That Which Should Not Be by Brett J. Talley

Recibí este libro a través del programa Early Reviewers de LibraryThing.  Este programa consiste en recibir una copia de una obra a cambio de  escribir una reseña. A continuación copio lo que he escrito en LibraryThing:

I am a huge fan of HPL and I am currently re-reading and  writing short reviews on everything he has written, so when reading this  book it was very easy to compare.

The book is a collection of several stories told to a man in search  of a powerful book. As others stated in their reviews, these stories  have influences that range from Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo to Bram  Stoker’s Dracula, all of them mixed with a good deal of the Cthulhu  Mythos.

The way in which the stories are told, specially the structure, is  similar to Lovecraft’s but not so the writing style. Lovecraft’s style  is not for everyone as it sometimes can be a bit dense, but it is also  very evocative and rich. It is a difficult style to imitate and, though  at some points in the book Talley has tried to do so, it is a good thing  that he has not tried to do it for the whole book.

It is not a very long book and the reader can be drawn to the  different stories quite easily, they are fast-paced and entertaining.  However, almost all the stories fail in the ending. The Cthulhu Mythos  are dominated by the absolute certainty that whatever you do, whatever  you believe in, the universe is a place without hope, so vast and cruel,  so full of purely evil god-creatures that in the end nothing can save  you. Not in this book. [spoilers]Here the christian god can save you and  have the power to do so, even more, he was the one who defeted the Old  Ones aeons ago (!)[/spoilers]. This is so far from what was written by  HPL that I found myself losing my interest in each story as I progressed  through the book. I could have forgiven it if it had happened once but  no so many times, sorry. Many good writers have expanded and enriched  HPL’s universe but none have dared to change its foundations, the basics  have remained the same and this is something very important to me as a  reader and a fan.

I have read a great deal of stories written by Lovecraft’s fans and  admirers. Even if this book is better than many, and I really appreciate  the effort, I cannot fully recommend it to fans who like their stories  fully compliant with the original source. For me this is a pity because I  really wanted to like this book.

Mi puntuación: 2/5