Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
The Thing on the Roof
The Fire of Asshurbanipal
The Seven Geases
Fane of the Black Pharaoh
1
2
3
4
5
The Invaders
Bells of Horror
The Thing That Walked on the Wind
Ithaqua
The Lair of the Star-Spawn
1
2
3
4
The Lord of Illusion
The Warder of Knowledge
The Scourge of B’Moth
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
The House of the Worm
Spawn of the Green Abyss
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
The Guardian of the Book
1
2
3
The Abyss
Music of the Stars
The Aquarium
The Horror out of Lovecraft
To Arkham and the Stars
Copyright Page
Dedicated to the memory of
Lin Carter,
Grand Archivist of the Cthulhu Mythos
The H.P. Lovecraft editions from Del Rey Books:
The Best of H. P. Lovecraft:
Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft:
Dreams of Terror and Death
The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft:
The Road to Madness
Waking Up Screaming
Shadows of Death
Creeping Dementia (forthcoming)
The Watchers Out of Time (forthcoming)
The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (forthcoming)
Other stories in the Lovecraftian World:
The Children of Cthulhu
Cthulhu 2000
The New Lovecraft Circle
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos
Shadows Over Baker Street
Shadows Over Innsmouth
Also available from The Modern Library:
At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition
Preface
At the first World Fantasy Convention, in 1975, the mayor of Providence gave me a key to the city.
I appreciated the gesture, but it wasn’t necessary. My welcome to Providence had come almost half a century earlier, in 1927, from the hand of its distinguished citizen, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
His was the hand penning the stories which enthralled me when I first encountered them in the pages of Weird Tales magazine. And early in 1933 it was through that same hand I was ushered into Lovecraft’s private world as we began a personal correspondence. Thus he opened the gates of his cherished Providence to me long before I ever actually arrived there.
Not every reader of his work was so singularly fortunate. But all were free to enter the realms he roamed, realms born and borne out of imagination and dreams.
In tales embodying a revised concept of the cosmos, Lovecraft literally re-created the universe, restructuring space and time, reconciling ancient witchcraft with modern mathematics. He invented blasphemous books of forbidden magic, secret cults worshipping star-spawned monstrosities lurking beneath land or sea. As a sardonic twist he altered the geography of his beloved New England and linked its legends to those of his own devising.
Avid readers soon became familiar with the look of Innsmouth, the horror of Dunwich, the contents of Miskatonic University’s archives in archaic Arkham. Many virtually memorized his Mythos.
Some of them didn’t stop there, but went on to imitate and emulate him in tales of their own. Through the years H. P. Lovecraft has shaped and influenced fantasy and horror fiction more than any other writer in the genre. The stories which Lovecraft scholar and authority Robert M. Price chose for this compendium illustrate how his contemporaries responded to Cthulhu’s call.
I myself was one of them, though later years found me straying far afield. But in a sense all of us began our journey in Providence, guided by the hand of the man we referred to as “HPL.” And our stories included here, whether the early efforts of aspiring authors or the deliberate homage of established writers, serve as testament to his impact on his colleagues.
Truly, they are Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos.
—ROBERT BLOCH
Introduction
Many readers of the present volume will recognize a more than coincidental similarity between it and August Derleth’s Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos anthology that appeared more than two decades ago, in 1969. Derleth had compiled a prime collection of tales written by various authors under the influence of H. P. Lovecraft and employing the props of his system of “artificial mythology” which Derleth (but not Lovecraft) called “the Cthulhu Mythos.” To this collection Derleth prefixed a brief exposition of the Mythos as he understood it, so as to provide a context to help the reader better understand the stories that were to follow. It seems appropriate, therefore, in the present case to provide an analogous exposition, especially since the scholarship of the last decades has seen a major reinterpretation of Lovecraft’s Mythos.
