Cold War Cthulhu

The concept for Cold War Cthulhu is a narrower focus than the premise of Darrell Schweitzer’s first PS anthology, That Is Not Dead. If the Old Ones have been lurking about since elder eons, people should have noticed in periods other the time frame of the original Lovecraft stories. That Is Not Dead took the premise back into remote Antiquity. Cold War Cthulhu brings it forward to the period of about 1950-1989.

Surely with all that spying and top secret research both the CIA and the KGB must have known something about the eldritch forces that haunt our planet and tried to make use of everything from dimensional gates to Deep Ones to Shoggoths. But at the same time this is all secret history, not alternate history. Many of the readers lived through this period and we know that Cthulhu did not rise and devastate the world any more than Godzilla really stomped Tokyo. We what really happened? The stories were required to dovetail into known and remembered history, even though what happened behind the scenes and undercover may be very different from what the public was aware of.

Contents

Introduction: Nyarlathotep at Checkpoint Charlie by Darrell Schweitzer
1. Cold Warrior by Geoffrey Hart
2. Red Star at R’lyeh by Susan Shwartz
3. Beyond the Couch by Don Webb
4. Project NAHAB by Stephen Woodworth
5. A Resonant Darkness by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
6. Ghost Station Zero by Robert Jeschonek
7. Innsmouth Vulgaris by Tim Curran
8. The Skywatchers by Paul Di Filippo
9. The Iceworm Cometh by Gordon Linzner
10. Spheres by Harry Turtledove
11. The Cosmic Congregation by Will Murray
12. The Well by Tim Lees
13. L’Appel du Vide by Amdi Silvestri
14. The Endless Black Cathedral by Nicholas Kaufmann
15. A Simpler Solution by Frank Schildiner
16. Midnight Climax by Cody Goodfellow
17. My Best Friend the Spy by Darrell Schweitzer
18. Café of the World by Don Webb
19. The Deepwater Incident by Adrian Cole