What do you think?
Rate this book
CVLT OF CTHXS
289 pages, Paperback
Published February 27, 2024
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 28, 2025
What is this book about? “The past is a root system. And you’ve been standing on it.”
Bam Barrow’s CVLT of CTHXS feels like contamination rather than publication. The book reads like a forgotten manuscript unearthed from the bramble of a Suffolk bog; heavy with grief, fungal dread, and ancestral violence. I can say, only a handful of horror works I’ve read conjure an atmosphere so thick it practically resists parsing like Ligotti’s The Last Feast of Harlequin or Evenson’s The Warren or Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl. Like Barrow, these writers let you drown in the atmosphere they built them. And the atmosphere reminds me of a video game called Silent Hill.
In this book, Suffolk and Norfolk’s fields and forests, heaths and hamlets, act like porous membranes between worlds. Fog, sigils, bramble, and bone recur as topographical glyphs, hinting at unseen geometries buried in the land. Barrow’s mythos are like pollen. You inhale it before you understand it’s already altered you.
In “The Forgotten Heath,” in the collection, a boy’s birthday journey turns mythic and monstrous as he stumbles upon six ghostly figures and an unholy mound of ancient runes. His life, family, and sanity curdle in slow motion from that moment forward. Told as a posthumous letter to a confidante, the story unfolds like a suicide note marinated in folklore and blood memory. Each sentence walks the reader deeper into a realm where metaphor collapses into biology.
Barrow’s cast rarely fits genre expectations. No priests with relics, no academic occultists armed with footnotes. Instead, the police detectives, field nurses, widowers, children on bicycles go missing, spiral, vanish, or mutate. The horror thrives in kitchens, train stations, and graveyards. In “A Calamity in Croxton”, we follow a London detective sent to investigate a seaside disappearance. What unfolds is a metaphysical unraveling. Reality folds under the pressure of something older than human time. There are songs in the tide, voices in the chalk cliffs. By the end, the mystery is how long you can survive proximity to the truth. This emphasis on the everyday anchors Barrow’s more esoteric moves.
Barrow's prose leans hard into density. The style feels like an incantation. The sentences often lurch forward in a dream-hung gait, heavy with repetition, arcane diction, and sensory corrosion. Readers may stagger, but that seems to be the point. To exhumate deep into you. What might feel overwritten in lesser hands becomes a necessary register here and Barrow, skillfully, writes the way cursed things speak. Still, there’s a wry British humor leaks through: characters bicker about bus routes, complain about dogs, fumble through conversations about the unnameable. This tension between the cosmic and the quotidian gives the collection a strange moral elasticity. No heroes. Just meat, memory, and momentary defiance.
“Cathexis,” in Freudian terms, marks the intense emotional fixation upon an object or idea. In Barrow’s hands, it becomes a metaphysical disease of obsession. The “cult” never gathers in robes or chants Latin but it grows like moss in the cracks of a shared trauma. The horror unfolds as a metaphoric inheritance: a taproot of despair threading through generations. For me, I felt it is an unspoken reckoning with Britain’s fractured identity, refracted through the hallucinatory lens of folk horror. The rotting heath, the disappearing villages, and the eldritch infestations can be read as allegories for a post-Brexit UK trapped between nostalgia and entropy. Barrow’s England is one that has mythologized its own decline. The recurring motif of forgotten places can reflect the cultural abandonment of peripheral regions in favor of metropolitan narratives. In this light, the ghasts and root-creatures are expressions of a collective psychic wound; what festers when entire communities are cut off from the future yet burdened by an inescapable, mythic past.
There’s something unmistakably political in Barrow’s invocation of decay as inheritance. The “Infallible Hand” that governs this cosmology feels like an invisible ruling class who is unreachable, unknowable, and yet omnipresent, pulling strings through forgotten rituals and bureaucratic silence. The cults and closed systems resemble the mechanisms of power that entrap working-class characters in generational cycles of despair. In this sense, CVLT of CTHXS can be read as a spectral map of British austerity and all stories symbolizing the unchecked spread of trauma under the guise of tradition. There's no preaching in this book but conjure and what it conjures is a country unraveling in its soil.
