Titus Crow, Volume 2: The Clock of Dreams; Spawn of the Winds (Paperback)

The second novel in this volume - ugh. I could barely finish it, and had me saying things like "Give me a break!" out loud on the bus. It was only my hunger for Lovecraft related lore that gave me the stamina to finish it. It lacked any real sense of wonder. The combination of a bleak setting and a plot that's a collection of cliches and abuses of Cthulhu mythos ideas just bored me to tears, when it didn't infuriate or exasperate me.

Life's too short to waste on books this bad. The only reason I can justify having spent hours and hours reading Spawn of the Winds is that it sets up In the Moons of Borea (contained in volume 3 of the Titus Crow collection), which is slightly more entertaining and interesting.

If you happen to really like Lumley's Necroscope books, I found the second half of this collection to be very similar to Necroscope 3: The Source. Our intrepid heroes are whisked away to a bleak, dangerous world beset by a supernatural threat; small bands of similar refugees survive against all odds; etc etc. I also found that book barely tolerable. So, if you disagree strongly with my assessment of The Source, you'll probably actually really like this book.

The Clock of Dreams presents us with the laughable image of two middle-aged men tooling around Dreamland in a flying GRANDFATHER CLOCK.......This is just too ridiculous to get past. The story takes place in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamland, home of my most hated Lovecraft stories, so already I have a predjudice against this chapter, but Lumley actually manages to deliver a brisk story with a few great moments; He does especially well with Lovecraft's turbaned Denizens of Leng....

Spawn of the Winds fares better, because we're spared the boring presence of Titus Crow and his snooze-inducing crony, Henri. Spawn finds a team of psychics, mentioned briefly in Book One, who are abducted by Ithaqua, The Walker On The Winds, and taken to far-off Borea. From there we get a Robert E. Howard pastiche, as our two-fisted texan hero and his buddies are drawn into a war between Ithaqua's forces and the opposing army of his daughter, Armandra. The book is reminisicent of territory Lumley would cover later (and better...) in the Blood Brothers books. Spawn is a rip-snortin' action story, and together Clock and Spawn are a not bad read, if a tad predictable.

Lumley's style is also reminiscent of the pulp genre popular in the 1930's with black-and-white heroic protagonists aided by beautiful heroines in a story of non-stop, bigger-than-life struggles and battles. So, if your taste goes toward the more amoral, often pornographic splatterpunk tales that pass for Mythos stories today, you're going to be disappointed.

In the first book, The Clock of Dreams, Lumley takes us on a tour of H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands adding a consistency and logic that was missing in Lovecraft's Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, but retaining much of the wonder and magic. Like Derleth, Lumley is not fond of loose ends and ties up a lot of threads left by Lovecraft for others to repair. This time, Henri-Laurent de Marigny takes the role as main protagonist as he rescues his friend Titus Crow and his Elder God wife from the dream traps of Cthulhu himself.

In Spawn of the Winds, Crow and company are left behind and we are told the story of Hank Silburhutte, a two-fisted Texan with a striking resemblance to author Robert Howard. A story true to its 1930's pulp roots, Silburhutte and his friends are captured by Ithaqua aka the Wendigo and transported to the planet Borea which may or may not be in our galaxy, let alone our dimension. Be prepared for lots of descriptions of big burly men with rippling muscles and bulging sinews, beautiful alien women, and bloody battles. It's a lot of fun.