Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos Read online

  I do not believe we can completely dismiss Derleth’s interpretations of Lovecraft, and this for two reasons. Just as an earlier generation of critics sought to strip away Derleth’s reinterpretations so that Lovecraft’s bold conceptions might clearly be seen, I believe the time has come to recognize that these critics themselves unwittingly caricatured both Derleth and Lovecraft.

  Derleth was closer to Lovecraft, and Lovecraft veered closer to what they deem Derleth’s abuses, than Mosigian critics can admit.

  For our purposes this entails the recognition that for the Lovecraft Mythos to continue to evolve and develop by the addition not only of new gods and new grimoires, but also by the stretching and adapting of Lovecraft’s original concepts is by no means alien to Lovecraft’s intentions. How could it be, when Lovecraft had explicitly blessed such additions as his letters to Kuttner, Derleth, and others reveal? Again a critic may reply, and some have, that Lovecraft was simply being polite. In other words, again, he was just kidding. And how do we know when he was kidding? When he failed to conform to the abstraction we have of his thought, when he didn’t say what he should have said.

  Such, then, is the Mythos, and the debate over it. Now what of the book you are holding? As I have gladly admitted already, this Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos is an homage, thirty years after the untimely death of August Derleth (July 4, 1971), to his important collection Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Many readers, like myself, no doubt found that volume great fun. We were latter-day Lovecraftians, initiated into the wonders of Weird Tales thirty years after the fact through the paperback revival of the 1960s. While our older brothers and sisters were out protesting Cambodia and Vietnam, we were hanging around reading Conan, Doc Savage, and of course Lovecraft. We may have felt ourselves Outsiders, like Lovecraft, born out of our proper time. Only, unlike him, we felt we belonged not in the Eighteenth Century, but rather in the fourth decade of our own, when we might have bought pulps off the newsstand and even struck up an epistolary friendship with the Old Gent himself, as whippersnappers our own age actually managed to do in those golden years!

  As we got our hands on those eye-torturing small-print Arkham House books, we became aware of August Derleth, too. We knew he had carried on after Lovecraft’s death, much as L. Sprague de Camp had taken it upon himself to continue the saga of Robert E. Howard’s Conan. But until the publication of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,who in our Johnny-come-lately generation could have guessed the dimensions of the movement Lovecraft had spawned! There was a whole school! A whole cult! Soon we had read all there was by Lovecraft, and until enough time had passed for us to be able to re-read Lovecraft afresh, there were all these other Lovecraft-like tales to be read! At least it was better (though in some cases not by much!) than reading the lame fan pastiches we and our pals dashed off!

  For some of us, the delight of reading Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was so great that we would in later years go to some trouble to read any other Mythos fiction we could dig up. It was always fun, even if not always of sterling quality. I have always felt a kind of historical interest in seeing how the whole sprawling thing developed. Thus I have welcomed new collections of old or new material in this vein. New anthologies like Edward Paul Berglund’s Disciples of Cthulhu(1976) and Ramsey Campbell’s New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980) were great treats, and then James Turner updated Derleth’s volume, rounding up some of the better Mythos-inspired items that had appeared in the years since the first publication, but that hadn’t made it into Campbell’s or Berglund’s collections.

  All of which leads me, at long last, to the reason for and the logic of the present collection, which I hope you will place on the shelf alongside the Mythos collections just named.

  Cthulhu Mythos fiction has burgeoned in the years since Derleth’s original collection. But even in the late 60s there was already an embarrassment of riches, and as a result Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos could be no more than a sampler. My goal in assembling the present collection is, in effect, to go back and do again what August Derleth did: to assemble a flagship Mythos collection that he might as well have assembled. It is an alternate version of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. (Hence I am not one bit uncomfortable having the title of this book sound so much like his.) The contents of his book might as well have been these.

  One respect in which Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos differs from its prototype is in its chronological scope. This volume covers the pulp era, but extends no further. We are concerned here with the foundational generation of Mythos writers. If this book generates sufficient interest, there are plans for a second volume which would cover the subsequent period, to be called The New Lovecraft Circle.

