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Corporate Cthulhu: Lovecraftian Tales of Bureaucratic Nightmare Paperback – January 28, 2018
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YOUR CALL TO CTHULHU IS IMPORTANT TO US. PLEASE HOLD.
Red tape. Catch-22s. Circular chains of command. Whether you're a customer or co-worker, bureaucracies drive us all insane. Even management is just a cog in a vast machine. Information, items, and even people get lost in the system, never gone but never found. No one seems to notice the insanity surrounding them... or if they do, they keep it to themselves. After all, those who notice and call attention to it tend to disappear, leaving nothing behind but an empty desk and whispered rumors in the break room. If ever there was a place for a cosmic horror to hide, grow, and thrive, it's deep within the archives of a huge, old bureaucracy.
But of all bureaucracies, corporations are the most powerful, seeming to have a life and will of their own. They're privately held with a multi-national reach, seemingly bottomless resources, and armies of lawyers jealously guarding their trade secrets. Corporate culture fiercely resists any attempt to change or regulate it, and anything and everything is justified by the bottom line. Who needs a Cthulhu Cult when you've got Cthulhu, Inc.?
Into this insidious world are thrust our heroes—the curious, the puzzled, and the frustrated. Defying authority, seeking answers they'd be better off not knowing, the secrets they discover threaten their sanity and their lives. Will they become the next whistleblower media hero? Or the next no-call / no-show their coworkers promptly forget? Just remember: it's nothing personal—it's just business.
This book contains twenty-five tales of bureaucratic insanity, including:
DEATH PLEDGE by Jeff Deck
WELCOME TO THE R’LYEH CORPORATION by James Pratt
SHADOW CHARTS by Marcus Johnston
CASUAL FRIDAY by Todd H. C. Fischer
THE GOD UNDER THE CHURCH by David Tallerman
REFUSAL by DJ Tyrer
DAGON-TEC by Adam Millard
ESOTERIC INSURANCE, INC. by Evan Dicken & Adrian Ludens
CAREER ZOMBIE by John Taloni
BOEDROMION NOUMENIA by Andrew Scott
INCORPORATION by Max D. Stanton
THE LOPONINE EXPLOITATION by John M. Campbell
FESTIVAL PREPARATIONS by Justin Bailey
MARYANNE’S EQUATIONS by Harry Pauff
WHOLESOME LABOR by Sam Rent
LIKE A GOOD NEIGHBOR by Wile E. Young
TINDALOS, INC. by Charlie Allison
CLEAN UP AISLE FOUR by Josh Storey
FORCED LABOR by Peter Rawlik
THE SHADOWS LENGTHEN in the Close by Ethan Gibney
IT CAME FROM I.T. by Gordon Linzner
RETRACTION by Marie Michaels
FACILITIES MANAGEMENT AT DAGOCORP HQ by L Chan
NO DOVES COME FROM RAVEN EGGS by Mark Oxbrow
APOTHEOSIS by Darren Todd
- Print length418 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 28, 2018
- Dimensions6 x 0.95 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100998938971
- ISBN-13978-0998938974
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Corporate Cthulhu is a brilliant anthology and a huge success for Pickman's Press, full of high-quality, well-written tales from both new and veteran writers of the Cthulhu Mythos . . . should be picked up by anyone interested in either good Mythos fiction, or just good writing overall."- Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer
"Where it hits the mark, the ending is bleak and leaves a chill . . . where it doesn't there's either a happy ending or -- slightly better -- a qualified happy ending with terrible conditions attached."- Goodreads
"This is great reading if you've ever had a job that sucked the life out of you."- Amazon
Product details
- Publisher : Stasheff Literary Enterprises (January 28, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 418 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0998938971
- ISBN-13 : 978-0998938974
- Item Weight : 1.23 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.95 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,654,324 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,282 in Horror Anthologies (Books)
- #9,260 in Ghost Fiction
- #15,965 in Occult Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
David Tallerman is the author of the historical science-fiction novel To End All Wars, thrillers A Savage Generation and The Bad Neighbor, fantasy series The Black River Chronicles and The Tales of Easie Damasco, and the Tor.com novella Patchwerk, among other works.
David's short fiction has appeared in over a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and fourteen of his horror and dark fantasy stories were brought together in the collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.
Further details can be found at his website www.davidtallerman.co.uk.
Adrian Ludens is the author of the new short story collections The Tension of a Coming Storm (Dark Owl Publishing) and Bottled Spirits (Lycan Valley Press). He has contributed stories to the anthologies Blood Lite III: Aftertaste, The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Stories, Gothic Fantasy Science Fiction Short Stories, Shadows Over Main Street, The Beauty of Death, and many others.
