tombomp's review
So the first story, Petey, focuses on some annoying yuppies with some sinister elements that I struggled to connect together and then a very anticlimactic ending. But the biggest issue was that the sinister creature the ending hinges on is described as like one of those giant ground sloths. This instantly punctures any creepiness. The vast majority of the population finds sloths adorable. There is nothing scary about a giant sloth. Even if it's coming to eat you. I'd probably let it. Frustrating story.
The second story is both much more effectively creepy but also unfortunately very very explicitly racist! I kept reading in the hope it was just a character thing but nope! It's set in 70s NYC, with the constant background of the "crime wave". And it's presented in an incredibly racist way. And without spoiling the horror part of the end, there's a "horde" of Black people and other minority groups at the end and they're not only bad and dangerous criminals, looting etc, but written to directly parallel dangerous and bad inhuman creatures. It's racist as hell. Lovecraft would be proud.
Then the next story is called "black man with a horn". And it opens with a Lovecraft quote. Do I trust a story in this context to not just be incredibly racist again? Probably not. Maybe I'll call it there
The second story is both much more effectively creepy but also unfortunately very very explicitly racist! I kept reading in the hope it was just a character thing but nope! It's set in 70s NYC, with the constant background of the "crime wave". And it's presented in an incredibly racist way. And without spoiling the horror part of the end, there's a "horde" of Black people and other minority groups at the end and they're not only bad and dangerous criminals, looting etc, but written to directly parallel dangerous and bad inhuman creatures. It's racist as hell. Lovecraft would be proud.
Then the next story is called "black man with a horn". And it opens with a Lovecraft quote. Do I trust a story in this context to not just be incredibly racist again? Probably not. Maybe I'll call it there
itcamefromthepage's review
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
This is a hard book to rate because the 1st and the 3rd Novellas are INCREDIBLY rascist....but Petey and Nadelman's God are ALL time classics.
We're just going to put it at a 3 for now.
We're just going to put it at a 3 for now.
hcross's review
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.5
willgalltall's review against another edition
5.0
I have wanted to read this book for a few years now, and it has not disappointed!
Dark Gods is a collection of 4 stories that could be classed as weird fiction / horror. But they are so much more than that.
The writing in these stories is simply brilliant! Even my least favourite in the collection, Black Man with a Horn, was superbly written. This is nothing less than a 5 star read.
Children of the Kingdom wasn't what I expected going into the collection, but the last 25% of the story was completely different to the rest and was very chilling.
The second story, Petey, was another step up. The story even dabbled into the occult and was very atmospheric. I was totally gripped and had to read more.
The third story, Black Man with a Horn, was my least favourite in this collection. Nothing really happened compared with the rest of the stories, and was very much a tribute to H P Lovecraft. If I knew more about Lovecraft and his life, I may have appreciated the story a lot more. But again, the writing is amazing, so even though it wasn't a great story, it was enjoyable to read.
The final story, Nadelman's God, has to be one of my favourite stories I've read. I was creeped out a few times whilst reading this. Not because it was graphic or gruesome, but because of the tension that Klein builds up throughout the story. This story actually felt real, and I experienced every emotion that Nadelman goes through in the story. Absolutely brilliant!
If you manage to find a copy of this book somewhere, you must pick it up! When I saw a reasonably priced paperback copy online, I had to get it, and I am so glad that o did. If you are a fan of Lovecraft, horror, tales of the occult, weird fiction, then make this a priority. You will not regret it!
Dark Gods is a collection of 4 stories that could be classed as weird fiction / horror. But they are so much more than that.
The writing in these stories is simply brilliant! Even my least favourite in the collection, Black Man with a Horn, was superbly written. This is nothing less than a 5 star read.
Children of the Kingdom wasn't what I expected going into the collection, but the last 25% of the story was completely different to the rest and was very chilling.
The second story, Petey, was another step up. The story even dabbled into the occult and was very atmospheric. I was totally gripped and had to read more.
The third story, Black Man with a Horn, was my least favourite in this collection. Nothing really happened compared with the rest of the stories, and was very much a tribute to H P Lovecraft. If I knew more about Lovecraft and his life, I may have appreciated the story a lot more. But again, the writing is amazing, so even though it wasn't a great story, it was enjoyable to read.
The final story, Nadelman's God, has to be one of my favourite stories I've read. I was creeped out a few times whilst reading this. Not because it was graphic or gruesome, but because of the tension that Klein builds up throughout the story. This story actually felt real, and I experienced every emotion that Nadelman goes through in the story. Absolutely brilliant!
