Negative Positive
Title: Tough to write, but that's no excuse
Review: Fact of the matter is, even Lovecraft didn't pull off a good story every time, so it's even harder for people who write their own Mythos stories to do a good job. All too often, Mythos imitators misuse the conventions of the genre, with the mysterious elements brought right into the open so the writer's hero can solve them with some half-baked solution. This is in contrast to HP Lovecraft's stories, which mostly ended with the protagonist getting eaten by something or shooting himself. This anthology does not add much to what could have been the richest horror genre of them all. Instead, it just piles on more so-so stories that aren't innovative or all that memorable. It's not that the stories are universally bad, they're just so much less than they could have been, given the material the authors had to work with.
Is the review positive or negative? 