A nice little volume of early Lumley stories. The first 2/3 of the book is excellent old school spook and mythos stories. Good for a cold winter's eve read. There are two Titus Crow stories for those that are interested. The last part of the book is marred by an overlong story entitled: Born of the Winds. It is a mish-mash of mythos that also tries to throw in some Blackwood Wendigo and even some hackneyed Christian symbolism (virgin Mary/Jesus). It all goes awry as the story heaps these and all the usual mythos tropes that Lovecraft did so much better, onto a story that just seems to drag on and on. We end up wanting the monster to either go away or destroy the universe and don't really care which one it chooses. We also wish the inevitably doomed narrator would have lost his pen in the snow 70 pages earlier.

Well written as all of Lumley is and deliciously pulpy at times. Read it if you can find it in a library or borrow it and avoid the last story. ( )

The book is an anthology of eight stories written by Brian Lumley, whose early horror writings are among my favorites in the world of weird fiction and cosmic horror. As is true in many anthologies, you take the excellent with the good with the not so hot in this collection, but when all is said and done, it's a pretty good conglomerate of weird fiction. Lovecraft's influence can be felt throughout, but there is plenty here to mark Lumley's own writing style as well.

The eight stories in the book (with a brief intro to each) are:

"The Viking's Stone" -- featuring Titus Crow, Lumley's very own creation, about whom Lumley writes:

"he is one to whom, in his unending search for mysteries and discoveries of marvels, the occult has been simply a passage down which his wanderings have taken him; where he has learned, on more than one occasion, outre things unheard of in the more mundane world of ordinary men. Crow may, in that snese, be called an occultist -- but so is he a most knowledgeable man and something of an expert in many fields."

In this story, Crow and his partner de Marigny get involved with a fellow scholar who is messing about with things he shouldn't and removes the "bautastein" (tomb marker) of a bloodthirsty Viking when the runes say not to.
"Aunt Hester" finds a young man going to visit his black-sheep aunt shunned by the rest of his family and in the process and to his detriment he discovers why no one even speaks of her any more.
"No Way Home" is an eerie tale of a man who has been trying to find his way home for 15 years; this one is somewhat marred by its ending and although it started out like a hackle-raising ghost story it lost me at the finish.
The title story "The Horror at Oakdeene," finds Martin Spellman, an aspiring author who wants to do a compilation of "rare or outstanding mental cases," soaking up atmosphere in training as a nurse at Oakdeene Sanatorium. Spellman tries to avoid the basement ward known as "Hell," where a fellow nurse may or may not have had anything to do with a patient's bizarre death.
Burglar William "Spotty" Morton decides to go back and finish something he'd started a year ago in "The Cleaner Woman," but the perfect crime may still be out of his reach.
Quite possibly my favorite in the entire collection is "The Statement of Henry Worthy," a little reminiscent of HPL's Innsmouth adventures but with a clever and spooky twist. This one takes place in the moors of Scotland, when Matthew Worthy, Henry's nephew, comes down to visit his uncle and to also follow in the footsteps of a lost botanist who had disappeared after finding a very unusual species of plant.
"Darghud's Doll" is another Titus Crow story, where Crow is not really involved in the action but shares a bizarre story about the power and long reach of supernatural revenge.
Ending this collection of stories is "Born of the Winds," a rather long, drawn-out account of a determined woman seeking her son in the frozen Canadian north. This story started out fine but got kind of bogged down as Lumley combines a mix of mythologies that imho didn't match the state of hovering horror as much as most of the other stories in this book were able to.

All in all -- a pretty good volume of tales of terror influenced largely by HP Lovecraft; a highly-recommended must for collectors if you're into Lumley or Lovecraft or this brand of cosmic horror/weird fiction. ( )