If you manage to find a copy of this book somewhere, you must pick it up! When I saw a reasonably priced paperback copy online, I had to get it, and I am so glad that o did. If you are a fan of Lovecraft, horror, tales of the occult, weird fiction, then make this a priority. You will not regret it!
sisteray's review against another edition
3.0
CW: Racism and Sexual Assault
So, I guess I should just jump into talking about the biggest elephant in the room: the racism.
First, I totally get writing all sorts of characters. I don't think that an author should be limited to only writing about good people, or avoid writing characters that think or act a certain way. I also totally get that authors are conditioned by the times that they live in. Again, I also get how an author might want to emulate a style or form overriding the consideration of a segment of their audience. BUT, I feel like these can be used as excuses to facilitate an author's biases, even if they are self-aware or even self deprecating.
In two of the four stories we get two main characters who are pretty racist. In horror, I'm used to seeing someone cast in a negative light so that you don't mind when they get offed. But that's not what's going on here.
In a lot of ways T.E.D. Klein is laying the groundwork for a lot of contemporary horror stories where they are more personal mundane storytelling with the occasional monster or impending doom to apply pressure. I would say he's a vanguard in the change of form. When you compare him to someone writing weird tales like Robert Bloch where you get a touch of character, you get supernatural conflict and then a twist or reveal at the end, the point is the supernatural. With Klein he's really character focused, and the mysteries kind of reveal themselves in the background. Honestly, he's a very compelling storyteller because he lets you live in the space of the characters for a while, he throws in a little mystery, and then whammo. This is something that I feel Laird Barron, Jon Lanagan, and Nathan Ballingrud adopted from Klein to their benefit.
Because of that when you have characters that are racist, you live in their head and you feel what they think. But, what's important is to create a distinction between the internal world and the reality of the world that the author is creating. I feel like Ballingrud pulled it off in North American Lake Monsters: Stories with his neo-nazi failed recruitment story. But Klein regularly fails for me because in addition to character's language and actions, he is also injecting racism into the stories himself as an author.
One story about a racist author (Black Man With a Horn) has him throwing out Asian slurs, but then also has a scene focused around the Asian spilling Chinese duck sauce on a plane, as if Asians just carry duck sauce around (and the person in question was Indonesian, yet they had Chinese Food for some reason). There is a scene where for no great reason a Black guy on a plane started yowling and it was presented like some vaudevillian routine where he'd dropped a cigarette on his lap and the whole thing took a weird left turn for yucks. The story called for a distraction to delay the narration, but the author chose to use a historically racist approach. So when the story starts with Asian and Black stereotyping when it gets into the horror of the story by exoticising a culture and a people it put me in a place where I was feeling uncomfortable with having a mysterious generically evil boogeyman monster that was just a black native whose lips were so big that they made a horn who has no motivation other than to break into people's homes and kill them.
Some stuff was also so ambiguous, that if there was no foundation for weird othering of cultures that maybe you'd think he wasn't saying a mysterious Asian character was a pedophile, but who knows after all the other stuff that was said prior.
The lead story (Children of the Kingdom) focuses on a character terrified of Black people, and as an upper middle class guy in Manhattan he's forced to interact with the melting pot. And while the story is told from his perspective, outside of the persistent descriptions of squalor attributed to Black people, the "lazy" black security guard, and Black people being the only guilty party vandalizing/ rioting in NY it felt like the author was injecting his own bias into the story. I felt like the story was supposed to be cathartic for him where he is confronting his own racism and working through it, acknowledging the flaws in the way that he is thinking, but still thinking and living it.
The big problem for me is that everyone paints Black people as being the issue, and that the twist is that there are white monsters running around raping women. But the author is issuing a point counterpoint saying while it looks like Black people are the monsters of this story, the real monsters are these imaginary things. What he does is just paint Black people in a terrible light trying to use his perception of reality. Presenting imaginary monsters as a counterpoint doesn't work for me because, well, they aren't real. So the take away from the story might be there are worse things than Black people, but we haven't found it in the real world yet.
Both of these stories rely heavily on a Lovecraftian pastiche, but of all things to emulate why prop up the racism? The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle takes all the worst elements of the racism of Lovecraft's Horror at Red Hook and turns it on its ear beautifully. If an author isn't going to tackle it full on it's going to just sound like Joe Rogan justifying why he can say the "N" word over and over again.
I think Children of the Kingdom also suffered a bit because it opens with what I'm assuming is a rape quip buried in with the opening author quotes, and then kind of sexually fridges one of the characters. As a side note I thought the ending was kind of lame and didn't make any sense in the context of the story.
