Dead But Dreaming is an anthology of mostly-original Cthulhu Mythos stories (with, to my knowledge, one reprint) that originally came out in 2002 as one of the final releases of DarkTales Publications. It emerged in extremely limited numbers but gained some critical acclaim – enough to justify Miskatonic River Press reprinting it in 2008. Edited by Kevin Ross and Keith Herber – both veteran contributors to the Call of Cthulhu RPG, is the collection worth the hype (and the high eBay prices charged prior to the reprint)?
Stephen Mark Rainey leads off with Epiphany: A Flying Tiger’s Story, in which a World War II fighter pilot from the Flying Tigers – the volunteer airmen who went off to join an all-American air force group fighting the Japanese on behalf of the Republic of China before the US officially entered World War II – finds himself falling foul of some strange aerial power after a perilous dogfight. It’s basically a better Ithaqua story than August Derleth himself ever wrote; shifting the scene from the icy Canadian wilderness to the jungles of Burma helps establish some distance from the Wendigo myth Derleth used as inspiration (or, rather, the myth that Algernon Blackwood used as inspiration and Derleth ripped off) and teases out some of the wilder implications of an alien thing which can pluck you up and toss you around the sky on a whim.
Rainey is not the only writer here who undertakes an exercise in taking a motif from pulper weird tales and putting a different spin of it. Loren MacLeod’s The Aklo is basically a “secret white civilisation somewhere in Africa” story of the sort which littered the pulps; an attempt is made to subvert the trope by saying that yes, the Aklo are the ancestors of all white people – and they are miserably corrupt and evil, an evil which manifested through colonialism and global warfare millennia after their city was abandoned.
I’m not sure about this one. On the one hand, I can see the point in inverting all of those “lost race of white people in Africa who were so much more cultured and wise and kind than the bestial savages around them” stories. On the other hand, this isn’t that much of an inversion, since the Aklo are still depicted as having constructed an astonishingly advanced city (with ample slave labour) and so on, they’re just nasty about it. Furthermore, this sort of inversion does not really attack the core fallacy of such stories, which is the idea of racial characteristics meaningfully shaping behaviour over a span of millennia and ancestral predeterminism.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 