The Weird Company: The Secret History of H. P. Lovecraft?s Twentieth Century Paperback – October 7, 2014

Some people are purists when it comes to Lovecraft. I’m not one of them. I love all the crazy additions to the Cthulhu Mythos, love all the extra side stories, the new characters and monsters, backstories to Outer Gods, children that suddenly popped up, all of it. (C’mon, I have a giant stuffed Cthulhu.) So when I read THE WEIRD COMPANY, I pretty much had a grin on my face the entire time.Imagine “Extraordinary League Of Gentlemen,” but for the Mythos gang. That’s basically what you’ve got going on here. Through a series of journal entries and letters, characters we’ve come to know through Lovecraft’s work are reassembled. Not only do we discover what has occurred after their own particular tales were told, but in some cases, what happened before. It’s a fascinating story, these players all coming together in the now government controlled city of Innsmouth, especially as you come to realize who some of them are. Secrets are revealed, and from there the team is off to Antarctica, The Mountains Of Madness awoken in earlier events by a clueless Miskatonic University team. More revelations and more individuals get involved. The fate of the world is at stake, and it’s up to The Weird Company (not heroes but monsters) to save it: a witch, a changeling, a mad scientist, and a poet trapped in the form of a beast.Rawlik’s book is not only brilliant, but it’s loads of fun. It name-drops characters, has others interact like you always hoped they would, takes surprise turns, stays wonderfully atmospheric, yet can gets downright bloody. Some people might balk at what he’s done with some of the charters (I can think of one in particular), but you can tell this was a labor of love. The book is a big fun, horrific, eldritch adventure, and fans of the Mythos should go along.

This is quite a nice book and does amuse a good deal of the time. Plot is surprisingly good and incorporates many of HPLs critters.It falls short of being a true horror story and slides into a SiFi mode quite early on. All in all a good read.But only to devotees of Lovecraft.

I just finished Pete Rawlik’s second novel The Weird Company and my one word review would be “FUN.” It was a real blast. Obviously The Weird Company was written for fans of Lovecraft who are very familiar with the Old Gent’s stories of cosmic horror. I have also read Rawlik’s first novel Reanimators, which was a fun read as well, being a parallel set of tales happening during and after the events in Lovecraft’s serialized story “Reanimator.” However, I must admit I enjoyed The Weird Company even more so than Reanimators. This is largely due to fact that At the Mountains of Madness is one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories and Rawlik’s The Weird Company focuses heavily on that tale of the Elder Things.The Weird Company itself is a group of characters from Lovecraft’s and Rawlik’s pervious stories, each with a unique set of skills. They travel to the bottom of the world to essentially prevent the destruction of the planet. I don’t want to give too much away but the story is fast paced and there is some good character development but for me the best part was Rawlik’s scientific concepts and ideas used to explain things as varied as the physiology of the shoggoth to how faster than light travel is possible. I could not get enough of that.Finally, Rawlik has a great ability to make Lovecraft’s horrors be, well, once again horrible! Like the Universal creations of Frankenstein’s Monster or the Wolfman, or more recently the xenomorph from the Alien Franchise, continuous exposure to Lovecraft’s creations can make them less terrifying over the years. However, Rawlik puts the menace and horror back into these entities, particularly with the Elder Things and the shoggoths. There is an early scene in the novel that shows what happened to the Lake party in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and it is one of the most terrifying things I have ever read in a Lovecraftian tale – well worth the purchase of the book or eBook. In conclusion, I can’t recommend this book enough and looking forward Rawlik’s next novel.

The author clearly loves and is intimately familiar with the characters and situations created by the immortal H. P. Lovecraft, and the love and familiarity are evident on almost every page. Unfortunately, we also find on almost every page gross misprints, grammatical errors, and broken sentences which make little sense even when reread several times, trying to guess what words are missing, or completely misused. The author has also recycled about a half a dozen previously published short stories, which are just inserted into the narrative with little or no real excuse. These stories are often highly imaginative and invariably end on a satisfying note of jarring terror, but they fracture the narrative into which they are embedded in such a way as to harm the narrative in many ways. And one of the biggest problems relates to a comment made in a letter by HPL to one of his many correspondents, about HPL's close friend Frank Belknap Long. HPL says something like, "The big problem with little Belknap's stories is that EVERY character talks exactly like little Belknap." The many different narrators in this novel have the same problem precisely... every one writes in exactly the same style, and it is not a very gripping style to say the least. The overall plot has a ragtag group of Lovecraftian monsters, led by Asenath Waite, supposedly organizing themselves to combat the invasion of our cosmos by Yog Sothoth. After many adventures, this plotline ends in a total anticlimax. If you are a Lovecraft fan, as I am, you will probably like parts of this book, but on the whole you may wind up disappointed.

After reading Peter Rawlik's debut novel, REANIMATORS, I had a niggling doubt that he'd be able to hit those heights again. I really should adjust my attitude, because THE WEIRD COMPANY meets and exceeds the standards set in the first book. As with REANIMATORS, Rawlik uses the supporting cast of several of H.P.Lovecraft's tales to weave a new secret "true" history, behind the scenes of some of Lovecraft's most famous tales. Rawlik plainly has a great deal of fun with this, as he slips in sly references to everything from BABYLON 5 to FORBIDDEN PLANET, while keeping the story flowing at a pace and style familiar to readers of the pulp classics like Doc Savage. Rawlik's real genius lies in the way he ties disperate threads of the familiar Cthulhu Mythos to create new vistas of horror from familiar elements. Very highly recommended!

“The Weird Company”byPeter RawlikIf you are a stranger to the horror stories of the late H.P. Lovecraft it is probably best that you ignore this review. The collected works of The Master are available on KINDLE and a familiarity with his scary works is essential to understand the current volume. Dedicated Lovecraftians however will enjoy this gruesome book which links several of HPL’s stories into a cohesive tale.It is presented as a collection of top secret US Government documents starting with new information on the disastrous1931 Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition. At long last we learn why several team members disappeared without trace as recounted in “At The Mountains of Madness”.The next portion expands on events at Innsmouth as recounted by Robert Martin Olmstead after the military occupation and depth charging of the Reef. Other documents bring in disciples of Herbert West as a disparate group of people unite in an attempt to save Planet Earth from terrible disaster. Reading on the cognoscenti will find connections to other Lovecraftian episodes, even a visit to The Witch House, as the story moves on to ever more horrifying episodes. I will let the readers find those out as they proceed.After the great and gory adventures of The Weird Company we end with a survivor of the Antarctic Expedition’s most terrible Easter ever and learn the true nature of the star shaped artefacts discovered with the remains of The Great Old Ones. Dedicated Lovecraft fans should enjoy this very scary novel; I hope it really is fiction.

I like this, but i find it middle of the road pastiche. This came as a disappointment, because Re-animator's is a really top quality weird pulp fiction master-piece. This one doesn't work quite so well. Maybe because it is more fantastical than the other book. I look forward to the third installment, because this man really knows his subject material.

This and Reanimators have kept my cesspool imagination and its myriad pseudopodia busy for an otherwise ghastly week recovering from a tedious illness which, I’m checking even now, does not seem to involve elasticity of my long bones as yet. - thank you so much.As has been previously waxed upon, last few chapters have a few proof reading errors but didn’t spoil anything for me.Those who can do, those who can’t criticise.