Mrs. Rahlo's Closet and Other Mad Tales

R. E. Klein

Well, it was rather inevitable, wasn't it? It took H. P. Lovecraft almost sixty years to spawn a worthwhile descendant in Thomas Ligotti; Ligotti, on the other hand, took less than ten until the first writer of worth to wear the influence on his sleeve came along. That writer is R. E. Klein.

Don't get me wrong; a lot of other authors have been influenced by Ligotti, but none this obviously. Where other authors balance the Ligotti influence with various other things (Kiernan's gothic twist, for example), Klein seems to balance Ligotti against Lovecraft, and focuses on those parts of Ligotti that are most obvious when translated into an author's own voice. Klein also brings back in the science fiction vibe of Lovecraft's that has seem to have been bred out of most other horror writers, and it's refreshing. This isn't bad B-grade alien horror flicks (though one can imagine a number of these stories being turned into bad B-grade alien horror flicks), but manages to keep the tone and content above the drowning level, just as Lovecraft did and Ligotti does.

Klein is more, for lack of a better term, earthy than either of his predecessors, however. Lovecraft's diction (and Ligotti's distillations of Lovecraft's diction) are very much of a piece with nineteenth-century literature; one can imagine all of their heroes enunciating, with cultured Oxford accents. Not so Klein, whose protagonists are just as easily imagined with the flat Beantown delivery one should get from folks in that part of the country.

Put simply, this is fun stuff. The title story is straight out of Lovecraft's fake book. Other stories include tales of a private investigator who solves crimes that have not yet been committed, what happens when the artifact of a celestial war lands on the doorstep of your average Joe, and various other amusing little tidbits.

Fun stuff. Definitely worth a look-see.