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Brett J. Talley
Brett J. Talley writes stories that explore the darker corners of imagination. His work often features elements of horror and the strange. Readers looking for something chilling should consider his novel, The Abyssal Plain.
That Which Should Not Be
Synopsis
Carter Weston studies at Miskatonic University, an institution with a long-standing reputation for taking the occult seriously. His professor sends him to a fishing village on the coast to recover the Incendium Maleficarum, a book said to give its holder command of the things that were here before people.
He gets as far as an inn, where four men are waiting out the weather, and each of them has a story about what happens to people who go looking. The stories are the novel: a whaler, a soldier, a doctor and a priest, each account darker than the last, each one circling the same conclusion.
Brett J. Talley's first novel is deliberate Lovecraftian pastiche done with real affection: nested tales in the nineteenth-century tradition, the Mythos handled straight, and a frame story that closes exactly as unpleasantly as it should.
Genres
Characters
Carter WestonProtagonist
A Miskatonic University student sent to recover a book his professor should probably have left alone.