Black Wings: the Final Flight?

Well; here we are at what some feared would be the end. After providing my response to Shimmin’s Ferretbrain-era review of the first Black Wings of Cthulhu volume, I’ve covered the second, third, fourth, and fifth collections in the series, and found my patience for them waning as I go.

Now I’ve finally gotten around to the sixth volume. For a while, it’s seemed like this is where the series stops. After dutifully producing a new Black Wings entry every year or two (with the release schedule going annual from Black Wings 3 onwards), series editor S.T. Joshi has let the sequence lie fallow since 2017. With Black Wings taking a long break after this, does it go out with a bang, or does it fade away uninspiringly? Let’s see…

Ann K. Schwader leads us off with Pothunters, another episode in the Cassie Barrett series. I liked this one substantially more than I did Night of the Piper from Black Wings 4; that story tried to make the Kokopelli figure part of the horror, which felt like a dodgy appropriation of still-current beliefs. This one still touches on the indigenous cultures of the American Southwest in order to set up its plot, but I feel that it does so in a substantially less problematic way.

In particular, rather than conflating the horror with actual traditional practices and real cultures in a dodgy way, Schwader makes sure to draw a clear distinction. The sinister pots found at an archaeological site which kick off the terror are, it is repeatedly emphasised, of a different design and construction from anything else found in the area, which is the tip-off that it doesn’t belong to any of the local cultures – instead, it belongs to aliens which, perhaps, are doing a rough mimicry of the aesthetics of the local cultures as an attempt to blend in.

This is a small distinction, but an important one when it comes to making sure the story doesn’t end up demonising actual cultures. Furthermore, the story itself flows somewhat better than Night of the Piper did, building to climactic revelations which were a surprise to me but which in retrospect were actually nicely hinted at over the course of the story.