Even time seems to have stood still to follow the sometimes funny and sometimes creepy adventures of a devil character messing with people's minds. It's a small film and it's from Australia and it does a good job of not making you feel like you're anywhere in particular. But it doesn't look like an old fashioned film though. When you tell a story with good actors, a good story and very good script and all of that seems old fashioned then you know it must be 2018. Well worth reading.I kept getting the feeling while I was watching According To Ben Adams that if it was made before the days of CGI and franchises that are all the same film that this would have been a film that stood out. But honestly every story in this collection is great and well worth reading, incorporating the central cosmic horror axis to a milieu that really only works if the world doesn't quite end yet and instead inflicts these apocalypses on the persons who are rarely left unscathed by their encounters. Greg Stolze's time jumping/transcending 'As I See It' is also fascinating, while the UFO hunter gone Yith story 'Russian Dolls' mows past a well meaning group of characters who find out that the reality of the universe is cruel and impartial. Dennis Detwiller's Nazi occult adventure 'Night and Water' is well written pulp, both familiar with its leering Nazi villains and unfamiliar with a couple of neat twists. But there are some other gems in here as well. I looked up Dembo after this to see that she hasn't written too many other mythos stories, which is a shame as this is one of the best mythos stories I have read in dozens of volumes.

Fresh off of reading the Song of Cthulhu anthology, some other types of stories where the rock band is chasing a Lovecraftian apocalypse were pretty fresh in my mind, but Dembo really grounds three strands of the mythos (pre and post Lovecraft) by creating a number of well thought out characters that balance out what to a big music fan can often be awkward takes on how a rock band operates and encompasses mythos material as lyrical content. This is the second anthology and something of a step up from Alien Intelligence and it's anchored by the long novella 'Suicide Watch' written by Arinn Dembo.

If you're a fan of the secret agency fighting against the mythos menace (both Charles Stross The Laundry and David Conyers' Harrison Peel stories are perhaps the closest analogs), which I am, this shared universe version of it has managed to bring with it a surprising number of very strong stories. In the endless wasteland of Cthulhu Mythos pastiches on one hand and well-meaning but modernist takes that seem to avoid as much as possible the subject of Lovecraft, it seems like the Delta Green franchise often gets ignored in the mix.

Dark Theatres by Benjamin Adams