As the title of this volume implies, there has even been a shift in nomenclature in regards to the Mythos. Especially in reference to the body of fictitious lore as it appears in the stories of Lovecraft himself, it seems better to refer to it as “the Lovecraft Mythos” after its creator, rather than “the Cthulhu Mythos” after one of the dread entities mentioned in it. As with most things, we must understand the origin and development of the Mythos before we can venture to say we know what it is. The definition of a thing includes its history. Hence the following sketch of the Lovecraft Mythos and its evolution into the Cthulhu Mythos.
Lovecraft, inspired no doubt by the fanciful mythologies created for various purposes by Lord Dunsany, Robert W. Chambers, and even Madame Blavatsky, ventured to weave a web of his own mythology that would in its evocative fragmentariness and misty archaism simulate the eerie and august suggestive power of genuine ancient lore. He began in “The Nameless City” (1921) by creating the mad kahin (poet-soothsayer) Abdul Alhazred and his “unexplainable couplet” that would loom so large in all subsequent Mythos fiction: “That is not dead / Which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons / Even death may die.”
By “The Hound” one year later, Alhazred had been made the author of a banned book of blasphemies, the Necronomicon, a title so mysterious that even Lovecraft did not understand the true meaning of it. The name came to him in a dream, apparently the fortuitous creation of his subconscious, scrambling elements of the Greek language in which Lovecraft was reasonably learned. In a waking state he reasoned out the meaning as “Image of the Laws of the Dead,” taking the middle syllable as the Greek nomos, “law,” and the last as representing ikon, “image.” In both guesses he was quite wrong, as S. T. Joshi has shown. Rather, on analogy with Manilius’s Astronomicon, a title Lovecraft knew, “Necronomicon” simply means “Concerning the Dead,” or idiomatically, “The Book of the Dead.” At any rate, the Mythos was off and running.
In 1926 he introduced dreaming Cthulhu, a titan based in part on Dunsany’s snoring creator Mana-Yood-Sushai, in a story called “The Call of Cthulhu,” itself suggested in large measure, I am sure, by
certain evocative phrases concerning dead and dreaming gods in Dunsany’s “A Shop in Go-by Street.” The interdimensional being Yog-Sothoth first appeared in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) and was later central to the premise of “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). Azathoth the daemon-sultan made his debut in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926–7). Nyarlathotep, a kind of combination of Thoth-Hermes and the Antichrist, first appeared as early as 1920 as a sinister charlatan in the dream-inspired prose-poem “Nyarlathotep.” This name was probably another subconscious borrowing, this time from Dunsany’s names Mynarthitep and Alhireth-hotep. The fifth of the five major Lovecraftian entities was Shub-Niggurath (surely from Dunsany’s Sheol-Nugganoth). This creature would be variously described as a “cloud-like entity” or “the Goat with a Thousand Young.”
Over the years, often in his ghost-written “revision” tales, HPL would introduce new devil-gods. Shub-Niggurath herself started her literary life in a revision tale, “The Last Test” (1927). Other entities never or seldom ventured into the fiction Lovecraft claimed as his own. These included Nug and Yeb, Rhan-Tegoth, Ghatanothoa, and Yig, Father of Serpents.
The most important addition to the original group was Tsathoggua, a furry black bat-toad deity worshipped in ancient Hyperborea. This creature was the creation of Lovecraft’s friend and correspondent Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft simply adopted Tsathoggua into his own pantheon, just as Smith began making references to the Necronomicon and Yog-Sothoth.
It was by this sort of cross-referencing and flattery by imitation that the Lovecraft Mythos began quickly to be transmuted into the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft good-naturedly began to encourage his young protégés as well as his colleague-correspondents like Smith to expand the lore by additions of their own. When young Robert Bloch invented Necronomicon analogues including Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm (Lovecraft supplied the Latin “original” De Vermis Mysteriis) and the Comte D’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules,or Cults of the Ghouls (Bloch’s invention in truth, despite Derleth’s occasional later claims to paternity), Lovecraft showed himself happy to include ominous references to them in his own tales.