Recent anthology appearances include Generation X-ed (Dark Ink), Something Wicked This Way Rides (Dark Owl Publishing), The Lost Librarian's Grave (Redwood Press), and the Bram Stoker nominated anthology Under Twin Suns (Hippocampus Press).
He lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota where he stays busy as a library associate and the public address announcer for a AAA hockey team. Adrian is a fan of hockey, dark fiction, all kinds of music, and exploring abandoned buildings and remote places.
Adam Millard is the author of twenty-six novels, thirteen novellas, and more than two hundred short stories, which can be found in various collections, magazine, and anthologies. Probably best known for his post-apocalyptic fiction, Adam also writes fantasy/horror for children and Bizarro fiction for several publishers. His work has recently been translated for the German market.
www.adammillard.co.uk
John Taloni lives in Southern California with his wife and daughter. Three of their four cats share suspicious similarities with the main characters of "Crisis on Stardust Station." John's daughter also swears one of the cats can teleport, a trait you just might see in the sequel. "Shadow on the Moon" the second book in the Cats of Space series, is available on Kindle.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
DJ Tyrer is probably best known as a horror writer, but has written in many other different genres and styles, as well as being behind the Atlantean Publishing small press.
Andrew Scott was born in Ormskirk, England. His first foray into comics, "What Happened When Isaac Newton Met Al-Ma'mun" resulted in the CreaMurcia Accésit Prize for him artist Carlos Morote. Since then his works of weird historical fiction, fantasy and folklore have appeared in various anthologies in comics and prose.
Marie Michaels is an attorney by day and a nerd pretty much all the time. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and very noisy cat. Marie Michaels publishes sci-fi and fantasy short stories and hopes to publish one of her NaNoWriMo novels, if only she can bring herself to look at them again once November is over. In addition to the anthologies listed here, you can read (for free!) the first short story she ever wrote at Fiction Vortex, an online zine at www.fictionvortex.com.
Marie Michaels is on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads, where she geeks out about speculative fiction and feminism and posts way too many pictures of her dinner and/or cat.
John M. Campbell speculates on the worlds currently unknown to us that science and engineering may unlock. He is compelled by the promise technology offers to address many of the issues facing human survival. The prospect of extraterrestrial life in our solar system on Mars and the outer planets fascinates him. He finds intriguing the likelihood that machine intelligence will likely surpass mankind’s ability to control it in this century. Inspiration for his stories often comes from the strange realities of quantum physics and cosmology.
John grew up reading science fiction and loved imagining a future extrapolated from what is now known. He hopes his stories will inspire careers in science and engineering as the authors he read inspired his career.
John lives with his wife in Denver, Colorado. Access his website at www.JohnMCampbell.com.
Todd H. C. Fischer is a graduate of York University in Canada, with a double honours BA in English and Creative Writing, where he studied many different forms of literature and poetry. He has had work appear in several publications around the world and has published almost two dozen books though his own publishing house (Stonebunny Press). Mr. Fischer has had work recently appear in (or is slated to appear in) journals such as The Compleat Anachronist (a medievalist journal); magazines such as Scryptic Magazine, Helios Quarterly, NonBinary Review, and The Healing Muse; and anthologies such as Untimely Frost (Lycan Valley Press), and Corporate Cthulhu (Pickman’s Press).
Wile E. Young is an author who not only has a price on his head but also
specializes in southern themed horror stories, both terrifying and
bizarre. His novels include Catfish in the Cradle (2019), The Perfectly Fine House (2020), and the Magpie Coffin (2020). His short stories have been featured in various anthologies
including the Clickers Forever (2018), Behind the Mask- Tales From the Id
(2018), Corporate Cthulhu (2018) and And Hell Followed (2019).
Max D. Stanton is a bookish, morbid Dungeons & Dragons nerd who lives in Philadelphia with his common-law wife and their two savage, unruly hounds. An unexpected meeting with the Devil inspired Max to take up a writing career. His first short story collection, A Season of Loathsome Miracles, is available from Trepidatio Publishing.
Darren writes short fiction full time, along with freelance book editing for Evolved Publications and narrating the occasional audiobook for Audible, Inc. His short fiction has appeared in thirty-one publications over the last twelve years. He has had four plays produced and a non-fiction book published.
While some of his works fall under the literary umbrella, he often returns to horror. His style and reading preferences tend toward the psychological, as he enjoys stories that linger in the imagination long after he's closed the book on them.
