Current Reads: Autopsy of an Eldritch City by James Champagne.

Autopsy of an Eldritch City

I am turned off by Lovecraft’s fiction because of his lurid and insistent white supremacy. But Lovecraftian fiction, that plays with his tropes, can be philosophical, poetic and beautiful. I am currently reading AUTOPSY OF AN ELDRITCH CITY by James Champagne, a fellow Rebel Satori author, which modernizes and plays with Cosmic Horror tropes. Set in a fictional Rhode Island city, the stories are full of ominous dark fantasy imagery, full of nihilistic angst with a dash of bleak humor.

From the back cover copy:

Every city casts a shadow, some longer than others. And the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island casts one of the longest shadows of all. With a population of 40,000 people, it might not seem like the most populated place on earth, but every citizen there has a story to tell, some more sinister than others. Look past the city’s pious Catholic façade and you shall see dead children floating face down in its sewers, witches corrupting susceptible minds with blasphemous books, and demons capering on the frescos of its haunted churches. It is a city where even the most innocent of objects–a quilt, a video game, a snow globe, a notebook–can act as a key that unlocks the doors to Doom, Delirium, and Death. The city has long since faded away: all that lingers is its nightmares, in the form of these ten testimonials from the damned, tales of strange and unproductive thinking. Will you open these pages and conduct an autopsy of your own on this dead city? But be warned: the scalpel that dissects the shadows is also the scalpel that cuts both ways.

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