Weston eventually realizes that he has a date with destiny and must play a critical role in stopping a great evil from the depths of time (is there any other kind?) and travel halfway around the world to stop a certain Great Old One with whom we are all familiar. The novel is thus comprised of four seemingly disparate stories related on a dark and stormy night, along with the hoary framing device of a young man sent on a quest to retrieve a MacGuffin who encounters the travelers. Before Weston can get very far in his quest, he encounters a gathering of fellow travelers who relate their own tales of past encounters with the macabre. Our story begins with the precocious Miskatonic University student, Carter Weston, tasked by one of his professors with retrieving a powerful occult tome, the Incendium Maleficarum, before it can fall into the wrong hands. Please not: spoilers follow, but only in a cursory, plot-summary sense. Talley’s THAT WHICH SHOULD NOT BE is a welcome exception. Relatively few of these works are novel-length (appropriate, I suppose, since most of Lovecraft’s work is sub-novel length), and while some rival or exceed Lovecraft’s own work, most others are less than memorable. It seems as though every week a new collection of “Lovecraftian” fiction is released, containing new and reprinted stories of the Mythos by the famous and not-so-famous. We live in a Golden Age of pastiches and new tales of H.
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