  Another respect in which Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos is more restrictive than Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is in its lack of any of Lovecraft’s own tales. For the life of me, I could never see why Derleth felt compelled to include “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” Even then it was inconceivable that anyone who had picked up a book with a title like Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (for Yog’s sake!) would not already have both Lovecraft tales in some collection or other! Granted Derleth’s collection as a whole and in individual parts presupposed these particular stories, but why not simply warn readers in the introduction to be sure they’d read them first? So no Lovecraft this time around. That way we can make room for more of the related fiction you probably don’t already have.

  If this collection is narrower in its focus, it is also wider in that I have not scrupled to include a couple of tales from pulp era fanzines, written by young correspondents of Lovecraft. I believe that in them the spirit of that wonderful time, plus the sparkle of the initial wave of Lovecraft enthusiasm, comes through and helps re-create the atmosphere of the era we are conjuring.

  Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos offers several tales that are anything but standard anthology fodder. While you will quite likely have a couple of them already, others you will only have heard of. Some have been reprinted only in obscure fanzines (some of these published by me!); some were reprinted so long ago that they might as well never have been reprinted as far as today’s reader is concerned.

  Even so, there remains an embarrassment of riches. This book only makes a dent. Many other stories, e.g., by Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, would have fit well here. Why have I chosen these in particular? All I can say is that as a Mythos novice I read many stories by Lin Carter, Brian Lumley, Colin Wilson, and others, in which I kept running across strange names I had not read in Lovecraft or even in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos ! What did they mean? Where had they come from?

  Was I missing something the author assumed I’d already know? The occasional Mythos glossary was of precious little help, since their compilers seemed to feel they had rendered adequate service by compiling all the known information about this or that entity without tracing its roots, providing its context. As the years went by and I discovered more and more unreprinted, marginal, or neglected Mythos tales, I was able to put most of the pieces together.

  So what I have tried to do here is to assemble the stories in which certain important Mythos names or items are either first mentioned or most fully explained by the author who created them (as you know, one Mythos author feels remarkably free to enlarge upon the creations of another!). I believe this is especially important since yet another generation of Lovecraft enthusiasts has appeared, not just since the 60s, but even since the early 80s! There are young readers who have never even seen copies of Bloch’s collection Mysteries of the Worm (Lin Carter, editor, Zebra Books, 1981), much less Campbell’s The Inhabitant of the Lake (Arkham House, 1964)! I trust this book will be a valued reference book as well as a source of much enjoyment and amusement.

  So here you will find the truth that had hitherto been mercifully cloaked beneath the mystifying names Abhoth, Atlach-Nacha, Unter Zee Kulten, Hydrophinnae, the Eltdown Shards, ’Umr at-Tawil, Lloigor, Zhar, the Tcho-Tcho people, Ithaqua, Iod, Vorvadoss, Zuchequan, the Chronicle of Nat
h, and others. Better bring along your Elder Sign.

  A few notes anent a few of the stories. Most readers will know that Lovecraft penned “The Haunter of the Dark” as a sequel to Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars,” and that Bloch wrote another installment, some years later, called “The Shadow from the Steeple.” But the sharp-eyed reader will notice that Bloch’s earlier tale “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” (Weird Tales, December, 1937) is in a real sense an earlier sequel to “The Haunter of the Dark,” as it develops Lovecraft’s evocative hint, dropped in that tale, about some abominable deed wrought by the Pharaoh Nephren-Ka which caused his name to be stricken thereafter from all Egyptian stelae.

  August Derleth, as we know by now, was one of the great architects of the expanding Mythos (in this connection one recalls the references in several of his tales to old mansions whose original ground plans could no longer be discerned for the profusion of extra wings and rooms added over the course of generations). He appropriated for the Mythos the legendary Wendigo as fictionalized by Algernon Blackwood in his famous story “The Wendigo.” Derleth’s Ithaqua the Wind-Walker figures in many of his stories and has come into new prominence in some of the novels of Brian Lumley. Yet the stories (“The Thing That Walked on the Wind” and “Ithaqua”) in which the Mythos version of the Wendigo debuts have lain unreprinted for so long that few readers will have seen them.

