Tag Archives: Josh Reynolds

Shadows of Pnath

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Shadows of Pnath [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Josh Reynolds, cover Daniel Strange, part of the Arkham Horror series.

Reynolds Shadows of Pnath

“The City of Lights was nice and all, but Arkham was Arkham. Her father had told her that once you were in Arkham’s shadow, you couldn’t escape it” (40-1). Although Shadows of Pnath is set in the Arkham Horror game milieu, none of it takes place in the Massachusetts city of Arkham, only in “Arkham’s shadow” at various locations around France. This second novel written by Josh Reynolds for the Aconyte Books series continues the adventures of his elite thief character Countess Alessandra Zorzi and her apprentice Pepper Kelly. It furthermore introduces the involvement of Arkham Files investigator Trish Scarborough, a spy for the US “Black Chamber” Cipher Bureau.

While Shadows of Pnath is most overtly a sequel to Reynolds’ previous book Wrath of N’kai, it also draws on threads begun by Reynolds with his contributions to the recent Arkham Horror anthology volumes The Devourer Below (“The Hounds Below”) and Secrets in Scarlet (“The Red and the Black”). The initial arc of the novel is focused on the recovery of a copy of Cultes des Goules, and it bears a certain resemblance to The Club Dumas–or more precisely to its cinematic version The Ninth Gate. This plot also brings into play Zorzi’s peer “acquisitionist” Chauncey Swann, an American connected with the Silver Twilight Lodge.

The titular Pnath is a reference to the Vale of Pnath in the Lovecraftian Dreamlands, which also featured in Brian Lumley’s Ship of Dreams. In a piece of weird horror set in interwar France, it is not surprising to encounter a few traces of jauniste mythemes regarding the “pallid mask” and ominous glimpses of yellow. These are undeveloped and may be seeds sown for a further sequel.

Alessandra and Pepper are separated early in the course of the story, and most of it consists of short, fast-moving chapters alternating between their two viewpoints. Reynolds has succeeded in cultivating my affection for his heroine to the point that I hope game publisher Fantasy Flight will eventually issue a set of Countess Zorzi investigator cards for Arkham Horror: The Card Game.

Secrets in Scarlet

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Secrets in Scarlet: An Arkham Horror Anthology [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] ed Charlotte Llewelyn-Wells, with David Annandale, Davide Mana, Jason Fischer, Carrie Harris, Steven Philip Jones, Lisa Smedman, James Fadeley, M J Newman, and Josh Reynolds, cover by Daniel Strange.

Llewelyn-Wells Secrets in Scarlet

Secrets in Scarlet is the second volume of new short stories edited by Charlotte Llewelleyn-Wells and set in the Arkham Horror game milieu. Just as the previous book was oriented around the “Night of the Zealot” campaign in the core set of Arkham Horror: The Card Game, this one consists of background tales that flesh out the setting and antecedent plots of the recently-released Scarlet Keys Campaign Expansion. The campaign is built upon a cosmopolitan cast of conspirators whose lore goes back to Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game or even earlier. Known collectively as the Congress of the Keys, or the Red Coterie, these include the Red-Gloved Man, the Claret Knight, Amaranth, The Sanguine Watcher, and others. At least one of these characters features in each of the stories. There are also other incidental characters from the game, such as Li Flint and Ece Sahin.

Arkham Horror player-character investigators only appear in a few of the tales. Reporter Rex Murphy has a nautical fright in Lisa Smedman’s “Strange Things Done.” Stephen Philip Jones has written about security consultant Kymani Jones investigating a theft in “A Forty Grain Weight of Nephrite.” “The Red and the Black” by Josh Reynolds concerns the spy Trish Scarborough. The immediate events of the narratives all take place in the 1920s interwar period in which the games are set.

Seven of the nine stories are the elaborated forms of seven of the nine rumors in the bulleted list on page 10 of the Campaign Guide from The Scarlet Keys, with settings of Shanghai, Havana, Buenos Aires, Anchorage, Istanbul, and Marrakesh. There are no stories for the Nairobi and Kathmandu entries on that list, however. Instead, the first tale in the book is set in Manhattan, and the the final one is in Venice. These highlight the campaign’s explicit (though optional) inclusion of separately-distributed scenario packs, alluding to The War of the Outer Gods and Carnevale of Horrors respectively.

The literary quality of the stories is variable. Of special note is the contribution by M. J. Newman, who had a long tenure as the lead designer on the card game. As far as I know, the story “Crossing Stars” is Newman’s first published Arkham Horror fiction that is not embedded in game rules. I wasn’t impressed with the often affected diction here, e.g. “a sorcerer, able to manipulate the very winds of change with but a thought and the implementation of various esoteric componentry” (287). But the story made up for it with an interesting plot well connected to the central theme of the collection. I thought the best writing of the book was in the pieces by Smedman and Reynolds, but they all held my interest.

