Rivals of Weird tales Book

Since I had recently finished Williamson's classic Darker Than You Think, I figured I'd check my list of "stories to be read" and polish off anything short by him. There was only one tale and though "short" it was not (really, it's a novella), I got it off the web and read it. I'm putting the review here because "why not?" but please note "Wolves Of Darkness" is the only thing I read in this no doubt fine anthology (well, technically that's not true, I've also read 5 other stories here, but not recently enough to have reviews in my head).

So, "Wolves Of Darkness" - well, it's certainly pulp, in both the positive sense that it's a cracking weird mystery sci-fi horror fantasy hybrid, and in the negative sense that it's repetitive, action-focused and mostly surface level stuff. But then you don't really read pulp for literary depth, right? For a good yarn, sure, and for occasional flashes of visionary oddness and resonant strangeness...

A man arrives in a lonely, snow-bound West Texas town in answer to a strangely worded telegram from his scientist father. The locals live in fear of a weird wolf-pack that haunts the area, killing people and seemingly running alongside human beings. Eventually, our hero discovers his father and female assistant out on the farm acting strangely, with chalk white skin and glowing green eyes, assisted by a pack of similarly-orbed wolves, and the smashed remains of an experimental multi-dimensional gateway machine in the now-enormous basement.

While this is a good example of the weirdness the pulps could get up to (black onyx chambers lit with low red lights, an inter-dimensional view of a black-light city populated by fiendish shadow creatures, a woman chewing into a man's leg as a form of torture) it's also a good example of how frustrating they can be to read (and I'm a man who likes 19th century literature!) - endless repetition and circular plotting, the by-now-obvious stated baldly, little sense of atmosphere, mystery or larger resonances. Williamson is better at it than most, I'll give him that, and he does occasionally generate a weird atmosphere (the leg-chewing scene is unexpected and shocking, the view through the portal is weird and Lovecraftian - if over-written, and the setting and blizzard paralyzed town are nicely atmospheric) but, on the other hand, this isn't any different than some sci-fi potboiler movie in the end. Lack of realistic characters is probably a big culprit in this feeling. Worth reading if you like pulps but if you're just a horror fan surveying the field, not essential.