  Derleth’s and Schorer’s “The Lair of the Star-Spawn” is another of the pivotal stories in the evolution of the Mythos. In it we see for the first time Derleth’s version of the “Elder Gods versus Old Ones” contest, though Derleth is still experimenting with nomenclature. If the ending seems to you far too redolent of the Derleth Mythos attacked by Mosig, what with its celestial deliverance, just recall the bolts of lightning that shoot down from the heavens to dispatch the monsters at the climaxes of “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” By the way, Lovecraft himself suggested the title for the tale to his correspondent Derleth and later referred to its events in “The Horror in the Museum.”

  I have included two tales by Robert E. Howard, the famous creator of Pike Bearfield. One will not be unfamiliar to you, “The Thing on the Roof.” I would rank this as number two behind “The Black Stone” among Howard’s best efforts at Mythos fiction. In terms of the lore it presents it runs parallel to “The Black Stone” (which was of course included in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos), providing various data concerning Von Junzt’s Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten. (May I point out that the initial article die must have stood in Von Junzt’s original, since without it the title would read Unaussprechliche Kulten?) For Howard’s references to his own Old One Gol-Goroth, you may consult his tales “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” and “The Children of the Night.”

  The second Howard story, “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” is rather less well known, though not infrequently reprinted. However, what you will read here is Howard’s original version, previously published only in the Spring 1972 issue of The Howard Collector. As you will see, though this version is a tale of Oriental adventure, not of supernatural horror, it is nonetheless a tale of the Lovecraft Mythos, illustrating a crucial fact about the lore of Lovecraft: the Old Gent himself treated his “artificial mythology” as a fund of atmospheric mood generators, not as the main spectacle on stage. Howard here follows this Lovecraftian prototype.

  With Richard Searight’s “The Warder of Knowledge,” we have a special treat: a story that Lovecraft read in manuscript, but which was never published—until now. Searight, you will remember, had created the Eltdown Shards, cited in his story “The Sealed Casket,” and used to good effect subsequently by HPL in “The Challenge from Beyond” and other stories. Interestingly, Lovecraft and Searight were simultaneously developing the concept of the Shards in different directions, as can be seen from “The Warder of Knowledge.” Of it Lovecraft said in a November 4, 1935, letter to Searight, “I like the story exceedingly, & hope you will not let [Weird Tales editor Farnsworth] Wright’s rejection discourage you....The references to the Eltdown Shards are fascinating—but woe is me! I’ve given a lot of dope in that composite story [the round-robin “The Challenge from Beyond”] which conflicts directly with the true facts as here revealed!...I also fear that I described the shards in a conflicting way. Oh, well—in sober truth relatively few people will ever see the composite yarn anyhow.” Ah, the ironies of history.

  Bertram Russell’s “The Scourge of B’Moth,” Mearle Prout’s “The House of the Worm,” and C. Hall Thompson’s “Spawn of the Green Abyss” are a set of stories which do not bear all the customary Mythos touches, but which are significantly influenced by Lovecraft’s seminal tale “The Call of Cthulhu.” In Russell’s tale the scholarly protagonists are puzzled at the outlandish name of the monster B’Moth, but it turns out to be a contraction of the name of the Bible’s primeval sea titan Behemoth. The name itself reveals its owner as a cousin of Great Cthulhu.

  “The House of the Worm” caught Lovecraft’s attention when it first appeared in Weird Tales (October, 1933). In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith he dubbed it one of the high points of the issue: “[Mearle Prout] is a newcomer, but to me his story seems to have a singularly authentic quality despite certain touches of naïvete. It has a certain atmosphere and sense of brooding evil—things which most pulp contributors totally lack” (unpublished letter of October 3, 1933). What HPL did not remark upon was the thinly veiled opening lines of his own “The Call of Cthulhu,” which Prout appropriated almost verbatim for his later tale! You will have no difficulty recognizing them.

