Titus Crow is a kind of Sherlock Holmes of the paranormal set-somewhat detached in personality, possessed of estimable smarts, intermittently psychic and given to prescient dreams. The book wouldn’t be so frustrating in its clumsiness and stultifying dullness if the set up didn’t have so much potential. Pivotal leads? Deft characterization? Thrilling plot developments? Bah, says Lumley, measuring you for a coffin in the shape of a book, what do you need with story when you have all this comfy padding? Some of its twists and turns offer a tantalizing glimpse of story before throwing you back into heaps of digressive references. The narrative winds like a maze through a library piled high with dusty grimoires and faux-historical records, never revealing a definitive shape and dead-ending in a featureless wall of text. On evidence of this book, Lumley is more of an addled mythos encyclopediast than a storyteller. I’ve elected to start this experiment in casual criticism with The Burrowers Beneath, the first entry in the six book Titus Crow series by Brian Lumley. Given the nature of the Nightscape series, I thought it might be of interest to offer the occasional review of other, similarly Lovecraftian works.
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