That said I really liked two of the stories quite a bit. Strangely, they are the two stories that aren't usually lauded in the collection: Petey and Nadelman's God. I thought they were finely crafted cosmic horror stories.
Contrary to that, Petey really struck me, I thought it was a perfect little tale. I loved how it developed and revealed itself as people milled around each other. It was like one of those plays where all the actors are interacting with each other in a house and audience members can move from room to room to see what's going on with all the different characters.
Nadelman's God was kind of absurd, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Again there was some weird minor incidental racism in it with the weird fetishizing of a "negress". But nothing like the other ones. It had a great pace and sense of mystery.
Is this collection important? I think so. Is the writing great? Yes. But on whole, I have to put a big fat asterisk by any recommendation I'd give.
So, I guess I should just jump into talking about the biggest elephant in the room: the racism.
First, I totally get writing all sorts of characters. I don't think that an author should be limited to only writing about good people, or avoid writing characters that think or act a certain way. I also totally get that authors are conditioned by the times that they live in. Again, I also get how an author might want to emulate a style or form overriding the consideration of a segment of their audience. BUT, I feel like these can be used as excuses to facilitate an author's biases, even if they are self-aware or even self deprecating.
In two of the four stories we get two main characters who are pretty racist. In horror, I'm used to seeing someone cast in a negative light so that you don't mind when they get offed. But that's not what's going on here.
In a lot of ways T.E.D. Klein is laying the groundwork for a lot of contemporary horror stories where they are more personal mundane storytelling with the occasional monster or impending doom to apply pressure. I would say he's a vanguard in the change of form. When you compare him to someone writing weird tales like Robert Bloch where you get a touch of character, you get supernatural conflict and then a twist or reveal at the end, the point is the supernatural. With Klein he's really character focused, and the mysteries kind of reveal themselves in the background. Honestly, he's a very compelling storyteller because he lets you live in the space of the characters for a while, he throws in a little mystery, and then whammo. This is something that I feel Laird Barron, Jon Lanagan, and Nathan Ballingrud adopted from Klein to their benefit.
Because of that when you have characters that are racist, you live in their head and you feel what they think. But, what's important is to create a distinction between the internal world and the reality of the world that the author is creating. I feel like Ballingrud pulled it off in North American Lake Monsters: Stories with his neo-nazi failed recruitment story. But Klein regularly fails for me because in addition to character's language and actions, he is also injecting racism into the stories himself as an author.
One story about a racist author (Black Man With a Horn) has him throwing out Asian slurs, but then also has a scene focused around the Asian spilling Chinese duck sauce on a plane, as if Asians just carry duck sauce around (and the person in question was Indonesian, yet they had Chinese Food for some reason). There is a scene where for no great reason a Black guy on a plane started yowling and it was presented like some vaudevillian routine where he'd dropped a cigarette on his lap and the whole thing took a weird left turn for yucks. The story called for a distraction to delay the narration, but the author chose to use a historically racist approach. So when the story starts with Asian and Black stereotyping when it gets into the horror of the story by exoticising a culture and a people it put me in a place where I was feeling uncomfortable with having a mysterious generically evil boogeyman monster that was just a black native whose lips were so big that they made a horn who has no motivation other than to break into people's homes and kill them.
Some stuff was also so ambiguous, that if there was no foundation for weird othering of cultures that maybe you'd think he wasn't saying a mysterious Asian character was a pedophile, but who knows after all the other stuff that was said prior.
The lead story (Children of the Kingdom) focuses on a character terrified of Black people, and as an upper middle class guy in Manhattan he's forced to interact with the melting pot. And while the story is told from his perspective, outside of the persistent descriptions of squalor attributed to Black people, the "lazy" black security guard, and Black people being the only guilty party vandalizing/ rioting in NY it felt like the author was injecting his own bias into the story. I felt like the story was supposed to be cathartic for him where he is confronting his own racism and working through it, acknowledging the flaws in the way that he is thinking, but still thinking and living it.
The big problem for me is that everyone paints Black people as being the issue, and that the twist is that there are white monsters running around raping women. But the author is issuing a point counterpoint saying while it looks like Black people are the monsters of this story, the real monsters are these imaginary things. What he does is just paint Black people in a terrible light trying to use his perception of reality. Presenting imaginary monsters as a counterpoint doesn't work for me because, well, they aren't real. So the take away from the story might be there are worse things than Black people, but we haven't found it in the real world yet.
