H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  Campbell also began making additions of his own to the lore of the Mythos, and his next few tales introduced new divinities to the Lovecraftian pantheon, such as Glaaki and Daoloth, and a new tome of eldritch horrors, the Revelations of Glaaki. The young writer also picked up Bloch’s inventions, Han and Byatis, embroidering the scanty lore concerning them with new information of his own, and even gave a new quotation or two from De Vermis Mysteriis and the Necronomicon itself. His collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake (1964), was a major addition to the literature of the Mythos, as it contained nine tales, all of them new and none of them available elsewhere.

  Derleth published a second “all new” anthology that same year; it was titled Over the Edge and contained the tenth Campbell Mythos story, as well as the usual roster of old-time Arkham authors, Hodgson, Howard, Long, Wakefield, Leiber, Derleth, and so on, plus a new H.P.L./A.D. collaboration, The Shadow in the Attic, and a story by Clark Ashton Smith. That last was a bit of a surprise. It had been far too many years since Smith had written any new stories to speak of, and in 1961, after a long, storyless period devoted largely to poetry and sculpture, he died at the age of sixty-eight.

  Another anthology of new tales of the macabre appeared a couple of years later under the title of Travellers by Night (1967), with a new story by Campbell and another Lovecraft/Derleth, The Horror from the Middle Span, which was to be the last of all the Derlethian posthumous collaborations, save only for Innsmouth Clay (although no one could have known it then).

  Other young hopefuls were rising, inspired by the example of Ramsey Campbell, and when in 1969 Derleth published an ambitious omnibus under the title of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, the volume contained not only Campbell’s eleventh Mythos tale, a chiller called Cold Print, but the first Mythos tale of another new writer, Brian Lumley.2* In fact, not only did that book contain Lumley’s first Mythos story, The Sister City, but also his second, Cement Surroundings, as well. Lumley, too, carved out new territory of his own in the Mythos, and those two tales introduced several bits of newly-invented lore, such as the city of Ephiroth, which Lumley presents as the long-lost “sister city” to lb, a Lovecraftian invention from The Doom That Came to Sarnath. The second of his two stories in the book introduced another tome of eldritch horror, the G’harne Fragments, plus two new additions to the ever-growing pantheon, Shudde-M’elle and Yibb-Tstll.

  This particular collection, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the Mythos for many reasons, and one of the most important was that it introduced an extraordinary number of new writers in the Mythos. We have already discussed the two first Mythos tales of Brian Lumley, but have yet to mention J. Vernon Shea, whose first Mythos story—a sort of modern parody on the Lovecraftian style—also appeared therein, under the title of The Haunter of the Graveyard (certainly a title with a traditional Lovecraftian ring to it.)

  Shea was not exactly a new writer, having begun to produce stories as far back as 1926, but this was his first Mythos story. Unlike the rest of the “New Lovecraft Circle,” he actually had known H.P.L. very well and had corresponded with him for some years. I have seen no further stories under his byline, so it is impossible to tell whether or not his contribution to the literature of the Mythos will be significant.

  The third of the new Mythos writers who made his first appearance in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was James Wade, a 42-year-old Illinois-born writer, resident for the past decade or so in Seoul, South Korea. His first and only Mythos tale, a novelette entitled The Deep Ones, was possibly the best of the new stories in the book. It made quite a clever and very topical use of the recent experiments in the study of the extraordinary intelligence of dolphins.

  As for Cold Print, the Ramsey Campbell story in the same volume, it adds new lore to his developing sub-Mythos, presenting some interesting new information on his main additions to the pantheon, Y’golonac and Glaaki, and a lengthy new quotation from his Revelations of Glaaki.

