Eldritch Chrome: Unquiet Tales of a Mythos-Haunted Future

This mixed bag of 18 short stories adds little to the countless volumes of fiction inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. The introduction illustrates the challenge the editors set for themselves%E2%80%94the stories are all set in a near future Cyberpunk world%E2%80%94but arming the "Cyberpunk Cthulhu hero" with "high-tech weapons and other advances at their disposal" changes nothing, because "to beings where time has no meaning, beings so technologically advanced that their actions seem supernatural or powered by magic, no human has the edge." There are a few entries that succeed in being more than a thin narrative punctuated with a twist ending intended to shock. Michael Tice's "Inlibration" opens with an Internet-age appropriate tweaking of the opening of "The Call of Cthulhu": "The most wonderful thing in the world, I think, is the ability of the augmented human mind to correlate all its contents." The story goes on to be yet another search for the Necronomicon, but the framing device is clever. "CL3ANS3," by Carrie Cuinn, is also well done, with horrors spawned in part by the relentless drive to turn all of human experience into accessible data. (Oct.)