He particularly liked Robert E. Howard’s creation Nameless Cults (rendered into German by August Derleth and E. Hoffmann Price as Unaussprechlichen Kulten) and made extensive use of it in a revision written with Duane Rimel, “The Tree on the Hill,” in which appeared yet another new tome, Rudolph Yergler’s The Chronicle of Nath, invented by either young Rimel or his mentor. Smith added The Book of Eibon, which Lovecraft delighted to use, and in the last stages of the game HPL had welcomed into the canon young Henry Kuttner’s The Book of Iod (rather too close to Smith’s Book of Eibon, one might judge), and probably Willis Conover’s Ghorl Nigral by Herrmann Mulder, about which HPL himself wrote a shuddery anecdote in a letter to Conover.
Much controversy continues to surround the vexed question of whether and to what extent Lovecraft meant the reader to understand his eldritch entities as unknown deities (HPL’s explicit acknowledgment of their ultimate origin in Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana would suggest this) or simply as aliens from outer space taken for gods (à la Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods), as references in many tales imply. It can be argued both ways, and the issue is further complicated if, as I think, Lovecraft intended some of the beings to be superhuman aliens and others as real gods worshipped by these aliens.
But the really crucial question in post-Derlethian interpretation of the Mythos is whether it is harmonious with Lovecraft’s conception of things to envision a cosmic war waged between different superhuman races. Derleth attributed to Lovecraft his own notion of a primordial contest between the benevolent Elder Gods and the Satan-like Old Ones. Derleth, in his introduction to Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and elsewhere, made explicit this parallel between Christian and Cthulhuvian myths.
Interpreters from Richard L. Tierney and Dirk W. Mosig on have hotly repudiated this whole schema, derisively dubbing it “the Derleth Mythos.” They saw in Derleth’s framework, especially in the Christian parallel, the imposition of a Good versus Evil schema foreign to Lovecraft’s original, morally neutral conception. While such an understanding would indeed represent the grossest rending of the Lovecraftian fabric, I am not convinced that critics have correctly understood Derleth at this point.
In a book that is an explicit homage to Derleth’s seminal Mythos anthology it is perhaps not amiss to take a moment to defend him. Though Derleth did sometimes in his own Lovecraft pastiches say he was pitting good entities against evil ones (he makes this explicit in, e.g., “The Return of Hastur”), it is not apparent that this turns out to make much difference. Rather we simply have protagonists like Seneca Lapham and Laban Shrewsbury defending human interests against inhuman/superhuman ones, just as we had in Lovecraft, where after all we do occasionally see Henry Armitage and Martinus Bicknell Willet trying (and even succeeding!) to prevent the planet from being cleared of human beings.
And in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” Armitage does not hesitate, as Mosig would have, to call the ancestral faith of the Whateleys a “wicked cult.” In “The Thing on the Doorstep,” delvers into forbidden lore (“It’s the devil’s business.”) are called “evil souls.” Both authors have their characters call the Old Ones “evil” from an admittedly anthropocentric perspective, not an objective, “cosmicist” one.
Too much has been made by Derleth’s critics of the use he made of the Elder Gods/Old Ones conflict. A close look at Derleth’s Lovecraftian fiction will reveal that Derleth himself saw both groups simply as powerful races of space aliens, as ought to be obvious by his locating the Elder Gods in the vicinity of Betelgeuse (their name for which, Glyu-Vho, Lovecraft himself supplied for Derleth!). And had not HPL made considerable use of the theme of warring alien races, with human earth as their battleground?
Indeed many of Derleth’s most strident critics deem At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time” the greatest works of Lovecraft, and it is in these novellas that such conflicts between “Elder Ones,” “space-devils,” and “Cthulhu-spawn” abound!