  But Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is perhaps most significant because a brilliant young “philosophical writer” or novelist of ideas, whose reputation is by now secure on both sides of the Atlantic, made his first appearance with a Mythos tale therein. The tale was a novella entitled The Return of the Lloigor and its author was the celebrated British novelist, critic and intellectual, Colin Wilson. It is a complex, interesting tale—a sort of intellectual puzzle mystery involving Mu, Churchward’s “Naacal tablets,” Lovecraftian divinities such as Ghatanothoa and Nug, Arthur Machen and Lewis Spence—and it’s fun to read. Wilson is a writer of considerable power and his fiction generates as much excitement as his non-fiction; but he certainly plays fast and loose with the pattern of the Mythos. The tale is, at best, a borderline Mythos story.

  Wilson tells an amusing anecdote to explain how he became embroiled in Lovecraftiana. His initial impact on the literary world was made through a book called The Outsider; somewhile after this he discovered The Outsider and Others, and was impelled to read it because of the similarity in titles. The character of Lovecraft fascinated him to the extent of writing a book called The Strength to Dream which was a study the creative imagination, particularly in writers of fantasy and horror stories. The book dealt in a very large part with Lovecraft. Wilson did not deny that the eccentric Providence recluse possessed “gloomy imaginative power that compares with Poe,” but his innate taste forced him to admit he found Lovecraft “an atrocious writer.” The Strength to Dream, of course, came to Derleth’s attention, and he wrote a mildly reproving letter—but, as Colin Wilson recently noted:

  In due course, a copy of my book fell into the hands of August Derleth. And Derleth wrote to me, protesting that my judgement on Lovecraft was too harsh, and asking me why, if I was all that good, I didn’t try writing a “Lovecraft” novel myself.

  A couple of years later an idea occurred to him and engendered a novel.

  I cast it in the Lovecraft tradition, and it became The Mind Parasites, which was published in due course by August Derleth. Its reception by English critics was unexpectedly good; I suspect this is because I didn’t sound as if I was serious.

  Arkham House published The Mind Parasites in 1967; although it discusses Lovecraft and borrows some of the terminology of the Mythos, it is really an independent story and thus does not figure in our present study. But The Return of the Lloigor comes close enough to the Mythos to be admitted to at least the borderline of the canon, in the same sense that Henry Hasse’s The Guardian of the Book is a borderline Mythos story.

  In 1969, Wilson wrote another novel which closely borders on the Mythos, a book which shares the continuum of the Lloigor tale. This novel is called The Philosopher’s Stone and it was published in an American edition in 1971. It discusses the Necronomicon and the Great Old Ones and Mu, but again it violates too much the established lore to be other than a marginal work (although a very interesting novel, immensely entertaining in its own right).

  As if the new talents of Ramsey Campbell, J. Vernon Shea, Brian Lumley, James Wade, and Colin Wilson, were not enough to launch the “new” Cthulhu Mythos, Derleth did not long delay before introducing his readers to yet other writers who were to contribute to the ever-growing literature.

  After the war, Derleth had briefly experimented with a periodical called The Arkham Sampler, of which seven issues appeared during 1948 and ’49. Towards the end of 1967 he tried it again, by issuing a smallish magazine of Arkham House news and notes called The Arkham Collector. Publishing at the rate of four issues a year, Derleth soon increased the size of the magazine to include short stories and verse largely by new writers, although some familiar names did make occasional appearances therein, such as Clark Ashton Smith and Carl Jacobi.

  The sixth issue, dated “Winter, 1970,” gave us a new Lumley tale, and yet another followed in #7, but that same seventh issue introduced a new writer named Gary Myers, with a story called The House of the Worm. I suppose this unusual little tale has to be considered a M
ythos story for want of any other category wherein to lodge it; but what Myers actually did with that first story was to go all the way back to the Dunsanian “Dreamlands” fiction of Lovecraft’s first period, and write new stories in the bejewelled style of those early yarns—stories utilizing many of the same characters and much of the same scenery of the Lovecraft tales, but stories written in full knowledge of the later Cthulhuoid fiction. The blend of styles and plot-material is deft and the stories themselves most attractive—so attractive, that I cannot help but consider Myers the best of the “New Lovecraft Circle” writers.

