Secure The Sign Of Glaaki Curated By Steven Savile Displayed In Manuscript

from more than a few flaws and pet peeves, "The Sign of Glaaki," by Steven Savile and Steve Lockley, was an entertaining read for fans of the Arkham Horror board game and H.
P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

Though, if I had to say, I would assert that this book has much more in common with the "Call of Cthulhu" roleplaying game than it does with Arkham Horror.
The tone of this novel is much more bleak and dark than most of the other Arkham Horror books.
Plus, it references very little from the actual board game it's supposed to be an extension of.


Like "Feeders From Within," this book is a standalone novel, Considering the mess that was made of the "Lord of Nightmares" Arkham Horror "trilogy" recently, I think standalone books may be for the best for the folks over at Fantasy Flight Publishing.


In "The Sign of Glaaki," a Brit named Dennis Wheatley comes to Dunwich to aid Harry Houdini with the production of a movie about "reallife" freaks, like the Tod Browning film from.
Max Shreck, the first man to play a vampire onscreen in F, W. Murnau'ssilent film "Nosferatu" also shows up along the way,

side note: The peculiarities of Max Shreck and the production of the film "Nosferatu" are depicted in the yearfilm, "Shadow of the Vampire" with Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich.


So there are more appearances from reallife figures of the time than there are the Arkham Horror characters we players know and love.
The lone character who shows up is Joe Diamond, the private eye, He doesn't have a main role in the story, but he does provide aid to Wheatley and Houdini from time to time.


Why Houdini recruits Wheatley in the first place is never made clear, Wheatley wants to escape to America because he was somehow involved in covering for a murderer who killed his best friend.
That plot, other than to make the Arkham police suspicious of Wheatley later on, goes pretty much nowhere.


In "The Sign of Glaaki," Dunwich is covered in a thick, evil fog, and in that fog are many twisted and freakish worshippers of Glaaki mixed in with the "normal" freaks trying to get into the movie.
Yet even though the book is called "The Sign of Glaaki" and that "sign" shows up a number of times, said sign is never described or depicted clearly.
And the chanting of "Glaaki" by the cultists is a bit over done, And I'm sorry, it really doesn't sound like the clacking of mandibles, like the author says, no matter how many times I say it aloud.


And naming the main character "Wheatley" when one of the main antagonists is from the often corrupt and bizarre "Whateley" family just seems pointless if it doesn't lead anywhere.
. . and it doesn't.

side note: Here's a big pet peeve of mine, . . SO many books lately including this one have glaring errors in them, . . and not just these Arkham Horror novels, I'm pretty sure spellcheck has replaced actual proofreading by intelligent individuals, So words that are spelled properly yet are wrong in context show up about a dozen times in this novel.


The basic plot is simplethe worshippers of Glaaki want to sacrifice people to their god and bring him forth.
Houdini and Wheatley must track down the murderous cultists and stop them, Or that's what the plot seems to be, Yet the murder that attracts the heroes attention at the beginning is never quite explained, It wasn't a sacrifice like the others later in the novel, And as the "shocking" film revealed at the end of the book shows, Glaaki did rise, . . probably before Houdini and Wheatley were on the case, And nothing happened other than Glaaki rising. Shrug.

The authors seem to just want to throw as many different, tangentially related plots as they can at the reader and hope that the instances of the grotesque and the episodes of high adventure will distract from the fact that the book doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.
All in all, "The Sign of Glaaki" is a fun read, But if you pull the threads of the various plots, it all unravels pretty quickly,

This was an interesting solo AH story, Dennis Wheatley and Harry Houdini as protagonists, Interesting it plays out in multiple parts as a movie since it's about a movie being made where something has been seen that shouldn't have been.
. . maybe GLAAKI, GLAAKI, GLAAKI! What lies beneath the lake! Can they solve the mystery of the deaths on the set of the film, or will they become the next victims Ramps up over time until you get to the end and get a surprise.
. . Poorly writen, without much connection while the story goes on, making no sense, One of the worst books I've ever read I'm happy it only cost me! I thought that this was an entertaining read.
The plot was original. The story was compelling. It was an Art

Imitates Life story about a series of murders near Arkham about a Monster killing people on the set of a movie where a Monster kills people.
This book started out fairly well, It had some elements of the game on which it was based and a good murder mystery.
However, as the story progressed, I was unable to find a main storyline, truth be told, I was not sure where it was going.
The main characters of which I will speak of later seemed to be searching everywhere for anything without making much progress.
The main idea of a cult of freaks was transpiring as the story progressed, but they did not seem that dangerous.
This may due to the fact that one of the main character was none other than Houdini.
While it is an interesting choice, Houdini barely seemed to be surprised by anything, always on top of things and always knowing exactly what to do and where to go.
He even survived drowning at the ends of cultists, which seemed a bit far fetched to me.
while I understand that it is Houdini the escapologist we are talking about, this was an act and thus would have been an amazing feat.
In my humble opinion, he was a bit too invincible as far as characters participating in Cthulhu mythos go.
The second character, Dennis Wheatley, seemed to be only along for the ride, He had a few good ideas and proved resourceful at times, but compared to what Houdini could do and how fast he thought, Wheatley seemed a weak character.
The story itself, as I mentioned, did not lend itself well to the kind of stories I am used to reading in the Arkham Horror series.
I found the other books very good, but this one seem a bit apart and while I admire the fact that the cult mentality was well rendered, I feel that more would have been needed to make this a good book.
Maybe there was some length constraint in writing this book, I do not know, but it turned out to be a bit disappointing.
A lot of things happened in the last few pages of the book that make the pace go faster, but nevertheless, the ending is in line with the rest of the book and seems to be missing a bit of finishing touch in my opinion.
.