This was a disappointing read, for a few reasons. One of them is that the book doesn't even do what it says on the tin: only a small minority of the stories have any real connection to Shub-Niggurath, either explicit or implicit. A witch, a straight-up evil goat, or something vaguely creepy happening while somebody is near a tree (but not connected in any way with the tree) do not, in fact, make something a "tale of the black goat with a thousand young". Sigh. However, there's a few genuine Mythos stories in here. Honestly, most of them just aren't very good.

CW: I should flag up that there's a lot of sex in some stories, and rape in at least two of them.

"The Curate of Temphill" is the worst, I think. Content-wise, its treatment of homosexuality is very questionable, and as the sole female character is a lesbian antagonist, you can imagine her treatment is frankly appalling. From a thematic perspective, it's got little to do with Shub-Niggurath unless you consider any hint of a goat to be enough (Price clearly does). But there's also a total lack of credibility in the story, where the new reverend of a village is handed documents claiming to be secret missing bits of the Bible. In the story, he immediately accepts them at face value, and revises his entire religious outlook instantaneously on this basis alone. The thing is, there have been countless documents claiming to be extra gospels, additional prophecies, Real True Original versions of various Biblical stories, and so on. On top of that, there are all the books which are canonical in one variant of Christianity but not another (the entire Apocrypha? the numerous books which various early Christian groups agreed not to include?). An actual clergyman, as the protagonist is meant to be, would absolutely be fully aware of this. He might mention the documents to the church hierarchy, since they could be of historical interest, but behaving as he does in the story is stretching suspension of disbelief several miles beyond breaking point. ( )