My favorite quotes:
“They come and go as they please, and they judge not. They could tear me apart in an instant, remove all memory of my being from everyone I hold dear and then disappear again like nothing ever happened.”
— Prologue
“If you open the gates of hell, don't be surprised when you find the devil smiling back at you.”
— Prologue
“Some things are guided into fruition, whether through fate or proposed chaos. Some things just are, much to the chagrin of those who would seek to manipulate the situation in order to dominate the lives of others for their own power.”
— Mad Shadow
“They looked inside me, right into my very spirit and in that moment I knew without any doubt that I was utterly insignificant in this world.”
— The Forgotten Heath
“Could you, perhaps, show me the seed which bore the tree?”
— Codex CTHXS
“Today we bite the fingers from the hand that feeds us and await our blissful oblivion.”
— Madness at Sykkyt Naath
“The festering disease growing in-between the tumours of your womb I hear them squirm… no longer.”
— Madness at Sykkyt Naath
“We are lashed as the pendulum on the swinging string flitting between unending pain and crushing mundanity wishing that we had never come into being in the first place.”
— Lenoir’s Lament
“Nothing but whispers and shadows remain I'm afraid.”
— The Forgotten Heath
“I am not a relic. I am not a talisman. I am a human being. The pain is just as unbearable as the moment it was revealed to me, however long ago. It never sleeps.”
— The Night of Stifled Tears
Bam Barrow’s CVLT of CTHXS feels like contamination rather than publication. The book reads like a forgotten manuscript unearthed from the bramble of a Suffolk bog; heavy with grief, fungal dread, and ancestral violence. I can say, only a handful of horror works I’ve read conjure an atmosphere so thick it practically resists parsing like Ligotti’s The Last Feast of Harlequin or Evenson’s The Warren or Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl. Like Barrow, these writers let you drown in the atmosphere they built them. And the atmosphere reminds me of a video game called Silent Hill.
In this book, Suffolk and Norfolk’s fields and forests, heaths and hamlets, act like porous membranes between worlds. Fog, sigils, bramble, and bone recur as topographical glyphs, hinting at unseen geometries buried in the land. Barrow’s mythos are like pollen. You inhale it before you understand it’s already altered you.
In “The Forgotten Heath,” in the collection, a boy’s birthday journey turns mythic and monstrous as he stumbles upon six ghostly figures and an unholy mound of ancient runes. His life, family, and sanity curdle in slow motion from that moment forward. Told as a posthumous letter to a confidante, the story unfolds like a suicide note marinated in folklore and blood memory. Each sentence walks the reader deeper into a realm where metaphor collapses into biology.
Barrow’s cast rarely fits genre expectations. No priests with relics, no academic occultists armed with footnotes. Instead, the police detectives, field nurses, widowers, children on bicycles go missing, spiral, vanish, or mutate. The horror thrives in kitchens, train stations, and graveyards. In “A Calamity in Croxton”, we follow a London detective sent to investigate a seaside disappearance. What unfolds is a metaphysical unraveling. Reality folds under the pressure of something older than human time. There are songs in the tide, voices in the chalk cliffs. By the end, the mystery is how long you can survive proximity to the truth. This emphasis on the everyday anchors Barrow’s more esoteric moves.
Barrow's prose leans hard into density. The style feels like an incantation. The sentences often lurch forward in a dream-hung gait, heavy with repetition, arcane diction, and sensory corrosion. Readers may stagger, but that seems to be the point. To exhumate deep into you. What might feel overwritten in lesser hands becomes a necessary register here and Barrow, skillfully, writes the way cursed things speak. Still, there’s a wry British humor leaks through: characters bicker about bus routes, complain about dogs, fumble through conversations about the unnameable. This tension between the cosmic and the quotidian gives the collection a strange moral elasticity. No heroes. Just meat, memory, and momentary defiance.
