from: Elder Signs Press
Regular marked price: $15.95Discount Price: $11.96
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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9781934501023
ISBN number: 1934501026
Label: Elder Signs Press
Manufacturer: Elder Signs Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 336
Printing Date: September 01, 2007
Publishing house: Elder Signs Press
Sale Popularity Level: 356760
Studio: Elder Signs Press
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Hoist the anchor and set sail for the High Seas! Discover a time when tall ships ranged the oceans and creatures lurked in the dark depths. Journey across the world from the reign of pirates to the Age of Napoleon to the present. All hands on deck, ready the cannon, and prepare to engage terrors unknown!
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Rated by buyers 
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good book. Catches the lovecraft ideal out on the high seas in a collection of short stories
Rated by buyers 
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These stories are actually pretty good, for the most part. Given the overall theme, you expect Cthulhu, Dagon, and Deep Ones, and that's what you get with some exceptions. I really enjoyed the set-ups of the stories, the characters involved, and the writing styles.
So why the two stars? Because there were no surprises. Everything was put forward in plain, simple descriptions and plot lines. No "barely glimpsed" horrors, no hanging mysteries; just straight linear stories. Nothing to match or even reach for the chills that HPL's prose is capable of creating. It's a bit like reading descriptions of events in a "Call of Cthulhu" RPG campaign. Prosaic is a good word. These are more fantasy stories than lovecraftian horror.
Rated by buyers -
High Seas Cthulhu, full of mythos stories nautical and piratical, is the latest offering from Elder Signs Press. Right now this company is the hottest thing around in the US for fans of Cthulhu mythos fiction. They are more prolific than either Hippocampus Press, Chaosium or Mythos Books. In the UK, the best thing going is Rainfall Books. Thank goodness for the modern era and the web, so fans can acess all of their books. High Seas Cthulhu is a lovely trade paperback, with the usual flawless production qualities and editing we expect from Elder Signs Press (OK, I saw an occasional sentence fragment and at least one instance where as author used the word bemused when they meant amused). It lists for $15.95. I don't see a discount on Amazon but it is available for free shipping if you order more than $25 worth of stuff. Page count was 327 with stories starting on page 9, very generous for this genre! There were a few unnumbered pages of useful minibios of the authors at the back of the book. All of these stories are newly published with this anthology except "Ensnared," which was in an obscure story collection in 2003. Most of the authors were new to me. The attractive cover art by Steven Gilberts shows a Cthulhu-like thing attacking a ship; it could have been based on a number of the stories herein. I liked it but my favorite ESP covers are the shoggoth in Hive and the noir cover for Hard Boiled Cthulhu. There were a few nautical terms bandied about that I did not know; I've posted a list of these words and their definitions on alt.horror.cthulhu to save you the trouble. I wish William Jones had written an editor's/publisher's note to explain how he conceived of this book and let us know a little about the story selection process. This would have been fun to read; I had a similar wish when I read Hard Boiled Cthulhu.
Here are the contents:
The Idol in His Hand by Darrell Schweitzer
The Tip of the Iceberg by John Shire
Passage to Oblivion by Lee Clark Zumpe -
Dark Blue by Alan Dean Foster
The Isle of Dreams by Charles P. Zaglanis
Ensnared by Paul Melniczek
A Kind of Fear by C.J. Henderson
La Armada Invencible by Michael McBride
The Others by Stewart Sternberg
Signals by Stephen Mark Rainey
The Havenhome by William Meikle
The Bedlamite by Ferrel Moore
The Star of Istanbul by Chris and Linda L. Donahue
High Seas by Michael Penncavage
Those Who Came to Dagon by John Shirley
Clown Fish by Matthew Baugh
Ice by Heather Hatch
The Wreck of the Ghost by Tim Curran
The Stars, in their Dreaming by Gerard Houarner
Depth of Darkness by William Jones
I ended up really liking the book but it took some time to grow on me compared to Arkham Tales or Hardboiled Cthulhu, where I stayed up all night reading. There were a few stories in here I didn't really like, most near the front of the book, which took the wind out of my sails for a while. This is in contrast to other titles where just about all the contents are top notch. Eventually I warmed up to it and finished High Seas Cthulhu in a matter of 3 or 4 nights. It is practically self recommending to mythos fans. I mean, pirates and the mythos, how can you miss?
*****spoilers may follow so stop reading now if it bothers you******
"The Idol in His Hand" - Darrell Schweitzer has written a few mythos stories I know about. In particular I really liked "Why We Do It" form Dead But Dreaming. This story was OK but didn't really jazz me, about a journalism student interviewing a seedy ex-pirate who may have found a curious route to immortality.
"The Tip of the Iceberg" - This was a very likeable story, about an exploratory vessel discovering a shoggoth encased in the ice on the coast of Antarctica.
"Passage to Oblivion" - Lee Clarke Zumpe has a few mythos stories to his credit including "What Sorrows May Come" in Arkham Tales (a decent enough effort) and "The Breach" in Horrors Beyond (that I thought was very good). Unfortunately I found "Passage to Oblivion" pretty annoying. Maybe it was in medias res for some characters he has developed in other stories I don't know about. One main character is a superhuman Sentinel of Sodalitas Invictus (and these are not all that well explained in the text, although I suppose you can infer what they are; I even did a wikipedia search to no avail) and the other is probably a human avatar of the Great Race, posing as an Arkham professor. A secret map charting waters not meant to be seen by humans is stolen by the Barbary pirates and needs recovered. Apart from the exposition I was not blown away by the prose.
"Dark Blue" - Alan Dean Foster does not need introduced to fans of fantasy and science fiction. His mythos stories include "The Horror at the Beach" from The New Lovecraft Circle and "A Fatal Exception ... Read More
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