Down the Arches of the Years by Lee Allred

Down the Arches of the Years Reviews

• 
  Liz Busby

  Lee Allred's work seems to have its own specific genre: steampunk fantasy alternate history with a dash of cosmic horror. If that seems like a lot to fit into a short story, it sometimes is. These stories are crammed with details and ideas that seem to come a mile a minute, leaving less space for character arcs and descriptive prose. You have to be in it for the clever ideas and the twists that the author makes to existing historical ideas. But after reading the collection, I have no doubt that Lee Allred is going places; he's really utilizing the resources of his Mormon heritage to inform unique and exciting worldbuilding.
  
  Some comments on specific stories in the collection:
  
  "Murmuration of a Darkening Sea" is the most straightforward cosmic horror story of the bunch. It won its way into my heart by being set in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, which I have a lot of nostalgia for. Probably the most classic and universal of the stories in the collection.
  
  "Nice Timestream Youse Got Here," "Suppose They Gave a Ragnarok and Nobody Came?," and "Pirate Gold for Brother Brigham" comprise a humorous trio. The central conceit of "Nice Timestream" made me laugh out loud and triggered some author envy (why didn't I think of that?). "Ragnarok" and "Pirate Gold" are wacky and a bit silly, but definitely original.
  
  "Where Nothing Lives but Crosses" presents an interesting Mormon twist on the vampire genre. "New England's God" begins the more historical portion of the collection, presenting a combination of freemasonry, cosmic horror, and Revolutionary War history. The result is a believable "secret history," one of my favorite types of alternate history.
  
  "Lump of Clay," a Civil War story, is perhaps my favorite in the collection. If you're familiar with Jewish folklore, you can guess from the beginning the ultimate route this story will take, but the execution of the magic system has a particular Mormon flair that really fulfilled it for me.
  
  The last section of the collection contains several longer stories that are all part of a shared Clockwork Deseret universe in which the protagonists use a combination of folk-magic and steampunk technology to fight against Cthulhu-like threats. Though the name Deseret implies a Mormon worldview, only the first two stories are prominently LDS ("Can Such Things Be?" and "Tracting Out Cthulhu"), while the other stories ("Naught But Death Stands Fast," and "An Imperial Rescript") develop a similar magic system using British and French folk magic traditions. "Tracting Out Cthulhu" also lays out a Japanese version, resulting in a truly world-wide conception of the fight against cosmic evil. I hope that this worldbuilding makes its way into a longer novel as it felt a bit crowded in the short story length, but the ideas are undoubtably fascinating--and hilarious! I loved the reuse of the Dorian Grey concept.
  
  Overall, I am happy to have finally become familiar with Lee Allred's work and will definitely be following his future work as a unique creator in the speculative Mormon fiction space.
• 
  Nihonjoe

  All of the stories are solid. I really enjoyed reading this.