Song of Carcosa is Josh Reynolds' third book about the highbrow thief and occult adventuress Alessandra Zorzi in the interwar period. But it it is not just a sequel to the other two books. It picks up a number of threads about the Red Coterie established in the Arkham Horror Card Game campaign The Scarlet Keys and its related volume of short fiction Secrets in Scarlet. As signaled by the title, it is also connected with the jauniste lore of The King in Yellow (much of it rehearsed in the card game in The Path to Carcosa).

The Venice setting of this novel flows naturally from the previous books, and it is Zorzi's birthplace. Naturally, it glances at the content of the card game scenario Carnevale of Horrors with the same location. More surprisingly, it very thoroughly puts to use the contents of Terror in Venice, a deluxe expansion from the out-of-print Call of Cthulhu Card Game. (If this older product reflected earlier characters and notions created for the Call of Cthulhu tabletop role-playing game, I have been unable to find published evidence of them.)

Given this heroic synthesis of game materials, the actual story here is gratifyingly coherent. It centers on the rescue of Alessandra's apprentice Pepper, who had "seen the Yellow Sign" in Paris in the previous volume. Pepper has become identified with Camilla, and is gradually being drawn into Carcosa through dreams and visions. Three different occult factions are vying for supremacy in Venice, and the most aggressive of them is seeking to instantiate the reign of the King in Yellow in the city, an event to be catalyzed with a performance of the eponymous cursed play.

Where the Call of Cthulhu Card Game eschewed the topical inclusion of Fascists in 1920s Italy when Terror in Venice was published over a decade ago, Song of Carcosa adds them in as yet another feature of the Venetian conflict. I appreciate the greater historical honesty, and I still have to wonder about excluding such human monsters from a game that routinely foregrounded "evil cultists" of other sorts. Reynolds explicitly invokes the totalitarian aspect of the King in Yellow, although the Fascisti are not aligned with it. They are made into competing impulses to exploit a cultural moment in which Europe seems anxious to give itself up to malign powers.

Song of Carcosa is dedicated to "Joe Pulver, who showed me the wonders of Carcosa." Pulver has edited a couple of admirable multi-author anthologies of jauniste fiction: A Season in Carcosa and Cassilda's Song. He also has a collection of his own work in this vein, The King in Yellow Tales, vol. 1.