out of the question.

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Chris Spivey and friends’¹ 2020 Harlem Unbound is the second, expanded, edition of the earlier 2015 Harlem Unbound. Harlem Unbound is a source book covering Harlem Renaissance era Harlem. It is intended for use either with Chaosium’s 7^th edition Call of Cthulhu² (CoC) cosmic-horror roleplaying game or their Pulp Cthulhu cosmic-horror roleplaying game

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Premee Mohamed’s 2021 A Broken Darkness is a sequel to Beneath the Rising.

A year and a half ago, wunderkind Johnny Chambers and her bestest friend Nick Prasad saved the world from the Dimensional Anomaly. True, they were a bit late and hundreds of millions of people died. The important thing is that seven billion people didn’t die. 

Nick hasn’t spoken to Johnny in the last year and a half. It’s not just because Johnny was responsible for providing other-dimensional beings with the chance to invade our world. Although that is a large part of it.

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