  The following issue, #8, contained a second Mythos story from Gary Myers, Yohk the Necromancer, in the same style and setting, and he had a third, Passing of a Dreamer, in the issues that have appeared since then, giving him three stories thus far into 1971. Derleth told me fairly recently that he had plans to issue a slim little book of Myers’ tales, with delightful illustrations by a new artist

  All such plans came to an abrupt and shocking end on the fourth of July, 1971.

  Derleth was by then 62 years old: a burly, hearty, robust man with enough drive and energy for three lesser men. As a writer and anthologist, he had produced about one hundred and fifty books. His output was truly prodigious; only Isaac Asimov, in our field, seems likely to have equaled his enormous production.

  In 1969 he fell ill, seriously ill. He was hospitalized for a straight eighty-seven days and underwent four operations, including open heart surgery. But with his enormous, driving energy and will to five, he seemed to make an amazing recovery, and was soon back at work. However, he had received the sort of warning no man can easily ignore, and thus was forced to cut down somewhere. A young local Wisconsonian named Roderic Meng, who had worked for Derleth as a sort of shipping clerk during summer vacations during high school years before, joined the staff of the House as general manager, thus relieving Derleth of many tiresome routine chores.

  During June, my wife and I stopped over at Sauk City to visit Derleth for the day, on our way back to Long Island following a science fiction convention in Minneapolis to which I had been invited as guest of honor. Derleth and I had exchanged letters for something like seventeen years, and during the six months in which this present book was researched and written, I had been in touch on an almost day-to-day basis, for Derleth was never too busy to fire off a letter full of answers to my questions, or to give me information on the spot over the telephone. But we had never before met face to face, and I had long looked forward to that event. I found him genial and affable, a delightful host, a stimulating conversationalist.

  Thirteen days later he was dead.

  He had seen the first 103 pages of this book in manuscript, and had given me a very detailed, almost page-by-page critique. He was not overly pleased at some of the things I had said about Lovecraft as a writer, but he respected my point of view, and was most gratified to see someone like myself write a book on the Mythos and all its writers, not just on Lovecraft alone.

  With the death of August Derleth, the future of Arkham House is thrown into question. It is far too early to be able to say how the loss of Derleth will affect Arkham House which he founded and guided so ably all those years. Perhaps it will not long outlast its founder; on the other hand, perhaps somewhere there can be found an editor of similar taste and knowledge in the field to carry it on through the years to come.

  One thing is certain, anyway. The death of August Derleth is a far more serious event in the history of the macabre in America than were any of the events thus far depicted in this book. Popular weird fiction survived the demise of Weird Tales unimpaired; it will not so easily survive the death of August Derleth.

  And now I come to the point in my story where, with some embarrassment, I must talk about... myself. For, the most recent addition to the growing ranks of Mythos writers is none other than Lin Carter.

  I first got the idea of writing this book in March, 1971, and almost immediately signed a contract for it with Ballantine Books. It has not been an easy book to write, despite my knowledge of the subject and my enthusiasm for the stories and the writers discussed herein. Writing fiction is much more to my taste, for I am most at ease when writing a story laid in a world of my own imagination, where my imagination itself is the only authority; non-fiction is ever so much more difficult to write. If this book is entertaining—if it is even readable—it is due to immense effort. The problem is not so much the lack of reference materials, as the plethora of them. I have several pounds of information on Lovecraft, Weird Tales, Lovecraft’s fellow writers, Arkham House, and so on. The problem has been not to find such data, but to boil it down and digest it into concise and perhaps even enjoyable form.