Both of these stories rely heavily on a Lovecraftian pastiche, but of all things to emulate why prop up the racism? The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle takes all the worst elements of the racism of Lovecraft's Horror at Red Hook and turns it on its ear beautifully. If an author isn't going to tackle it full on it's going to just sound like Joe Rogan justifying why he can say the "N" word over and over again.
I think Children of the Kingdom also suffered a bit because it opens with what I'm assuming is a rape quip buried in with the opening author quotes, and then kind of sexually fridges one of the characters. As a side note I thought the ending was kind of lame and didn't make any sense in the context of the story.
That said I really liked two of the stories quite a bit. Strangely, they are the two stories that aren't usually lauded in the collection: Petey and Nadelman's God. I thought they were finely crafted cosmic horror stories.
Contrary to that, Petey really struck me, I thought it was a perfect little tale. I loved how it developed and revealed itself as people milled around each other. It was like one of those plays where all the actors are interacting with each other in a house and audience members can move from room to room to see what's going on with all the different characters.
Nadelman's God was kind of absurd, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Again there was some weird minor incidental racism in it with the weird fetishizing of a "negress". But nothing like the other ones. It had a great pace and sense of mystery.
Is this collection important? I think so. Is the writing great? Yes. But on whole, I have to put a big fat asterisk by any recommendation I'd give.
chmccann's review against another edition
3.0
I'm glad I read this - it's a notable entry in the development of Lovecraftian fiction. I had really loved [b:The Events at Poroth Farm|7055789|The Events at Poroth Farm|T.E.D. Klein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1458812325s/7055789.jpg|7307112], and I'd read "Black Man with a Horn" some time ago and remembered liking it. This is a larger helping of T.E.D. Klein, so it seemed promising.
Unfortunately, the story I'd already read was the strongest entry in this collection. Aside from the issues noted below, "Black Man with a Horn" was a pleasure to revisit, with one of the best opening lines in all of weird fiction:
How can you not read on after that? And I find the story mostly delivers, with a more modern take on the standard piecemeal research leading to unutterable realizations of horror. Enough is implied, without too much being revealed. There's a lot of atmosphere, and intriguing use of modern settings to good creepy effect, which can be hard to pull off. There's also an overarching theme of aging out of relevance that ties everything together (and to HPL himself) effectively.
The other stories left me a little meh. They have their moments, but mostly failed to connect. The narrator of "Children of the Kingdom" is obnoxious, and Klein's attempt to have him record his wife's first-person narrative in his diary comes of as ludicrously clunky. (Not to mention it's in service of some plotting that fails in every possible way in characterizing women.)
"Petey" left me utterly cold - a bunch random names spout random dialog, taking way too long to set up a pretty underwritten reveal.
"Nadelman's God" had an interesting idea, I guess, but seemed pointless when the main character is totally unsympathetic, and everything revolves around his personal perceptions.
The final element that detracted from my enjoyment was a lot of unalloyed racism. Throughout much of this book, you have to get past a concerning amount of "people of color are weird and Other and scary!" It's arguable that Klein is depicting the beliefs of his characters and not endorsing them. Indeed, most of the protagonists are deliberately unlikable, and even the narrator of BMwAH is depicted as a relic. For some readers, there's probably enough distance from the characters that their offensive beliefs and behaviors just add to the characterization. But for me it was hard to put up with.
Unfortunately, the story I'd already read was the strongest entry in this collection. Aside from the issues noted below, "Black Man with a Horn" was a pleasure to revisit, with one of the best opening lines in all of weird fiction:
There is something inherently comforting about the first-person past tense. It conjures up visions of some deskbound narrator puffing contemplatively up a pipe amid the safety of his study, lost in the tranquil recollection, seasoned but essentially unscathed by whatever experience he’s about to relate.
How can you not read on after that? And I find the story mostly delivers, with a more modern take on the standard piecemeal research leading to unutterable realizations of horror. Enough is implied, without too much being revealed. There's a lot of atmosphere, and intriguing use of modern settings to good creepy effect, which can be hard to pull off. There's also an overarching theme of aging out of relevance that ties everything together (and to HPL himself) effectively.
The other stories left me a little meh. They have their moments, but mostly failed to connect. The narrator of "Children of the Kingdom" is obnoxious, and Klein's attempt to have him record his wife's first-person narrative in his diary comes of as ludicrously clunky. (Not to mention it's in service of some plotting that fails in every possible way in characterizing women.)
"Petey" left me utterly cold - a bunch random names spout random dialog, taking way too long to set up a pretty underwritten reveal.
"Nadelman's God" had an interesting idea, I guess, but seemed pointless when the main character is totally unsympathetic, and everything revolves around his personal perceptions.
