The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth Paperback – December 12, 2018

I've now read several of these books (up to "Red Hook").Good parts:The author writes very well, the books are well edited, the plots and characters draw you in, I enjoyed reading them.I didn't get bored. They are well above average for action/adventure fantasy.Bad parts:There's a major back-story flaw in this attempt to write stories in which the members of the "Unaussprechliche Kulten" are the heroes: the character of the gods has to change. In Lovecraft's work, the Great Old Ones (etc.) don't care about people; they are outside human morality and reason. They care less about us than we care about the soil bacteria we kill or foster when we weed a garden. That's one of the reasons that people who get close to them go mad in the stories. They're not even interested but evil gods of the "help me and I'll eat you last" sort.In these books, the "Starry Wisdom" cult and the "Dagon" cult are helped by those they worship; they have personal interactions with them, there are frequent visitations by supernatural helpers. The Great Old Ones have become cuddly.Further, to provide a powerful antagonist, the author invents a giant conspiracy starting back in pre-Classical times and extending to the present, flush with money and dedicated to extermination of the harmless cultists. The proposed ideology of that conspiracy does not seem to me as though it could have inspired such an effort -- and of course, long-term, big, rich, large conspiracies which nonetheless remain secret for centuries may be a trope but I can't believe in them even for the sake of the story.I did very much like the way the fantastic was there in a realistic way. A non-spoiler example is that a character who has tentacles rather than legs suffers because walking and standing on tentacles require significant constant muscular effort while those of us with an internal skeleton only need to make small efforts so we stay balanced on top of our bones.

Now that this book is finally affordably available, every single Lovecraft fan, without exception, should get it. It is a delightful and unique new perspective on the Cthulhu Mythos from a writer who is known for contrarianism and dislike of false dichotomies. In the world of this series, both Lovecraft the writer and the beings and places he wrote about exist, but the character and implications of the latter are rather different from what Lovecraft led us to believe. Lovecraft, after all, was known to have the shrieking vapors at the idea of white people mating with non-whites (including Eastern Europeans!). Could such a person really be trusted to provide an unbiased view of the good, suspiciously fish-smelling folks of Innsmouth?Without giving spoilers, there's an awe-inspiring scene in the book that will forever change how you think about a key aspect of the Mythos, but it's not revisionist. It's totally consistent with Lovecraft's canonical writings on the entity in question, maybe even follows naturally from them, yet Lovecraft would not and could not have written such a scene. The key difference is that a vision that would have seemed horrifying to Lovecraft seems wondrous to Greer, and therefore to their respective characters. I can't say more without spoilers, so just read the book.There are a few scenes involving semi-lengthy explications in monologue, which is unavoidable if the alternate worldview being propounded is to be explained to readers; at any rate, the amount of infodumping is tolerable. If this book has a real weakness, it's in the rather nebulous portrayal of Miskatonic University. We aren't told much about the school itself, but the up-to-12-story campus office buildings (which most schools rightly avoid like the plague) and numerous history grad students suggest a good-sized research ("R1" or "R2") university, while the protagonist's claim that he knows all the liberal arts professors by sight suggests a small cozy private school or "Directional University". These data needn't be contradictory, in fact, but they aren't reconciled by anything we're given. Also, the protagonist keeps musing about going on for a "doctorate program", rather than "doctoral."A criticism for the publisher is that there are several typos, from missing punctuation or words to minor errors introduced in revision. Small presses seem not to bother doing line-editing anymore, but this publisher is an occult press that releases books first, and for a frustratingly long time, only in expensive to astonishingly expensive "special editions." Surely a book with a fancy leather binding and a price tag in the hundreds should have been copy-edited! Also, if they don't edit the grimoires any more carefully, watch out for those invocations, peeps.

I've now read all the books in Greer's "Haliverse" and I can say without hesitation that I loved every one of them. The storytelling style and theme drew me in, and I could not put any of them down until I was done.Aside from all the other glowing reviews, I'd like to say this: while I enjoyed Lovecraft's original stories, they were heavily imbued with themes of hostility toward an enemy-filled cosmos. In the study of memetics, this injected an adversarial relationship with nature into my world view. John M. Greer's books offer a hearty antidote to this memeplex. Somehow he was able to tell a consistent, coherent story from the viewpoint of Lovecraft's "monsters", retaining the kinds of action depicted in the original stories (Lovecraft's 'hero' usually dies, horribly) but recasting those "monsters" as the underdogs and freedom fighters opposed to a world-spanning oppressive conspiracy. AND he does so within a framework that is compatible with my own beliefs (in which the living world is sacred and humanity is part of the world, not set above it).All I can say is, "More, please."

It started off a little slow, but I was fully immersed in the story soon after. I love the Lovecraftian thread mixed with esoteric undercurrents! Looking forward to the next book!

Great novel particularly if your a fan of hp lovecraft. A fresh twist on classic fantasy horror.

The book which begins a series and kinda turns the Lovecraft Mythos upside down, is in itself fun, interesting and entertaining. Even though the Author is a bit too "Social Justice in your face". Also depicting one of the great old ones a bit like a nice uncle... I understand this is about reversing the view, but it takes a lot of fascination out of it. I wanted to give just 3 Stars, but gave a 4th because of the novel approach, even though then it kinda lacks the really interesting antagonistic side.

In this very curious take on the Cthulhu Mythos, the Old Ones, Deep Ones and other creatures are represented as victims of a century-old smear campaign from an ancient human conspiracy that wants to eliminate chaos, uncertainty and magic. The protagonist is involved in this fight and meet (mostly) benign versions of Lovecraftian creations, such as a very helpful and wise Nyarlathotep, who has pretty much the same function as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Surprisingly, it works. It's an interesting world, and I'm curious to read the other books in the series.