Fortunately, when he is in control, as in ""The Tootsie Roll Factor,"" about a compulsive gambler saved by Lady Luck as an 11-year-old freckled girl, he knows precisely when to stop. Even in a more serious effort at using Lovecraft, the kaleidoscopic ""Discovery of the Ghooric Zone,"" which has an unexpectedly poignant scene of the death of HPL's aunt, Lupoff is compelled to drag in the old pop tune ""Bei Mir Bist du Schon"" for irony. Lovecraft, the author's weakness for Yiddish humor slows down the story. In ""Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley,"" an homage to H.P. ""Lux Was Dead Right"" flounders in a welter of ""inside"" referential puns. Humor is Lupoff's strong suit, for he can be quite funny, though again he can overindulge. Similarly, ""The Second Drug,"" a pastiche of the overwritten, exotic stories of a century ago, is a heavyweight exercise in nostalgia. The opening tale, ""Black Mist,"" about a Japanese space station on a Martian moon, gets bogged down in its Japanese idiom. After some 50 books and 100 short stories, Lupoff has yet to achieve stardom, but he remains a skillful and inventive practitioner of lighter fantasy, as shown in this somewhat mixed collection.
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