Dark Gods

It is difficult to overestimate the impact these tales made as they appeared one by one in anthologies, starting in 1979 and culminating in the novella that capped the collection in 1985. Taking the merest hints from Machen and Lovecraft, Klein develops realms of inexorable, insidious threat, which his cast of otherwise ordinary people either never suspected or fail to recognize until it is too late.

Imagine: attempting to reach a loved one during the chaos of the 1977 New York Blackout and suddenly encountering the thrice-cursed “Children of the Kingdom” …following the Tarot cards that counterpoint the irony-laden chitchat of the people who displaced a raving old man from the cryptic “Petey”…living with the nightmarish truth behind your mentor’s fiction as you await the “Black Man with a Horn” …or discovering, in “Nadelman’s God," that the nihilistic deity you committed to paper decades ago in a fit of adolescent pique has found a zealous new acolyte.

Klein’s supple, deceptively simple prose is as capable of wit as it is of dread as he gradually lifts the veil separating his meticulously described contemporary world from the dark worlds of uncertainty and horror that impinge upon it.