That Which Should Not Be

Carter Weston is a student at Miskatonic University, a school known for treating the occult as a serious subject. His professor sends him to a fishing village on the coast with one task: bring back the Incendium Maleficarum, a book said to let its owner command the things that existed before humankind.

Carter reaches an inn and goes no further. Four men are sitting out the weather there, and each has a story about what happens to people who go looking for such things.

Those accounts make up most of the novel. A whaler, a soldier, a doctor and a priest take their turns, and every tale is darker than the one before. All of them point toward the same conclusion.

The structure follows the nested-story tradition of nineteenth-century horror, and the book is Lovecraftian pastiche that treats the Mythos seriously. It reads slowly and by degrees, with dread gathering from one narrator to the next while a storm keeps Carter in his seat and the frame story waits to close around him.