New tales about everyone’s favorite occult detective, Carnacki, originally created by William Hope Hodgson. I first encountered Carnacki via Hodgson’s super-creepy “The Whistling Room”, and later found a paperback collection of the other Carnacki stories.

Overall, I think that Meikle’s Carnacki fits quite well with Hodgson’s. I saw a review somewhere where the reviewer was complaining that none of the stories had mundane explanations, as some of Hodgson’s did. Meikle actually hangs a lampshade on that fact in “The Sisters of Mercy”, when his Jessop (one of Carnacki’s small circle of friends who form the audience for his stories) says, “I do hope this is not one of those tales where the perpetrators are no more than people in silly masks.”

There’s a fair amount of repeated text in these stories, courtesy of Carnacki’s detailed explanation of the pentacles he uses for protection, which are always exactly the same. You might think that Carnacki, speaking to the same group of people to whom he's told dozens or more of these stories, could just say something along the lines of, "Then I set up my standard protections, the chalk pentacle and then my electric pentacle, as I always do," but Meikle follows in Hodgson's footsteps by including the whole spiel. (To be fair, when any of these stories appeared on their own, you probably couldn't assume that every reader would know the background elements, so you would need to include them, but in reading a whole collection of these stories, it can be a bit wearing.)

Meikle also introduces a couple of new pieces of kit—an electrified Faraday cage that can act as an even stronger protection against occult forces than his electric pentacle (which always seems to be sparking, or blowing out, or running its battery down), and a very cool use of phonographs/grammophones. The cage and that tool makes an impressive showing in the last story, "The Dark Island", which also features a significant expansion of our knowledge about the malevolent beings from Hodgson's "The Hog" and a bit of a tour through Hodgson's _The House on The Borderland_ and _The Night Land_.

If you liked Hodgson's Carnacki, Meikle's will feel like your old friend. Although I might have liked a bit less repetition, it's consistent with Hodgson's approach (which you'll also find in some of his other story cycles, especially the seemingly endless minor variants of the Sargasso Sea stories). And Meikle's Carnacki breaks a bit with tradition by picking up some new lore here and there, coming up with some new technological approaches to several of the situations, and even screwing up and redeeming himself a couple of times. I think that his audience seem a bit more active in Meikle's stories, as well, with both Jessop and Arkwright feeling more fleshed out than ever. (Alas, we don't get much more insight into Dodgson, who is our source for these stories.) ( )