If you’re curious about the William Meikle’s work and don’t mind short fiction, this is a proper introduction to it. You’ll find him operating in his usual modes and some new ones I hadn’t seen before.

Meikle the Cthulhu Mythos writer has a couple of works that are some of the best in the book.

“The Havenhome” was probably the first Meikle I read when it appeared in High Seas Cthulhu, and it was good enough for me to remember his name. On re-reading it, I was struck by how there are no explicit references to the Mythos in it. In the year 1605, the Havenhome travels to the New World to find a European settlement wiped out, the bodies mysteriously frozen. Staying for the night, they realize something malevolent is at work and not just freak weather. I suppose you could see this as a takeoff on Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Coming of the White Worm” or August Derleth’s Ithaqua. Meikle often ends his stories with violent action which sometimes breaks up the mood he’s established, but here he definitely gets the balance right.

I’d also read “Inquisitor” before in Historical Lovecraft put out by Innsmouth Free Press. In it, a Dominican inquisitor interrogates a shoggoth brought back by Spanish sailors in 1535. But he isn’t prepared for the answers he gets. I was happy to revisit this one which I also remembered favorably from before.

Meikle makes no secret of his love for B-movie monsters, and “Rickman’s Plasma” is kind of a Mythos tale by way of a B movie. It seems like a story treatment of a never-shot movie which was probably the point since it debuted in the anthology Creature Features. But it’s a lot of plot and no interesting characters and feels like a condensed novel.

Meikle the ghost story writer gives us quite a lot of stories here, almost all well done, and some with macabre endings. None of the stories sound likes M. R. James. These are stories that sound like what a normal person would tell you about how the eerie looked, sounded, and felt like.

Being interested in Celtic music, I was pleased to see two stories incorporating it. “The Scotsman’s Fiddle” is one of those strange carnival stories mixed with revenge and ghosts. In 1889, such a show, headed by a Scots fiddler, comes to an Appalachian town. But mine owner Malone is not real pleased at what a fiddle tune does to his workers. A collector of folk music goes from Scotland to an Appalachian town to track down the historical truth behind “The Shoogling Jenny“, a tale of murder in a mine.

“Dancers” is a poignant story set in modern times and told by an old man who wants to unburden his conscience while watching a ghost in a graveyard. “The Yule Log” is another tender ghost story about a lonely man at Christmas.

“Samurai” is a rather common sort of supernatural tale about what happens when you disrespect the local taboos. Some shipwrecked Scottish sailors enter a deserted Japanese temple guarded by the spirit of a samurai. The main story didn’t do that much for me, but I did like the samurai’s Zen meditations.

I’m not entirely sure if “The Haunting of Esther Cox” is a ghost story or a story of demonic possession, and I’m not sure what its ending means, but I liked it. Set in 1878, it combines murder, spiritualism, exorcism, and, of course, a haunting. The story is told through diaries of the unfortunate Esther Cox and her brother-in-law and has a striking image at the end as well as an interesting skeptic sent to investigate Esther.

Meikle the sword-and-sorcery writer gives us two stories.

I’m often up for horror mixed with history and I’m interested in the Crusades, so I liked “The Brotherhood of the Thorn”. It has a group of desperate Crusaders deciding not to flee to Acre after the fall of Jerusalem but to look for a holy relic in the desert. What they find is a troubling cult that put me in mind of a similar one at the beginnings of Christianity in Meikle’s Watchers trilogy.

The gladiatorial hero of “The Toughest Mile” has won 100 fights in the arena, and the law says he now has a chance at freedom … if he can survive a 10 mile chase through a tunnel pursued by the Witch Queens’s bitches. But does he really want freedom if it means leaving the bed of the Witch Queen?

And, yes, Meikle’s favorite character, Derek Adams, is here, twice as a matter of fact.

I’d read “A Slim Chance” before, but this time either brain chemistry or circumstances made me react better to it. I appreciated Adams behaving honorably and seeing a job through even when his client is already dead and has already paid his bill. And I liked Adams’ bit of rough justice for a miscreant at story’s end. Of all things, the story centers around a dieting competition gone very wrong. “Home Is the Sailor” is morbidly funny but also kind of tender story about a rundown seaside hotel where the dead aren’t resting. Derek’s friend Doug puts in a cameo in this one.
Meikle does things I haven’t seem him do before in three stories.

“Turn Again” partakes of some of the same mystical notions in the Watchers trilogy and, while interesting, was a bit too elliptical for my tastes.

“Living the Dream” is a very violent and horrific story about a man with disturbing dreams and sexually obsessed with a co-worker. Murder, kidnapping, rape, torture, and voyeurism are here – and maybe other players besides a man and woman. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but this one seems to have several different meanings in the end.

In “The Young Lochinvar“, Meikle takes John Keel’s Mothman and audaciously transplants him to Scotland and adds a plot about a young English woman and the boor her father says she has to marry.

Nothing in this collection is boring, a few of the stories are memorable, and Meikle shows he writes even more kinds of stories than I thought. ( )

Review copy

All sixteen of the tales in Samurai snd Other Stories have appeared elsewhere over the last several years, but are offered as a collected work for the first time and represent a fine sampling of short stories from Scottish born writer William Meikle.

If you're not yet familiar with Meikle's work you are missing out. With twenty novels and more than 300 short stories published to date, his impressive body of work continues to grow and Samurai and Other Stories offers an excellent introduction.

This collection starts with the title story of the surviving members of a shipwrecked crew discovering a temple with riches that would more than make up for their lost cargo. One problem, it's guarded by A powerful, unearthly Samurai. "Samurai" is a strong start and offers up a nice twist as do many of the tales in this collection.

Some of my favorites include "Rickman's Plasma", sort of a 21st century take on the horror classic The Blob. "Home Is the Sailor" features a walking dead scenario. There's "Inquistor", a Lovecraftian tale from the time of the inquisition. "The Havenhome" is a very well told story set in the early 1600s with appropriate language and a frightening adversary. But, my most favorite of all is, "The Haunting of Esther Cox," set in 1878 and told through a series of diary entries. From one such entry, "You may not believe any good of me. But if you believe nothing else, believe this. I ain't a bad girl."

There were a few stories that I didn't particularly enjoy, but they were very few and It's very rare that every story in a collection will knock it out of the park. Overall, Samurai and Other Stories is certainly worth your time and is available both as a paperback and ebook from Crystal Lake Publishers and Amazon.com.

Highly recommended. ( )