MarzAat

And my look at Byron Craft’s Mythos Project series concludes.

Review: R’lyeh: The Lost Realm, Byron Craft, 2021. 

How to describe this book without sucking its vitality away with spoilers?

It’s a capstone, a wrapping up of threads, of all the Craft works I’ve reviewed.

It is, to borrow a phrase from drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, an “assemble the squad” story. It’s two years after Shoggoth 2, and Professor Ironwood puts out the call to some of the characters of the Shoggoth books to help rescue the grandchild of Faren and Janet Church. It seems that someone in R’lyeh wants a child with the blood of the Tanists in him.

Yes, Ironwood’s group dares – armed with some modern technology and weaponry – to go to R’lyeh though it is not, in this series, in the Pacific Ocean but in another dimension.

Ironwood’s group gathers at the home of the Churches, a lighthouse off the Florida coast. Elsewhere in Florida is our other plot. A nursing home resident is threatened by a mysterious visitor – and the visitor gets taken for his last ride by the resident’s confederates.

Mysteries are solved, second chances granted, blood shed, heroic deeds done, monsters confronted, justice prevails, and the meaning of sacrifice passed on from old to young.

The pleasures of this book are different than The Cry of Cthulhu, but I found it a worthy end to the series, and its strongest book since the opening. Like that novel, it also has interior illustrations.