  By the way, part of the tell-tale passage is missing in the only anthology appearances of the tale that I am aware of. The resurrected text has been abridged at many other points as well. But here you will see the complete text of “The House of the Worm,” rescued from obscurity at last.

  “Spawn of the Green Abyss” partakes about equally of “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” This is one of four horror tales Thompson wrote for Weird Tales, one of the others (“The Will of Claude Assher”) also bearing clear marks of Lovecraft’s influence. But the story goes that August Derleth intimidated Thompson into dropping the Lovecraft pastiche hobby, apparently because Thompson was working Derleth’s side of the street (and selling a better product).

  “The Abyss” by Robert W. Lowndes has appeared more than once since its first publication in the February, 1941, issue of Stirring Science Stories. But all the reprints have featured an updated, revised version. Though we may trust the author’s judgment and respect his decision to improve his work, we are pleased to satisfy your antiquarian curiosity by presenting the original 1941 version, in keeping with the pulp era focus of this book.

  Carl Jacobi’s “The Aquarium” is another Derleth casualty. At Derleth’s request Jacobi wrote the tale for inclusion in Dark Mind, Dark Heart (1962), but he wrote it with certain Mythos references that Derleth promptly axed. Derleth had much more of a protective attitude toward things Lovecraftian than Lovecraft himself ever had! One may only guess that Derleth did not care for Jacobi’s independent variations on items of Mythos lore and wanted to keep things orthodox! (For the same reason, Lin Carter once remarked that, despite his zeal to incorporate data from all previous Mythos tales, he could never figure out what to do with the unorthodox reinterpretations in Henry Hasse’s “The Guardian of the Book,” also included in this volume.) The original version of “The Aquarium” appears here. From it derive, as you will see, Brian Lumley’s many later references to books of arcane seabottom lore such as Unter Zee Kulten ,Jacobi’s mad creations.

  E. Hoffmann Price’s “The Lord of Illusion” is a real literary surprise. It is the draft of the Price-Lovecraft collaboration “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” The importance of Price’s original for the Lovecraft scholar should be obvious: it enables one to determine precisely who contributed what to the story. For lack of access to Price’s original, more than one scholar has mistaken what were re
ally Price’s concepts for Lovecraft’s, in the process drawing erroneous inferences as to development in Lovecraft’s thought as seen in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” Even Maurice Levy’s monumental Lovecraft is not free of this confusion.

  Here is Price’s own account of how “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” came to be written, taken from his memoir “The Man Who Was Lovecraft,” in Something About Cats:

  One of my favorite HPL stories was, and still is, The SilverKey. In telling him of the pleasure I had had in rereading it, I suggested a sequel to account for Randolph Carter’s doings after his disappearance. Before long we had seriously resolved to undertake the task. Some months later, I wrote a six thousand word first draft. HPL courteously applauded, and then literally took pen in hand. He mailed me a fourteen thousand word elaboration, in the Lovecraft manner, of what I had sent him. I had bogged down, of course. The idea of doing a sequel to one of his stories was more fantastic than any fantasy he has ever written. When I deciphered his manuscript, I estimated that he had left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original words: one passage which he considered to be not only rich and colorful in its own right, but also compatible with the style of his own composition. He was of course right in discarding all but the basic outline.

  But as you read Price’s original, you will see that Price had modestly overestimated the extent of Lovecraft’s revision. True, the result is a largely different tale, much augmented by HPL, but much of Price’s substructure remains. Price must in retrospect be assigned a greater share of credit for the finished tale than he was willing to accept. Incidentally, as can be surmised from the cliffhanger ending of “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” the story looked forward to yet another sequel to resolve poor Carter’s fate. But by this time HPL (never really keen on Price’s original notion, as his letters to other correspondents make clear) was tired of the whole business and by no means willing to spend the time on a Part Three.