Another modification for which Derleth’s critics cannot forgive him is his apportioning of the Lovecraftian entities among the hackneyed categories of the four elements, so that Cthulhu becomes a water-elemental, Nyarlathotep an earth-elemental, etc. Actually this was not Derleth’s idea. He accepted it from Francis T. Laney, a fan whose glossary of the Lovecraft Mythology Derleth read, liked, and reprinted. In fact we owe Derleth’s fire-elemental Cthugha to Laney: Derleth created him (in a singularly uninspired moment) to plug the gap left gaping by Lovecraft who had not obliged Laney by creating any fire-elementals . . . or, come to think of it, any air-elementals, either! Hence the birth of Lloigor and Zhar, and the pressing into service of Blackwood’s Wendigo under the Derlethian alias Ithaqua, and of Bierce’s and Chambers’s Hastur.
Mosig had great fun pointing out how ill-fitting the whole schema was. How could Cthulhu be a water-elemental when, on Derleth’s own reading, he was imprisoned under water! But in this case Derleth is more nearly right than Mosig, since after all Cthulhu is described as having the head of an octopus and to be served by the ichthyic Deep Ones! Cthulhu’s imprisonment is not constituted by the simple fact that he is under water, but by the fact that he is sealed in the barnacled tower of R’lyeh, as Lovecraft’s own Necronomicon quote (in “The Dunwich Horror”) says!
Even here I am willing to give Derleth (and Laney) the benefit of the doubt. Granted, the whole elemental business was handled pretty inanely, but the basic notion appears not to be so utterly foreign to Lovecraft at all. In Lovecraft’s stories it is clear that the monstrous elder races do symbolize certain geographic areas or particular landscapes which Lovecraft found potently evocative. We are told that in his night-time walks he would pause before a shadowed arch or a decrepit house and allow his imagination to people its recesses with unknown ghouls and ghosts. When he created the crinoid Old Ones in the ice-fields of Ant
arctica, or the crustacean Outer Ones of the domed Vermont hills, isn’t it obvious that these entities were in fact intended as incarnations of the sheer strangeness of nature in these places? In a passage of foreshadowing in “The Whisperer in Darkness” Lovecraft actually calls the Outer Ones “elemental spirits.”
Thus in an important sense, the Old Ones are indeed elementals. Can anyone deny that Lovecraft gave Cthulhu the pronounced traits of a mollusk precisely because of his loathing for wriggling sea-life? Thus Cthulhu turns out to be precisely a sea-elemental, Mosig notwithstanding.
Now if Mosig wanted to fault Derleth for writing poor stories in which what ought to remain implicit became explicit, that is another matter. But in fact it is quite evident that Mosig and his disciples were concerned to prosecute what seemed to them almost a religious heresy. They sought, in my view, to defend a system abstracted from Lovecraft, and thus more Lovecraftian than Lovecraft. Mosig had damned Derleth for, among other sins, stripping away the veil that hung before Lovecraft’s mythic lore and creating in its place a dry and over-explicit systematic theology. True, in his poorer work, much of it tossed off casually as filler for Weird Tales, Derleth did indeed commit this sin (though here he was led astray by Francis Laney, and he never sinned so grievously in this respect as Lin Carter did later).
But the pendulum swung fully to the other extreme as Mosig proceeded to substitute his own abstract system for Derleth’s, setting forth his own systematic philosophy of Lovecraft’s fiction and criticizing not only Derleth (explicitly) but even Lovecraft (implicitly) for failing to stick to it. It is amusing to note how Mosig’s successors have had to resort to dismissing Lovecraft’s own “The Dunwich Horror” as irony (“He can’t have meant it!—or my theory’s shot to hell!”) or “The Whisperer in Darkness” as self-parody. I cannot help but recall how in his seminars the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth would sometimes respond to a student question by first turning to one particularly astute graduate student and asking, “Mr. So-and-So, would you please give us the Barthian reply?... Thank you, and now for what I myself think.”
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