LOVECRAFTIAN BOOK REVIEW: RIDE THE STAR WIND

Ride the Star Wind
Edited by: Scott Gable/ C.Dobrowski
Publisher: Broken Eye Books
Reviewed by: Sandra Scholes

I recently reviewed Earth, Air, Fire and Water by Brian Lumley and remember reading other compilations of Cthulhu and Lovecraftian horror stories, and as an avid reader of cosmic weird, Ride the Star Wind felt the perfect next step book to read what I like about this rather thick book are not only the stories, I will be coming to them later. It's the 90s fanzine style cover art and interior illustrations that remind me of the good old days of Star Trek and Star Wars fandom back in the day.

Ride the Star Wind is around to bring readers the best in odd, strange and offbeat speculative fiction. As an indie press based in Seattle, it contains 29 short stories of weird cosmic space opera by the likes of Remy Nakamura, Lucy A Snyder, JE Bates, Gord Sellar, Brian Evenson and Heather Hatch. Each story has an author bio and a b&w illustration attached to it from some of the most creative artists around: Sishir Bommakanti, Michael Bukowski, Mike Dubish, Dave Felton and Nick Gucker.

Readers will find they got what they expected with Ride the Star Wind. Several of the stories seemed similarly written even though they were penned by different authors and many seemed to be very long indeed. I kind of understand why these stories are long as Lovecraft's work is also long and drawn out in keeping with the genre of dark and doomy. What start out as normal lives for these characters makes way for the peculiar and dangerous and before the characters know it, they are dragged into a world of pain they had no idea existed. I was personally glad of the more humorous aspects of some of the stories or I might also have sank into despair.

The reality of what I read had me thinking I would see the quality of the stories and how well they matched Lovecraft's vision of the strange and the artwork brings those stories to life.

It did take me a while to read through them as I wanted to understand them and why they had to be written when there are so many volumes of similar stories already around. There were many I thought were worth reading and what I would call the best of the bunch, while some I might have considered less so but still engaging and well written. 

I can see the effort that has gone into this volume and it is worth getting your hands on it as an introduction to a more modern side of Lovecraftian writings before you delve into the older stuff as it can get a bit too deep and melancholy.