Lin Carter's Anton Zarnak Supernatural Sleuth

by Robert M. Price (Editor), C.J. Henderson (Contributor), James Chambers (Contributor)

This is the first complete fiction collection of Lin Carter's character Anton Zarnak. Zarnak was created by Carter to live and fight in the world of H.P. Lovecraft's mythos. These sixteen stories take you on the exciting supernatural adventures of Anton Zarnak. Written by Lin Carter, Robert M. Price, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., Pierre Comtois, C.J. Henderson, John L. French, James Chambers, James Ambuehl, and Simon Bucher-Jones.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Occult Detective, Cthulhu Mythos, Anthologies, Short Stories

432 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2002

About the author

Robert McNair Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, asserting the Christ myth theory.

A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003. He has also written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by H.P. Lovecraft.

Reviews

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you have a mummy on the rampage after you? Have you noticed any squid-like creatures chasing you either in real life or in your dreams? Any strange beasts from the Beyond in your house? If your answer to these questions is yes, then you need to call Anton Zarnak, Supernatural Sleuth.

This book is a melange of several short stories all featuring Anton Zarnak, the original creation of Lin Carter. Zarnak himself is somewhat of an enigma; he lives with one Akbar Ram Singh & is charged with preventing evil from sneaking through from the world where those things exist into this one. Each and every one of the stories in this book was very well done, and coming from me, that says a lot because I'm not normally a short-story person. The original stories by Lin Carter that make up the first three in the collection are excellent; editor Robert M. Price's contributions are delightful as well. The rest are very good too.

I would recommend this book to those who like their horror without much gory detail & who like occult fiction. You have to be patient -- even though the stories are short, they are intense and demanding of reader attention.

[Mike Mclatchey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely love occult detectives although Lin Carter's Anton Zarnak is more an occult magician-detective. It's a strange pairing to match up the indefatigable and exhaustively knowledgeable and powerful Zarnak with the Cthulhu mythos, in order to do so all the authors involved have to stress the idea that Zarnak, who seems to get by with all the panache of a Jack Vance protagonist, is barely hanging on, evading catastrophe by the skin of his teeth in nearly every instance. While Carter only originally wrote three Zarnak stories (most of which are surpassed by the other writers), this anthology is filled out by C. J. Henderson, a man who has written plenty of his own occult detective stories (matching Zarnak up with his Teddy London once), with four stories, two each by editor Robert M. Price, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr and James Chambers, and a few other authors contributing one. Each author seems to interpret Zarnak a bit differently, for instance Pulver presents him more as occult magus, while Pierre Comtois has him more as a mystical psychologist. Zarnak is definitely old school and more of the Weird Tales age and the presence of his "Hindu servant" Singh isn't likely to fly with today's crowd so much even as Zarnak's faithful and likeable sidekick. Almost all of the authors here keep Zarnak in that early to mid 20th century mode without imagining that a "good" magician of this sort of power might have a more advanced social morality to match his puzzling and inexhaustible wealth and influence. The only story here that I think surpasses this is Chambers "Wandering Blackness" which brings Zarnak into a modern milieu with a great deal of power and emotional resonance, where the characters embroiled in the latest occult mishap endure significant consequences (this also feels later in the Zarnak chronology, post Singh). But overall if you're good with this kind of thing, this is an anthology of fun, if not particularly spectacular, stories, so I was actually probably pushing something like a 3 1/2 stars. Only the final story, where the two authors seem to fail to play the game straight, really let me down a little.