Beyond the Chaos Gate: Lovecraftian Horror

By: Quentin Ravensbane

Narrated by: Larry Gorman

Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

A novel in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft

Vast and Chaotic Demon Gods in dark worlds hunger to enter our Reality. Their coming will mean our extinction.

What if you were forced to believe in the unbelievable?

The fabric of reality is thin in some places.

The FBI assigned agent Garret to investigate the strange murder of an entire family in the small town of Holden. That case was just the beginning. Ian Crane lived in Holden, and he had been psychically sensitive all of his life.

All Garret wished to do was to solve the case, and get the bad guys, but the Killers were faceless, and they were committing the murders as part of some insane ritual. Ian felt a darkness coming, and he knew that it would be the end of all things if they could not stop it.

Garret knew that to catch a killer, you have to think like a killer, but nothing about the motivations for the crimes made any human sense, and strange things were starting to happen everywhere. Ian felt a vast mind coming closer, and he knew that the closer it came, the more the world would change.

Garret did not believe in the supernatural, but the world was changing around him in dark and twisted ways. He knew that the Killers believed in a coming dark god. Could he hold onto his humanity in the inhuman world they were bringing?

Somehow, Garret, Ian, and four of their friends must find a way to defeat the coming Shadow and its disciples, before our fragile world was transformed into an alien hell.

©2017 Quentin Ravensbane (P)2018 Quentin Ravensbane

My First Taste of Cosmic Horror

Very intense story with an ending I was not ready for. The narration was solid except for a few characters, who had the same inflections. Other than that it was an amazing listening experience. I really enjoyed it!

Is there a single contraction in this book

The dialogue is painfull. It is written like a 10th grader trying to fill a page requirement for an essay.
Characters don’t use contractions when they talk.
“I am so very sorry that you are...” and statements to that effect are every line of dialogue spoken.
I can’t decide if the narrator makes it worse by his distinct and spaced pronunciation of each word and the pause in-between.
At three quarters through I’m not sure I can finish.

Had me in the first half ngl

I was frustrated by the characters and the time spent on certain things. I was imagining an ending I wouldn't get that would justify the choices after the fact. Turns out I got the ending I wanted. Very nice food for thought.

okayish

Not great cosmic horror. The characters feel bland and unreal. You find it hard to care if something happens to a main character and the feeling of horror is mostly absent for the majority of the book. The ending however was great in my opinion. Good performance as well.

Weird word usages. Odd inflections

Not a horrible story but it doesn’t flow well phonetically. Too many “we will go” instead of “we’ll go”. No one actually speaks like that. It caused the dialog to come off as robotic.

Cthulhu-COVID-19, RECOMMENDED!

Beyond the Chaos Gate: Lovecraftian Horror
By
Quentin Ravensbane

'Cthulhu-COVID-19' ...going pandemic!

"Beyond the Chaos Gate" is a wonderfully weird Lovecraftian apocalypse that
seems like a episode of a strange 1960’s black & white TV sci-fi horror show.

I say this book is like a vintage Sci-Fi TV show because it’s written with the intelligence of Rod Serling.
It’s plot moves fast (as if it has only one hour to play, yet must fit in 3 commercial breaks) and the narrator’s great ‘announcer voice’ has the old time-y TV sound to it.

Tonight episode:
A small town, (like one you’ve see in an old show of “The Twilight Zone”,)
is beset by strange murders and stranger happenings.
Tonight's show stars: William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Vincent Price, Roddy Mcdowall, and Anne Francis.

An FBI agent (a young William Shatner) rolls into Twilight Zone town.
He be-friends a group of locals, right out of the coffee shop/local pub in that “Twilight Zone” episode about the martians invading. That episode you’d stay up to watch at 12:AM, Saturday night on TV Land.

The friends try to piece together the creepy puzzle pieces of the mysterious murders- like:
1.) An alien, flesh eating virile / fungus is found at each murder-site.
2.) Group murders. Victim’s heads are gone and replaced with Octopi. (the Cthulhu-murders!)
3.) The eight legged sea creatures are 'graphed' onto the dead-bodies at a molecular level.
4.) Finally the dead bodies may, or may not, be 'totally' ...dead!

That’s when this “Twilight Zone” episode gets really CREEPY and turns into something scarier.
More like an episode of “The Outer Limits” - (That's an old TV show that's on even later - like at 3:AM.)
A virile / fungus begins creeping across the world, 'INFECTING' people, animals, plants, ...and reality…changing everything into lovecraftian alien-creatures.

Quarantine, spores, viral-infection, people wearing masks and gloves so they don’t get infected by someone who is infected.
(just like YOU are doing now with the Covis-19 scare going on).
Folks using a flame thrower to burn back the “Fungus Among Us”!

Just the kinda' story you really don't want to hear during a 'Stay-in-&-Stay-Home' in real life pandemic.
The cosmic laws of Order and Chaos begin to trade places, and things start to resemble the daily news on CNN.
All this "BREAKING NEWS" is laced with a nice little 'love-story' oozing into it’s cell-structure.

WARNING:
This tale then takes a very dark downward-spiral turn.

• The only literary hero who has consistently beaten back the amorphous-Mythos Monstrosities of a Lovecratian alien-evil-tude-ness is the heroic main-man of the Sword & Sorcerery books written by Robert E Howard: the dude named "CONAN".
…and I do feel like I could have used some of the 'mighty Conan' coming in at this point in the book and kicking some Cthulhu-ass. - As I said, the book takes a downward turn. So, he don't.

CREEPIEST
The most creepy thing in the book is... the story's events are happening in 'April, 2019'.
That's only one year before the time when I was actually listening to the darned audio book!
So… That's why I rated this book as a cautionary tale.

CAUTION:
This book is Rated ”M” - for "mature audiences"."
This BOOK contains:
Monsters, sexual situations, violence, Weird Timing.
And a Cthulhu-like-19 infection going pandemic on da' world.

I highly recommended this audio book.

If you are desperate for Lovecraftian horror

Generally it’s crap. The writing is very basic with some chapters being almost painful to get through. A misfit complaint was a sudden modern segue into the characters complaining about civil war monuments being pulled down... randomly... out of nowhere...doing nothing to advance the stories or develop the characters. Just randomly dropped into the story as it’s apparently the authors thoughts on the topic coming in.

There is little character development in the story and most of the backstory that comes in just drops in out of nowhere and for little purpose.

The Lovecraftian horror is on the nose, but definitely hit the Lovecraft horror in a modern setting decently well. Thankfully I used a credit on this and and I didn’t take more than 5 hours to get through.