Drinks by Deity: Eldritch

Fifty-odd tales of men driven past the edge of what a mind will hold, and not one of them pours anything. That absence is this volume rather than a gap in it. These are drinks for somebody who has seen something and cannot explain it.

Fifty entries. Fifty drinks. Not one measurement anywhere in it.

That is the format, not an oversight. No ounces, no shots, no parts, no jigger and no shaker. Every drink here is built in the bottle the mixer came in: you pour some off to make room, you put things in, you put the cap back on and turn it over. Quantity is the container. You already know how to do this.

What replaces the measurement is the flavour. In a measured drink the design lives in the ratios; here it lives in which product and which variant, so every ingredient in this book names one. That is also why the spirit is written generically. It says vodka, or green apple vodka, and never a brand, because in a drink carrying candy and fruit punch the bottle you bought is a price signal and not a flavour decision.

Cthulhu is not dead and is not asleep, and the distinction is the whole problem. He gets Still Awake.

The cats of Ulthar hold a town where killing one is a capital offence, and they voted on it themselves. They get Midnight Census, and there is nothing in it.

Herbert West kept getting the formula almost right, which was considerably worse than getting it wrong. He gets Failed Reagent.

Every entry gets two facing pages and nothing is continued overleaf. What it was on the left, the drink on the right. You never turn the page in the middle of making something.

Ten of the fifty have no alcohol in them at all and nothing put in their place. They are not shoved in an appendix at the back, because they are entries. They are marked in the contents and listed together at the end for whoever is driving.

Everything here comes from Lovecraft's own stories and nothing from the writers who extended his world afterwards, which is why several famous names are missing. He was also a racist, in one story load-bearingly so, and this book names that story and says so rather than quietly skipping it.

One of eight. Norse, Greek, Eldritch, Egyptian, Aztec, Japanese, Polynesian and Mesopotamian.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. The second oldest is wanting a drink about it.