I am currently playing through The Scarlet Keys campaign in the card game, and I would definitely recommend this book of related stories to anyone in a similar position. Even for those with no involvement in Cthulhvian gaming, the suite of stories set against the background of a global conspiracy of alien sorcery and lost technology is enjoyable. At its best moments, it reminded me a little of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Tinfoil Dossier books.

The Dark Rites of Cthulhu

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphlius reviews The Dark Rites of Cthulhu: Horrific Tales of Magic and Madness from 16 Modern Masters of Terror! [Bookshop, Amazon] edited by Brian M Sammons, illustrated by Neil Baker, with Glynn Owen Barrass, Edward M Erdelac, John Goodrich, Scott T Goudsward, T E Grau, C J Henderson, Tom Lynch, William Meikle, Christine Morgan, Robert M Price, Pete Rawlik, Josh Reynolds, Brian M Sammons, Sam Stone, Jeffrey Thomas, and Don Webb.

Sammons The Dark Rites of Cthulhu

A fairly slender volume containing sixteen stories of liturgical Yog-Sothothery, The Dark Rites of Cthulhu featured only four authors previously familiar to me, so I was grateful for the appended “About the Authors” info. The stories are reasonably solid throughout. Some do sort of stretch the category of ritual magic, such as one oriented around martial arts (“Of Circles and Rings” by Tom Lynch). A few are detective stories oriented around ritual murders. There is considerable variety of flavor within the “magic” field, encompassing voodoo, online cult recruitment, and stage magic, among others.

Most of these tales don’t bother with Arkham and Lovecraft country, though some do, and a few even go so far as to include or reference specific characters from Grandpa Cthulhu’s “ritual literature” (so-called by Michel Houellebecq). The Lovecraft stories that most conspicuously served as references in this assortment were “The Dunwich Horror” (of course) and “From Beyond.”

“The Dark Horse” by John Goodrich is set in a stars-were-right post-apocalyptic regime of human dispossession. Edward Erdelac’s story “Black Tallow” lost points from me initially by misspelling the name Aleister Crowley, but ultimately redeemed itself with a credible representation of pathological contemporary ceremonial magic, along with lovely Club Dumas bibliophile fan service.

I read this book slowly over several months, since there is no continuity from story to story. It’s a decent collection of new weird fiction built around specialized themes that are of particular to interest to me, and I was satisfied by it.

Wrath of N’kai

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Wrath of N’kai: An Arkham Horror Novel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Josh Reynolds, part of the Arkham Horror series.

Reynolds Wrath of N'kai Arkham Horror

Wrath of N’kai is the first of a new series of licensed novels from publisher Aconyte Books set in the Arkham Horror game milieu. Unlike the recent investigator novellas from the game publisher Fantasy Flight, this one is at full novel length. It also lacks an established player character from the game for its protagonist. Instead, it has international adventuress and “gentlewoman thief” Countess Alessandra Zorzi as the principal investigator of the story. She is assisted by plucky trans-man cabbie Pepper Kelly. Neither of these have appeared in the games as far as I know. But the setting is unmistakably the Arkham of the games: various player characters do appear, such as Harvey Walters, Preston Fairmont, Tommy Muldoon, and Daisy Walker. Organizations like the O’Bannion gang and the Silver Twilight Lodge are also important to the story, which takes place entirely within the city limits of Arkham, starting with Alessandra’s arrival by train.

Despite ample stigmata of the Arkham Files universe, the narrative continuity of this story has in one case been better conformed to the original pulp-era literature. The underearth kingdom of K’n-yan is here given as lying beneath Oklahoma as it does in “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop and H.P. Lovecraft. The game designers had transferred K’n-yan to Mexico in the adventure “Heart of the Elders” for the Forgotten Age cycle of Arkham Horror: The Card Game. The plot of Wrath of N’kai centers on a scrimmage for a mummy recovered from K’nyan by a Miskatonic University archaeological expedition.

Author Josh Reynolds is a veteran at writing fiction for game universes such as the various Warhammer worlds, and he has also written some occult adventure in his “Tales of the Royal Occultist” novels. His reading in the relevant literature is signaled by clever allusions like Alessandra’s mentor Nuth (lifted from a story by Lord Dunsany). Wrath of N’kai has a lively pace, and I often read multiple short chapters at a single sitting. It is definitely more pulp adventure than weird horror, despite the Lovecraftian praeternatural elements. The prose isn’t highly polished, but it is engaging. I enjoyed it, and I would be willing to read a sequel about Alessandra’s adventures beyond Arkham.