He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with his wife and son, and does his best work in coffee shops on a dated word processor.
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Roughly half the stories took a more humorous approach to the concept, which was definitely one of the best ways to go. Some of the humor from the stories going along this line is a little dark, and none of them really made laugh so hard that I rolled on the floor, but I did get a bit of a chuckle out to them.
For me, the best story in this collection going along the humor route was "Facilities Management at Dagocorp HQ" by L Chan, which covers the apparently everyday maintenance problems and complaints that happen in an office operated by shoggoths and other beings that aren't quite human. Coming in second in this category is the story, "Welcome to the R'lyeh Corporation" by James Pratt, which parodies the type of mind-numbing new employ orientations we've all had to go through at least once during our working lives. My pick for third place in the humor category "Clean Up Aisle Four" by Josh Storey, which follows a college dropout who gets a job at a major retail chain and discovers that part of her job involves being the first line of defense against otherworldly abominations that wish to plunge our world into chaos. The story reads like the pilot for a primetime series on the CW, albeit one that would likely get canceled after one or two seasons.
Of course many of the stories approach the theme of this collection with all seriousness and give us true tales of horror. One of the main variations of the theme is the idea that the corporations we all serve in one way or another are no different from the Great Old Ones of the mythos or the cults they serve.
The best story in this category, and honestly the best story in the entire collection in my opinion, is a story centering on Hastur/The King in Yellow called "The Shadows Lengthen in the Close" by Ethan Gibney. The story follows a programer who's company gets acquired by a larger corporation run by worshipers of the Great Old One in question. There's also some romance in the story (and an LGBT romance at that), which makes the ending all the more tragic when we eventually learn the conditions of our unfortunate protagonist's "retirement package". This story has stayed with me for the past few days, and I personally would very much like it if some artist out there made it into a one-shot for a yuri manga anthology.
Coming in at second place in the category of the Great Old Ones and their cults becoming incorporated is "No Doves Come From Raven Eggs" by Mark Oxbrow. This story chronicles how a sect of the Cthulhu Cult manages to survive to modern times by remaking themselves into an energy company that extracts its resources from the deep sea as a way to mask their ultimate goal of freeing their dread lord from his underwater tomb. There are some flaws with this story's execution, but it's still a great example of the idea that one of the cults of the mythos could evolve into something more sinister to hide in the shadows and also control our very lives in some way.
Two more stories worth mentioning in the category of corporate cults are a couple more Hastur/King in Yellow stories. The first is "Incorporation" by Max D. Stanton. The employees of the company in this story don't worship Hastur but rather the Yellow Sign, or "Golden Sign" as it's called in the story; here the sign is depicted as a universal symbol for all forms of the Almighty Dollar. The metaphors are kind of obvious, but the story still pretty much nails the concept on the head. The second of the two Hastur stories worth mentioning in the corporate cult category is a story an unsavory private hospital called "Shadow Charts" by Marcus Johnston. This story might be hard some some to read since it involves elder abuse. It also uses the concept of the eternal feud between Hastur and Cthulhu created by August Derleth, but it uses it pretty successfully.
Another approach taken to the theme of this collection is the idea of corporations attempting to exploit the Great Old Ones or some other Lovecraftian horror to increase their profit margins or improve their corporate image, only to suffer the horrible consequences.
My pick for the best story in this category is "It Came From I.T." by Gordon Linzer. This story tells of a foolish attempt to makes copies of the Shining Trapezohedron from Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark" to sell as a collector's item. Coming in at number two for this category is "Like a Good Neighbor" by Wile E. Young. In this rather imaginative sequel to Lovecraft's "The Horror in the Museum", an insurance company attempts to make the lesser Great Old One, Rhan Tegoth into their mascot. One warning I should give about this second story is that once the madness sets in near the climax, there's a pretty extreme amount of blood, gore and other pretty gross stuff. My pick for third place in this third category is "The Loponine Exploitation" by John M. Campbell. This story begins with the humorous premise of a pharmaceutical company that attempt to exploit matter taken from another dimension to use as a sex drug, only to ensure the wrath of a malevolent entity once worshiped in ancient times as a god.
There are also a couple of stories where the Great Old Once and their cults stand in the way of a company's operations. The best example of this category "Wholesome Labor" by Sam Rent, which tells the story of a fixer for a Walmart-style retail chain trying to prevent the staff of one of their locations going on strike, only to make the horrifying discovery that the staff worships an ancient being far more terrifying than the company's CEO.
