#84

Man, whatever happened to T.E.D. Klein? He wrote a crackerjack horror novel,then released the four-novella collection Dark Gods, and for some reason he vanished from the face of the Earth. Both books sold well and received critical acclaim for not only being scary in interesting ways, but also sufficiently literary to please the refined bookish palate, which is typically not the case with books in the genre.

I was packing a bookcase triple-stuffed with old mass markets and found Dark Gods. Seemed like a good book to re-visit after 20 years, given the holiday. The stories still hold up. All Lovecrafty, all subtle, and written in a style not terribly different from that of John Cheever. Often people like to call Pete Straub the most literary of modern American horror masters--those people have missed Klein's short catalog of worthy books.

Why did he stop writing? Perhaps Klein really did find the mythical Tchou-tchou tribe from the Cthulu Mythos; even worse, perhaps they found him.