Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Arkham Horror: Dance of the Damned by Alan Bligh.

Here’s another novel rooted in the Arkham Horror gaming milieu of pulp-era Yog-Sothothery. The prose is not always good. In fact, it can be pretty awful: “He hefted the heavy shotgun onto his shoulder. Pausing to turn the light off, he cursed once and left it. Better to light a candle, as they say” (301). The book is littered with eggcorns and misplaced apostrophes. But author Alan Bligh cultivates some fine moral ambivalence in his characters, and his story is genuinely intriguing and scary. I read the closing arc of the book with real excitement, and found the ending satisfying.

Like fellow Arkham Horror novelist Graham McNeill, Bligh divides his action among locations in Arkham, New York City, and Kingsport, and both authors deploy the terrible old man of H.P. Lovecraft’s eponymous tale as a character in the last location. Of the two, I found Bligh’s old man to be more engaging and better woven into the fabric of the story.

Although there seemed to be a lot of different plots at the outset (partly resulting from a demand of the gaming novel genre, to involve multiple identifiable protagonists from the games), Bligh succeeded in pulling them together for a single coherent crisis with its resolution shrouded in mystery. Although it’s by a different author, I’ve already started reading its sequel in “The Lord of Nightmares Trilogy”: The Lies of Solace [via]