Status Updates From The Citadel of Fear: A Lost...

FINALLY we are at the point where all of the past histories have been disclosed, arriving at the painfully obvious twists with Mr. Kennedy and “Dusk Lady”. Like, I knew exactly who Biornson was the first time he tried to talk to O’Hara, and I’m not saying this to come off as clever. The tone of cosmic horror is undermined by Kennedy’s overweening villain speech with copious interruptions from O’Hara.

RAGE at the teasing out of the true history of the “Dusk Lady”. Bennett tells all early on, at least planting a giant neon sign pointing back to the little girl at the beginning of the book, but I am grinding my teeth like a Stephen King book because Bennett outlines the course of this disaster to an unhappy ending between her and Colin and, well, let’s be real, she’s like 15 years his junior.

Cliona has a brush with eldritch horror and almost dies from the ordeal, but not from anything physical. “Boots” has his own plan to catch the perpetrators, believing that his sister is right, and we’re given a curious intersection of cosmic horror meets the Island of Dr. Moreau, at least with not-Kennedy-but-Chester’s portrayal of his mansion grounds as host to some kind of menagerie.

The Mayan adventure wraps up abruptly with Kennedy encountering a Dark Eidolon and Boots exiled to the desert. Flash forward 15 years and we are out of the weird adventure and into the weird horror as Boots’s sister, Cliona, is home alone with her bulldog Snookums. Yes, really. Right now it’s illustrating the paranoia of being home alone at night for the first time, but the reader knows that something’s amiss.

Like REH, GBB has a fascination with Irish strong men. There’s also the admiration of the citadel warriors for Colin’s fighting prowess. Unlike Cerberus, however, Boots’s comrade—Kennedy—is a villain in ascent. It’s interesting because the Weird is reflected in Kennedy’s reaction to Tlallopan far more than the easygoing, gregarious Colin/Boots.

This book’s introduction attempts to enshrine Gertrude Barrows Bennett in the grand lineage of weird fiction as a contemporary of (if not crony of) H.P. Lovecraft, historically significant as a female author, as well as an author of science fiction. It’s an interesting essay and has me excited to get around to her Nightmare collection of dark fantasy stories.

Boots is a ginger Irishman *wink wink*