Copping Squid

A convenience store clerk is pressed into a late-night errand by a strange customer with cash and urgency, driven out to the coast to witness a rite in honour of a god that rises from the sea. Shea, a modern master of the weird, writes the Mythos in a wholly contemporary American voice, neon and asphalt and a working man swept into something vast and old.

The horror is not distance but proximity, the sense that the ancient worship never stopped, that it is carried on tonight by ordinary people a short drive from the till. It stands here for the living tradition that keeps the old dread moving, and is credited to Michael Shea. The Archive sets it swinging, the old worship met on a modern night road.