The final element that detracted from my enjoyment was a lot of unalloyed racism. Throughout much of this book, you have to get past a concerning amount of "people of color are weird and Other and scary!" It's arguable that Klein is depicting the beliefs of his characters and not endorsing them. Indeed, most of the protagonists are deliberately unlikable, and even the narrator of BMwAH is depicted as a relic. For some readers, there's probably enough distance from the characters that their offensive beliefs and behaviors just add to the characterization. But for me it was hard to put up with.
causearuckus's review against another edition
2.0
Author openly admits he is fine with the casual racism in the stories in the intro. Plus, none of the stories were that great
shendriq's review
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
mikki365's review against another edition
2.0
I was very reminiscent of HP Lovecraft...right done to the rampant racism. It's not a good thing when you have to think on what bothered the narrator more: the rapist mutant sewer monsters or the people of color in his neighborhood.
davidgillette's review
5.0
A really great book. In ascending order of quality, I would judge the stories as follows: “Nadelman’s God,” “Children of the Kingdom,” “Black Man with a Horn,” and “Petey.” But that’s not saying much, because they’re all superb.
“Nadelman’s God”: The World Fantasy Award winner. Well-observed, like all these stories; the banality and avidity of s/m is evoked with the same care as the experience of looking back on one’s juvenile writings. I find the thematic arc to be … well, not clichéd, but not as original as many of these stories. The journey from youthful iconoclasm back to the verities of tradition is definitely one that has been traced before. The story includes a thread that I find fascinating, though: I strongly suspect that Chris Carter, he of The X-Files, read this book at some point. The phrase “post-modern Prometheus” is used here, long before that became an episode of that show … on its own, I would definitely say it’s coincidence, but there is more to come.
“Children of the Kingdom”: Very much a story about New York in the 1980s, a place of decay and chaos (or, per Oh, Hello on Broadway: “[…] New York is a bankrupt, crime-ridden mess, and it is awesome! Tires roll down the street on fire. And inside of those tires: babies with knives!”). And, in The X-Files sourcing: The Xo tl’Mi-go seem like a source for Flukeman in “The Host”; they are also profoundly unpleasant.
“Black Man with a Horn”: Klein really excels at creating interesting monsters. Shugoran is superb, and the slow way he is evoked is remarkable. I am desperately curious about how the Chaucha grew Shugoran in their victim, but clearly the oblique way he describes everything about the supernatural menace is really what makes this story so effective. Remarkable restraint on Klein’s part, but then fragmentary glimpses are what horror is all about.
“Petey”: But speaking of slow evocations and barely-seen monstrosities … wow. I can understand that others might not love it, because it takes so much time on its slow build, but Klein has the writing chops to make it interesting, and the trail of breadcrumbs is just so tantalizing. I love this novella. The ending is sudden, probably too sudden for many, but to me it is perfect. Homunculi: underused as monsters!
“Nadelman’s God”: The World Fantasy Award winner. Well-observed, like all these stories; the banality and avidity of s/m is evoked with the same care as the experience of looking back on one’s juvenile writings. I find the thematic arc to be … well, not clichéd, but not as original as many of these stories. The journey from youthful iconoclasm back to the verities of tradition is definitely one that has been traced before. The story includes a thread that I find fascinating, though: I strongly suspect that Chris Carter, he of The X-Files, read this book at some point. The phrase “post-modern Prometheus” is used here, long before that became an episode of that show … on its own, I would definitely say it’s coincidence, but there is more to come.
“Children of the Kingdom”: Very much a story about New York in the 1980s, a place of decay and chaos (or, per Oh, Hello on Broadway: “[…] New York is a bankrupt, crime-ridden mess, and it is awesome! Tires roll down the street on fire. And inside of those tires: babies with knives!”). And, in The X-Files sourcing: The Xo tl’Mi-go seem like a source for Flukeman in “The Host”; they are also profoundly unpleasant.
“Black Man with a Horn”: Klein really excels at creating interesting monsters. Shugoran is superb, and the slow way he is evoked is remarkable. I am desperately curious about how the Chaucha grew Shugoran in their victim, but clearly the oblique way he describes everything about the supernatural menace is really what makes this story so effective. Remarkable restraint on Klein’s part, but then fragmentary glimpses are what horror is all about.
“Petey”: But speaking of slow evocations and barely-seen monstrosities … wow. I can understand that others might not love it, because it takes so much time on its slow build, but Klein has the writing chops to make it interesting, and the trail of breadcrumbs is just so tantalizing. I love this novella. The ending is sudden, probably too sudden for many, but to me it is perfect. Homunculi: underused as monsters!