The Old Gods Awaken

When the stars come right, The Old Gods shall rise again!

When a new star appears in the heavens where no star was before, astronomers class it as a supernova and study it with avid interest, but its novelty is soon taken for granted by the general public. Unknown to all, it is the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy in the Necronomicon. When the stars come right, the Old Gods shall rise again from their places of waiting beneath the sea, under the ground, and between the dimensions of space.

The blind idiot, Azathoth, has piped a cosmic song on his cracked flute, and once more the gates of Yog-Sothoth yawn wide to admit nightmares from forgotten ages into our modern world. One by one, they appear in different regions of the globe – Shub-Niggurath in the swamps of Louisiana, Yig in the desert hills of Arizona, Cthulhu on risen R’lyeh, Shoggoths from the mines of the earth, Tsathoggua in the sewers of New Orleans, Dagon and the Deep Ones on the South Sea Islands, the Mi-Go from the depths of space, the Haunter of the Dark through the portal of the shining trapezohedron.

Strange gods and alien races are drawn together to contest for dominion over our world beneath the baneful red glare of the new star, as they fought one another forgotten aeons ago before the evolution of mankind. Which of them shall rule this planet and enslave the human race? Or will the invisible Old Ones finally prevail in their plan to sterilize the surface of our world and wrench it out of its orbit around the sun?

Humans caught up in this cosmic drama find themselves helpless against it, and must fight merely to preserve their lives and their sanity. In all these machinations of battling titans, Nyarlathotep, the servant of Azathoth and the only Old God to take a personal interest in the doings of the human race, shall have a crucial role to play.

H. P. Lovecraft envisioned many terrifying Elder Gods, Old Ones and Deep Ones as part of his Cthulhu Mythos. Donald Tyson has written a series of horrific stories set in that world especially for this volume, in which eleven of these primordial deities from beyond the stars we know are represented—and in which the threats they pose to the continuing existence of humanity are made clear. Or, in some cases, subverted. But take heed of these warnings! A new, menacing red star approaches in the not-so-heavenly heavens.