Review: Shakespeare v. Lovecraft
Shakespeare vs. Lovecraft: A Horror Comedy Mash-Up featuring Shakespeare’s Characters and Lovecraft’s Creatures by D.R. O’Brien
My rating: [rating=2]
Summary:
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” — William Shakespeare
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” —Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
In the same putrid vein as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Shakespeare v. Lovecraft slithers hideously onto the literary mash-up scene, whispering of cosmic horrors and eldritch tales whilst espousing sweet soliloquys and profoundly contemplating mankind’s place in the universe.
Prospero, driven dangerously insane by prolonged exposure to the dread Necronomicon, makes a terrible pact with the titanic alien beast known only as Cthulhu. Now only his enchantress daughter Miranda and a handful of history’s greatest heroes are all that stand between humanity and blasphemous eternal subjugation.
It’s a bloodbath of Shakespearean proportions as Cthulhu and his eldritch companions come at our protagonists from all manner of strange geometric angles in a hideous and savage battle for supremacy.
This horror-comedy novella of 36,000 words will seize you in its clammy grip and not release you until you have gone positively mad with delight! Witness all this and more:
Histrionic Heroes vs. Tentacled Terrors!!! Endless Soliloquys vs. Unnatural Silences!!!
Romeo vs. Mi-Go!!! England’s Royal Beasts vs. A Shoggoth!!!
The Author vs. Iambic Pentameter!!!
Review:
(I received an e-copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)
2.5 stars. I liked some parts better than others.
Overall, this book was a quick and nice read that made me smile, although I can’t say it made me actually laugh.
I appreciated the numerous winks to and quotes to Shakespeare, of course. The latter may be both a strength and a weakness: just knowing a couple of lines from the Bard isn’t enough to get them, since they cross-reference several plays (The Tempest first, but also Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Henry V, Henry IV, A Midsummer’s Night Dream… and others). If one knows these works well enough, the inserts are likely to look awesome (personnally, I loved Henry V’s “Gods, stand up for mankind!”, alluding to Edmund’s soliloquy in King Lear); otherwise, they may fall flat. The same goes with Lovecraft—and I’m positive I missed a few things regarding those parts, since I haven’t read his works in the past eight years or so. I suppose that such mash-ups don’t appeal to people who don’t like the original novels they’re inspired from, so it’s not that much of a problem; but it could be for readers who know only a little.
The writing style attempts at emulating both Shakespeare’s and HPL’s. In my opinion, sometimes it manages, and sometimes it fails, making reading somewhat fastidious; I’m thinking about the heavy use of adverbs stacked almost one upon the other, among other things, which made a lot of sentences and paragraphs look weird. This is somewhat paradoxical, considering how short the book is (86 pages or so).
Also, the narrative itself regularly seemed more of a pretext than a real story. Again, this may not be the aim of a mash-up (I admit I haven’t read a lot of those, so perhaps I’m just a poor judge), but I still expected events to be stringed in a more streamlined way. As it is, I couldn’t care about the characters like I would have for Shakespeare’s, nor did I get the feeling of human life easily discarded as I would in Lovecraft’s works.
All in all, it wasn’t a bad read, though. Only I was expecting more, and therefore ended up disappointed.