“Cathexis,” in Freudian terms, marks the intense emotional fixation upon an object or idea. In Barrow’s hands, it becomes a metaphysical disease of obsession. The “cult” never gathers in robes or chants Latin but it grows like moss in the cracks of a shared trauma. The horror unfolds as a metaphoric inheritance: a taproot of despair threading through generations. For me, I felt it is an unspoken reckoning with Britain’s fractured identity, refracted through the hallucinatory lens of folk horror. The rotting heath, the disappearing villages, and the eldritch infestations can be read as allegories for a post-Brexit UK trapped between nostalgia and entropy. Barrow’s England is one that has mythologized its own decline. The recurring motif of forgotten places can reflect the cultural abandonment of peripheral regions in favor of metropolitan narratives. In this light, the ghasts and root-creatures are expressions of a collective psychic wound; what festers when entire communities are cut off from the future yet burdened by an inescapable, mythic past.
There’s something unmistakably political in Barrow’s invocation of decay as inheritance. The “Infallible Hand” that governs this cosmology feels like an invisible ruling class who is unreachable, unknowable, and yet omnipresent, pulling strings through forgotten rituals and bureaucratic silence. The cults and closed systems resemble the mechanisms of power that entrap working-class characters in generational cycles of despair. In this sense, CVLT of CTHXS can be read as a spectral map of British austerity and all stories symbolizing the unchecked spread of trauma under the guise of tradition. There's no preaching in this book but conjure and what it conjures is a country unraveling in its soil.
My favorite quotes:
“They come and go as they please, and they judge not. They could tear me apart in an instant, remove all memory of my being from everyone I hold dear and then disappear again like nothing ever happened.”
— Prologue
“If you open the gates of hell, don't be surprised when you find the devil smiling back at you.”
— Prologue
“Some things are guided into fruition, whether through fate or proposed chaos. Some things just are, much to the chagrin of those who would seek to manipulate the situation in order to dominate the lives of others for their own power.”
— Mad Shadow
“They looked inside me, right into my very spirit and in that moment I knew without any doubt that I was utterly insignificant in this world.”
— The Forgotten Heath
“Could you, perhaps, show me the seed which bore the tree?”
— Codex CTHXS
“Today we bite the fingers from the hand that feeds us and await our blissful oblivion.”
— Madness at Sykkyt Naath
“The festering disease growing in-between the tumours of your womb I hear them squirm… no longer.”
— Madness at Sykkyt Naath
“We are lashed as the pendulum on the swinging string flitting between unending pain and crushing mundanity wishing that we had never come into being in the first place.”
— Lenoir’s Lament
“Nothing but whispers and shadows remain I'm afraid.”
— The Forgotten Heath
“I am not a relic. I am not a talisman. I am a human being. The pain is just as unbearable as the moment it was revealed to me, however long ago. It never sleeps.”
— The Night of Stifled Tears
October 7, 2024
In CVLT OF CTHXS, Bam Barrow weaves a narrative that feels both centuries old and new at once. Stories built on a foundation of cosmic otherness and steeped in eldritch lore, that once read, infects the imagination with wonder and woe. Highly recommended!
March 22, 2024
Bam Barrow’s follow up to Arcanum Fabulas has two of my favourite elements – a series of interconnected stories and a tightly integrated cosmic horror mythos that’s both familiar yet horribly original. I loved how various characters and places reappear both in the past and future, intertwined in strange and wondrous ways. There is a nice variety of story structures, with always tantalizing chapter introductions, and prose that brings to mind Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft, with shades of Ligotti in some and Laird Barron in others.
Not every story hits it out of the park, but overall it’s a solid work with stories like A Calamity at Croxton, The Eldritch Six, Outbreak at the Outpost, Black Maggots of the Urchin Church and Lady Void standing out for me. Definitely worth a read.
Not every story hits it out of the park, but overall it’s a solid work with stories like A Calamity at Croxton, The Eldritch Six, Outbreak at the Outpost, Black Maggots of the Urchin Church and Lady Void standing out for me. Definitely worth a read.
April 22, 2024
This one I loved. One delicious bunch of intertwined gothic horror stories. Spans time from pre-history to present with fascinating recurring characters. My favorite stories were: A Calamity in Croxton, The Eldritch Six, Outbreak at the Outpost. A perfectly creepy read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews