cover image Dreams

Dreams

Richard A. Lupoff. Hippocampus (www.hippocampuspress.com), $20 trade paper (258p) ISBN 978-1-61498-039-1

The first entry in this collection from genre veteran Lupoff, "The Adventure of the Voorish Sign," is the strongest of the 15 stories. That Sherlock Holmes pastiche effectively merges the universes of Doyle and Lovecraft, with a credible Watsonian voice. The distraught client who seeks out Baker Street does so after gaining access to her husband's secret chamber only to find a room whose walls seem to shift. Sadly, that level of skill and imagination is less evident in the rest of the book. Lupoff offers plenty of variety%E2%80%94a ghost story the narrator insists he can prove is true, a tongue-in-cheek discussion of admissions at Miskatonic University (from the Lovecraft universe), a werewolf's reminiscences%E2%80%94but the execution is variable. The most promising is a trilogy, "The Webster Sloat Stories," yet another riff on making one's dreams real. Webster Sloat, after accepting an email inviting him to benefit from the work of Dreemz.biz, chooses to attend a Beatles concert, the world's first nuclear explosion, and experience the Call of Cthulhu first-hand. (July)