  From time to time over the last six months I have found myself turning away briefly from the grueling task of writing non-fiction to amuse myself by turning out a small morsel of fiction. Because I was soon up to my earlobes in data on the Cthulhu Mythos, I thought it would be fun to write some stories in the Mythos. I found myself attracted to what Clark Ashton Smith had done with a story called The Coming of the White Worm. (That droll and sparkling little gem of a tale he pretended was a translation from the Book of Eibon, an imaginary book he had himself invented.) At the same time I discovered in the text of The Haunter of the Dark Lovecraft’s last story in the Mythos, a list of the titles of imaginary stories written by an equally imaginary writer, “Robert Blake.” You may recall this list —Shaggai, In the Vale of Pnath, The Burrowers Beneath, and so on—a delicious passage in which Lovecraft indulged in self-parody, inventing titles which were if anything, over-typically Lovecraftian. I thought it would be amusing to write a short tale of the style and substance of Smith’s little joke, and use for a tide Lovecraft’s little joke. So I “translated” from the Book of Eibon a thousand-word story called Shaggai, and, a bit later, a second such tale called In the Vale of Pnath. Since I was by this time writing long lists of questions about Lovecraftiana to Derleth about twice a week, I included copies of these brief stylistic pastiches for his amusement; and when next the ennui of composing non-fiction began to get me down, I tried my hand at a few more “translations”— this time from the venerable Necronomicon itself—two stories called The Doom of Yakthoob and The City of Pillars, which purported to be drawn from the first pages of the Necronomicon and which were told in the first person by Abdul Alhazred himself. To my delight, Derleth liked them and purchased them for eventual use in The Arkham Collector and a forthcoming anthology of new stories he was then assembling under the title of Dark Things.

  Shortly after this I got interested in the fascinating glimpse into elder and shadowy Mu given in the Heald/Lovecraft revision, Out of the Eons. Atlantis and Hyperborea had been done virtually to the point of exhaustion by Mythos writers, but Mu had scarcely been touched upon. So I conceived of a linked series of tales which would expand on this Muvian lore, and because my study of the Mythos had by now revealed annoying lacunae in the myth-patterns, I resolved to write new Mythos stories of my own which would answer some of the questions my research had raised. I wrote two short stories, The Dweller in the Tomb and The Thing in the Pit, and a ten-thousand-word novelette called Out of the Ages in which I expanded the Muvian lore to include two new additions to the Cthulhuoid pantheon, Zoth-Ommog and Ythogtha, who were the brothers of Ghatanothoa and the sons of great Cthulhu himself (this last datum was inserted with the advance approval of August Derleth). I also added a couple of new books to the library of forbidden tomes, namely the Zanthu Tablets and the Ponape Scripture. Derleth bought these as well, setting aside Out of the Ages (in consideration of its length) for an anthology, then in the planning stage, which he intended to call New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

  Since Derleth passed away, I have written a new Eibon story, The Descent into the Abyss, and a first tale drawn from the Pnakotic Manuscripts, called Acolyte of the Flame, and I hope to eventually conclude my Muvian sequence with two more stories whose working titles are The Burrowers Beneath
and The Horror in the Gallery. There will most likely be one more story from the Pnakotic Manuscripts as well. Derleth’s death has cast the future of his publishing program in doubt, so it cannot be said for certain whether or not all of these tales will appear in print under the aegis of Arkham House. That, only time will tell.

  I have dealt with my own modest additions to the canon of the Mythos at such length not because I believe my contributions to be of any particular importance, but simply because I have all die facts at hand. I very much doubt if I will for long remain the most recent addition to the “New Lovecraft Circle.” It is most probable that young writers will continue to arise in the Mythos, as Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, James Wade, Colin Wilson, Gary Myers and I have recently arisen. In all likelihood, Lovecraft’s last disciple has yet to emerge.

  So this book really has no ending. The story of the Cthulhu Mythos, that thoroughly fascinating and completely unique literary phenomenon, extends from this point into the future. It is now forty-six years since The Call of Cthulhu was written, and the curious school of macabre fiction launched by that excellent story is still alive and still growing, still entertaining new generations of readers and still attracting new generations of writers who, like myself, never knew Lovecraft personally, and either were small children during his lifetime or, in some cases, were not even born until after he died.

  It would be nice if I could end this book with a succinct and final appraisal of Lovecraft the writer, and could neatly and finally pigeonhole him in an appropriate niche. But this cannot be. For Lovecraft himself is still on the move, and his reputation and influence are still growing. The last word on this subject cannot be written at this time.

  And may never be.