Of course there are quite a few stories that follow the concept of this collection's theme a little too loosely. In fact two of them don't really belong in the collection at all. One of these stories is "Career Zombie" by John Taloni. It's the story of an unfortunate office drone who dies at the office while working late, only to come back the next morning as a zombie and later continue working for the company. The only reason this story made it into the collection at all is because the author used the aftermath of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" as the origin point for the world's mild zombie outbreak; it's a cleaver idea, but it hardly makes this story a Cthulhu Mythos story or even a true Lovecraft story. The other story that really shouldn't be in the collection the very last one, "Apotheosis" by Darren Todd. This story takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where companies like Walmart and Google have taken over the military and the government to fight giant monsters that have ravaged the world, but the monsters in question are more like kaiju rather than true Lovecraftian monsters.
To summarize, not every story in this collection is a home run, but there are still plenty of stories in this book that make it worth picking up.
Note: Read a pre-release copy.
Top reviews from other countries

Corporate Cthulhu has a total of 25 stories, which is impressive particularly for the first title from a new publisher, and while many anthologies have ups and downs, or rather some stories that just don’t grab me, I have to say that I enjoyed every single one in this particular collection. Each tale is focused around the same overarching theme - the intersection between the world of spreadsheets, corporate takeovers and layoffs, and the world of Cthulhu, Shoggoths and multi-angular terror – and as with any anthology, I particularly enjoyed a handful of stories. As someone who actually works in a hospital, and in a governance capacity that often deals with vast reams of paperwork, I was instantly drawn to Shadow Charts by Marcus Johnston, one of the first stories in the anthology. The protagonist of the tale, a financial analyst/investigator, travels to a mysterious private hospital to investigate alleged financial corruption, only to be foxed at every turn by perfect records, blank-faced staff and disappearing patients. He eventually uncovers the terrible truth behind the hospital – there is always A Terrible Truth A Price To Be Paid in any Mythos tale – in an intriguing ending which didn’t quite play out as I expected.
Casual Friday by Todd H.C. Fisher is a light and enjoyable tale of the world of corporate interns and the short-lived nature of their employment, which I could sympathise with given my own time as a temp; and Career Zombie, by John Taloni, is a well thought-out and often quite touching tale that examines the concept of being a permanent employee, and how some employers could take that quite literally with the right technology. Esoteric Insurance, Inc,by Evan Dicken & Adrian Ludens is a fantastic story, and one of the best in the entire anthology; how could I not love a story that starts with the protagonist, a lowly insurance agent, regretfully informing a property owner that damage caused by interdimensional Mythos critters isn’t covered by his insurance, and ends with a twist only possible through the proper knowledge and application of corporate HR regulations? It is to be hoped that the authors expand on this tale – either through more short stories, or hopefully a full novel.
There are certainly some stories in Corporate Cthulhu that aren’t as light-hearted or even humorous as some of the ones I’ve highlighted above. Boedromion Noumenia by Andrew Scott shows the dire consequences of tech moguls trying to acquire prestige that mere money cannot, by delving into glyphs and artifacts that should remain undisturbed, and Incorporation by Max D. Stanton deftly twists the worlds of corporate money and world-ending apocalypse together to show that capitalists and cultists can easily find common ground in the desire for money and power. Forced Labor, by Mythos veteran Peter Rawlik, is a slow-burning and thoughtful story that questions the nature of slavery and indentured service and makes uncomfortable, although essential, reading.
However, by far my favourite of all of the stories in the anthology is Dagon-Tec by Adam Millard. It is a short story, perhaps one of the shortest in the collection, and yet I cannot remember laughing so much, or so hard, when reading any other Mythos tale. The plot of Dagon-Tec is almost irrelevant, because within these pages Millard manages to effortlessly lampoon almost every single trope of the Cthulhu Mythos, even going back to Lovecraft himself. From the protagonist writing his story on the back of a cereal box “as I could not for the life of me find a piece of blank paper”, to every character coincidentally having a forename and surname lifted from Lovecraft’s works, and an extended argument around the use and context of the term ‘gibbous’, the author expertly dissects the Mythos genre and the lazy clichés and coincidences that often infest its writing. The anthology is entirely worth the price for this story alone, and if Mr Millard can keep up this level of quality I would expect him to go far in the genre.
In conclusion, Corporate Cthulhu is a brilliant anthology and a huge success for Pickman’s Press, full of high-quality, well-written tales from both new and veteran writersof the Cthulhu Mythos. As of writing it is a mere £2.99 for an eBook copy, which is frankly a steal, and should be picked up by anyone interested in either good Mythos fiction, or just good writing overall.




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