

Dennis Detwiller's Nazi occult adventure "Night and Water" is well written pulp, both familiar with its leering Nazi villains and unfamiliar with a couple of neat twists. But there are some other gems in here as well. I looked up Dembo after this to see that she hasn't written too many other mythos stories, which is a shame as this is one of the best mythos stories I have read in dozens of volumes. Fresh off of reading the Song of Cthulhu anthology, some other types of stories where the rock band is chasing a Lovecraftian apocalypse were pretty fresh in my mind, but Dembo really grounds three strands of the mythos (pre and post Lovecraft) by creating a number of well thought out characters that balance out what to a big music fan can often be awkward takes on how a rock band operates and encompasses mythos material as lyrical content. This is the second anthology and something of a step up from Alien Intelligence and it's anchored by the long novella "Suicide Watch" written by Arinn Dembo. If you're a fan of the secret agency fighting against the mythos menace (both Charles Stross The Laundry and David Conyers' Harrison Peel stories are perhaps the closest analogs), which I am, this shared universe version of it has managed to bring with it a surprising number of very strong stories. In the endless wasteland of Cthulhu Mythos pastiches on one hand and well-meaning but modernist takes that seem to avoid as much as possible the subject of Lovecraft, it seems like the Delta Green franchise often gets ignored in the mix.
