Bromley, London, 1994: teenagers trespassing in a construction site uncover human bones and a clay urn hundreds of years old. Robert Chambers, an American forensic pathologist, travels to the British Museum to examine these remains, replacing the museum's previous pathologist, who stabbed out his own eyes after touching the bones. Chambers could be forgiven for refusing such an ominous assignment, but he is no stranger to weird and dangerous artifacts. As part of the Human Protection League, sometimes called the Lovecraft Squad, Chambers is familiar with the otherworldly terrors lurking behind everyday reality, cosmic horrors once published as fiction by H.P. Lovecraft.
The mysterious bones lead to All Hallows Church, an ancient site with a long history of unexplained deaths. Thanks to a meddlesome journalist, Chambers's research turns into a tabloid publicity stunt. He and six others are locked inside the church for four days to conduct a paranormal investigation. Almost as soon as the doors of All Hallows are sealed, that investigation becomes a horrifying descent into madness, death and supernatural abominations beyond the scope of human understanding.
The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror is the first of a promised trilogy written by John Llewellyn Probert and created by Stephen Jones. It sometimes feels like two concepts inorganically fused into one book: partly a story about a secret agency combating cosmic horrors, partly a story about a paranormal investigation that goes hellishly wrong. This jarring duality is, however, overshadowed by what turns into a grisly, gripping tale of terror with roots in medieval English history and Lovecraftian horror. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer