Synopsis of A Shop in Go-By-Street

The author wants to return to the Land of Dreams and rejoin his previous comrades he had adventured with previously along the river Yann and in the Bird of the River vessel. In order to facilitate this, he goes to Go-By-Street which is a unusual lane off the Strand, and finds an unusual shop, where the keeper is said to give you your dreams. The author eventually finds himself in the Land of Dreams again and moves to the river and waits for the ship to come sailing by. After three days, he explores the area and uncovers the long-dead wreck of the Bird of the River and realizes it has been around 200 years since he was last here, not the 2 in his real life. He says good bye and leaves.

Review of A Shop in Go-By-Street


Published in 1919 after his career was off, this was another of Dunsany’s classic tales. This is Dunsany’s sequel to a very popular story he wrote, Idle Days on the Yann, which can be seen in later works like Lovecrafts The White Ship and even CS Lewis Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Despite the quick pace, Dunsany gives this is full on style.

Take his description of a sunrise over the ridge in the Land of Dream:

Those indescribable dawns upon the Yann came up like flames in some land over the hills where a magician burns by secret means enormous amethysts in a copper pot.

That’s Dunsany for you.

There are two major conversations that really seem to have made an impression with Lovecraft. The last, when discussing the nature of reality, and the first with the shopkeep, when discussing the nature of gods, dreaming, and death.

Consider this line from Call of Cthulhu, quoted from the Necronomicon:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.


Now compare it to this quote from the shopkeeper in this Dunsany story:

“But for three or four thousand years a god is worshipped and for three or four he sleeps. Only Time is wakeful always.”


The impact this story had on the mythos is quite significant.


3.5 stars outta 5, some of Dunsany’s stuff is a pure 5, or 4.5, but this one is not the best work of his or anything. (If you love fantasy, and the Gods of Pegana seems a bit too much, grab The King of Elfland’s Daughter instead).

Now, before we leave behind this idea of immediate impact, let’s take a look at another major element of impact to Call of Cthulhu, one you are likely already familiar with, but which we will reframe in a Mythos context.

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s great poem, The Kraken. Read it again for the first time.



The Kraken



Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

The Kraken, a Norwegian myth, is clearly be seen in the nature of Call of Cthulhu. Is it just a coincidence that one of the major characters, the one who actually sees Cthulhu and survives, is Norwegian as well? The Kraken sleeps, far below the ocean, and will someday return.

Consider The Kraken against many of the other Gen 0 stories.

Alright, let’s do one more Gen 0 story for now, and then return. Lovecraft had a severe man-crush on Abraham Merritt. You may recall that Merritt was one of the five authors called in to write Challenge from Beyond.

In 1918 Merritt publishes a short story called The Moon Pool. He will follow with another, Conquest of the Moon Pool, and then edit them into his first novel which was also quite popular. We’ll skip the latter stuff, because the first is by far the best, and leaves behind the Lost World motif that the latter stuff mucks about with. Merritt began publishing in 1917, and this story really puts him on the map in the major way. From The Moon Pool will come a variety of major fantasy works, among them The Ship of Ishtar and Dwellers in the Mirage. Again, Gary Gygax cites Merritt as one of his favorite authors, and someone who also helped to establish D&D. We will be skipping that fantasy stuff, and focusing instead on this story, because first of how interesting it is and also how it shapes Merritt’s career, and has many proto-Lovecraft feelings.

Luckily, the story is not copyrighted and therefore is fully in the public domain.

I could not easily find just the first short story, apart from the Novelized version. Unfortunately, the novel version of these events is edited differently than the short story (which was designed to stand on its own). Frankly, the original short story is a bit better than the first five chapters of the novel because of that. (Both Lovecraft and Merritt himself agreed on that fact). So hopefully you have it anthologized somewhere and can read it there. Or maybes its online somewhere and my poor Google Fu will not discredit your ability to read the original story, which Lovecraft called one of the classics of horror literature.

Instead, we’ll have here the Project Gutenberg book in its entirety, and you only need to read chapters 1-5. That’s the Moon Pool’s original story. The rest moves away from that opening into other territory.


Moon Pools for Everyone!

Currently reading The Ship of Ishtar for the first time by Merritt too. When done, I'll let you know what I think

I read The Ship of Ishtar today, which is Merritt's best work, and also considered one of the classic fantasy novels. It's not even a little bit Lovecraft, but I'm glad to have read it.

I also read the Dealings of Daniel Kesserich by Fritz Lieber on Friday, and it was in the Lovecraft vein, but not in the Mythos, so we won;t be reading it here. There are a lot better things written by the master of the pen, good ol' Fritz-y - we'll talk about him and who he is later when we consider some of his Gen 2/3 stories.

So I wouldn;t think either was this amazing, eye-opening story. I'll not touch either one again, likely, but I was happy to have read them and opened my eyes in such a way.

Synopsis of The Moon Pool


A lot of plot happens in this short story. So I’ll skip some of the longer stuff and give a quick summary rather than go point by point through the tale.

In order to free Dr. Throckmarton’s reputation, one Dr. Goodwin has arranged to have these documents sent to Mr. Merritt to review and publish. Dr. Throckmartin sent a failed expedition to the Pacific to the Micronesian island of Ponape and investigate there the ruins of Nan-Matal. His wife and several others accompanied this excursion.

Dr. Goodwin runs into Throckmartin shortly after the expedition on a boat, and is acting strangely. Later that night Dr. Goodwin observes something odd in the moon light, a certain path that the moon is making on the sea. It appears to be chasing Thockmartin. Clouds pass over and the path is closed before it can pull Throckmartin fully and news come sin that the rest of the journey to Melbourne should be similarly cloud ridden. Dr. T. takes in Dr. G and begins to relate the tale.

Dr. Throckmartin begins by explaining that everyone that went with the expedition to Nan-Matal is now dead. He rips off his shirt to reveal a white ring around his chest, and in that ring, he cannot be burnt, bled, or touched – and its bitter cold. He is heading to Melbourne for the items needed to defeat it, to defeat the thing that killed them and is chasing him now – the thing that gave him that mark. After revealing a map of the area, Throckmartin explains there is a dweller in the moon pool in the ruins of Nan-Matal.

He goes back to explain the expedition. His wife and him were to make this their great work, the Venice of the Pacific, to reveal how these ruins got there and explore the customs and people that made them. They arrived, and began the archeology of their research.

Slowly a few more sensitive members of the expedition began to become aware of a strangeness of the place. The natives requested to leave the island for a festival for a few days and were granted it. That night, under a full moon, odd noise began to be heard from the ruins. Suspecting the natives were doing their rituals in the ruins, the others move out. Then something else is there. One of their number collapses after revealing there is something more sinister at work.

But they dismiss the night as the natives, and then dismiss the words of warning. Opposite the throne of the Sun King is a great moon rock, and behind it, the moon pool. They found the rock, and suspected it was a door, but were unable to open it. Lots of exploration and attempts to open the door fail.

They awaken the next morning with a nasty sleep and one of their number missing. An exhaustive search finds some of her hair and part of her handkerchief cut, right by the moon rock, which was opened. They knew they were going to wait until night, since it was likely only openable then, and gathered weapons and other things needed.

They spend the night in Nan-Matal.

The moon rose, and with it came a powerful slumber. “It was a sapping of all will to move.” The cry is heard of a creature, his wife is sleeping, and the last of their party has been transfixed by the now open door. The music swelled. After walking about transfixed for a bit, the other members is gone.

Thinking that he has solved it, Throckmartin believes there is a few minutes between the opening of the door and the activity of the creature beyond. That is the window of opportunity to strike and free their comrades or secure their own safety is that is not possible.

Night falls, and the door opens, and Throck flings himself through the door. In there is a glistening pool. Some radiant creature begins to form, and Throck shoots it with his pistol. It gurgles and the pool roils and bad stuff happens. Hearing the shots, his wife follows him into the room. The dweller in the pool sees this new person enter, and rushes her first. Edith moves to block it from her husband to protect him, and the creature absorbs her and takes her. The two disappear into the moon pool.

The rest of the story is Throck outlying his plan for action – buying dynamite. They may not be dead, just in the pool. He wrote a chart of the Pool and leaves Dr. Goodwin for Nan-Matal on Ponape, to make amends for his cowardice.

Review of The Moon Pool


The Moon Pool is a classic D&D story, (the stuff that happens later involves missing civilizations, frog men, odd deities, and more. ) It will turn into a very pulpy adventure yarn. That’s odd because the story here is a horror one, and yet it is turned into a Lost World one.


You can find tons of Moon Pool reviews online, but they focus on the book, not the short story.

“Goodwin,” he said,” do you know at all of the ruins on the Carolines: the cyclopean megalithic cities and harbors of Ponape and Lele , of Kusaie, of Ruk and Hogolu and a score of other islets there?


The writing is solid enough, although sometimes a bit too lurid. He never met an adjective he didn’t like. Nevertheless, this is a very fun trip through the Pacific. A common framing device in these stories is the publishing of documents or conversations after the fact. (The Call of Cthulhu does the same thing). When you have elements that are unnatural, it makes sense to try to make them seem as realistic as possible. From Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Merritt’s The Moon Pool, you use this as an effective story-telling device to enhance the level of horror.

Of course, that means the narrative has to pause for Throckmartin to wail around a bit every time something bad happens.

Anyway, one effective way this story works is because it’s mostly true:

Nan Madol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The ruins are real, and actually on the island mentioned. That enhances the level of spookiness that is in effect.

As for the impact this story had on Lovecraft, it’s pretty evident. Is the area of Nan-Matal inspiration for R’lyeh? Merritt even uses the typical Lovecraftian word: “Cyclopean.”

The idea of something very ancient in the corners of the earth, something with a different set of rules, in the Pacific is quite resonant, and is one of the basic concepts of Lovecraft’s Mythos.


3 stars out of 5 for the book version, and 3.5 for this one the work does what it needs too, and the two maps are awesome (but missing from the book – boo hiss!).

Alright, let’s leave behind the Gen 0 stuff for a bit. There’s more to consider, the Archer Machen stuff is great, I agree with HP Lovecraft that The Willows by Algernon Blackwood really is one of the best horror stories of all time, and another Blackwood story, The Wendigo, is heavily tied into some other stuff we’ve already read by August Derleth. But let’s bench these folks for right now.

Let’s head back to Gen 1.

I’d like to do a trilogy of stories by Robert Bloch. To begin with, HP Lovecraft’s The Haunter in the Dark was written as a sequel to a Robert Bloch story. I’d like to begin with that story.

The Shambler from the Stars

Written in 1935, this story was published late, and then HP Lovecraft wrote Haunter the next month after publication. It’s just 8 pages in one of my collections. We’ll be reading this story, reminding you of Haunter from the Dark, and then Robert Bloch will pen a sequel and a side-story. He publishes a sequel to Lovecraft’s Haunter in 1950 called The Shadow from the Steeple. That creates a little trilogy with Haunter in the middle. But then Bloch is also fascinated by a bit of characterization in Haunter of Nephren-Ka, and ancient pharaoh. So Bloch will write the story of Nephren-Ka in a short story called Fane of the Black Pharaoh. We’ll be reading all three in this little side trip to Bloch land.

So we’ll begin with Shambler, which started everything off in 1935. Then Haunter is written in 35 and published in 36. Bloch will enjoy the info about Nephren-Ka and pen Black Pharaoh a few months later, to be published in 1937. And then write the sequel to Haunter in Steeple.


My apologies that I am unable to find any of Bloch’s stories online to link to. For authors who died later in their lives, their stuff was under copyright a lot longer and either there is an estate or there is a lingering copyright. In some cases, they have hurt the original stuff by keeping it out of people’s hands for cheaply (Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, as examples). Bloch you can at least understand why, he’s a big name in the horror field.

But the nature of the Cthulhu Mythos, of everyone sharing and growing, feels anti-copyright to me. These stories should be available, for free, online, right now. They are not, and that saddens me. So again, hit up your library, collections, borrow from a friend, or just wait until I post the synopsis.


(Note some similarities between this one and The Space Eaters, by Frank Belknap Long we already read)

Who is Robert Bloch? Really, you don’t know? I suppose that’s how time can pass by some major names in the field. He started writing in 1934, so the stuff we are about to read is fresh from his pen, at the age of 18, and lacks some of the polish he’ll get later on. He is another avid member of the Lovecraft Circle of authors, and corresponded heavily with many of them

So, here’s what I expect you already know about Bloch – he wrote the book Psycho, which was turned into a movie by Hitchcock.

If you didn’t know that, now you’ll understand just why his estate is probably held onto so much. This is a major name in horror. He won a lot of awards in his lifetime, which Wikipedia said he published until his death in 1994.

Shambler is, in fact, a homage to Lovecraft, it is dedicated to him, and the main character seems very Lovecraftian. Bloch comes across more as a fan than a polished author like Frank Belknap Long.

Bloch published dozens of novels, hundreds of short stories, and had a real impact on the genre. His stuff, such as his take on Jack the Ripper. He also wrote a variety of screenplays in his later days, cashing in on his fame as the author of Psycho.

So let’s look at Bloch!

Synopsis of The Shambler from the Stars



The Narrator is an author of weird tales, because that is the only way he can earn a living, since his love of books and nature is such that little else suits him. Bored of the trite aspects of horror like werewolves and vampires, he wants to author a true work of art.

So he sets out to delve into the secrets of vari0us folks and encounters a friend in Providence who has read a few books, the Necronomicon and the Book of Eibon. He gives the narrator a list of people who may help him track them down but fails. So the narrator turns to scouring book stores for a forgotten copy here and there.

While he is unable ot find the books he wants, he does unearth a book called De Vermis Mysteriis, or Mysteries of the Worm, by Ludwig Prinn. Prinn lived for centuries and was a sorcerer, alchemist and necromancer who was entually jailed and killed. In jail he wrote this book in latin, which was surprssed and edited books made it into other languages.

Unable to read latin, he heads back to Providence to meet up with his friend. They read the book and there is a summoning ritual in Latin for a familiar from the stars. It is read, and something unseen appears from the stars. It kills the friend, draining all of his blood, and swells and becomes visible with the newly charged energy. It then leaves, and the narrator knows it will come back, unsummoned to kill him too.

Review of The Shambler from the Stars



There is no question that the narrator is actually Bloch and the friend is actually Lovecraft. Bloch write shim ahead of time and asks for permission to kill him off. Lovecraft provides the latin translation of the book and also the latin summoning ritual to put into the story.

We’ve seen the book before in Lovecrafts fiction – in both Haunter and Shadow over Innsmouth. Lovecraft really loved the idea of the book and it’s one of the major books in the Mythos. Bloch also creates this creature, called a star vampire for lack of a better term, which is used by other writers as well.

Nevertheless this is real fanfic. The 18 year old writer includes both himself and his favorite author in a story, they meet, the hero is killed, and he introduces his own book to the club as well. And yet, Lovecraft embraces it. Lovecraft is something else. He is so hospitable. He really transcends normal expectations for a decently well known guy. He doesn’t just reply nicely and politely to Bloch, but he outright encourages him, and helps him with the tale.

And what happens? Bloch turns around to be a highly influential writer in the genre for 60 years. That’s the sort of impact that Lovecraft had. What if Lovecraft had refused to return Bloch’s letter? Or asked kindly for Bloch to not include his aspect at all? And then Lovecraft uses Bloch’;s stuff in his own works, dedicates Haunter of the Dark to Bloch, and then kills off a character reminiscent of Bloch in his own story set in Providence.

It’s great stuff between the two of them.


It’s a dirty 2.5 stars out of 5. The writing style needs a bit of polish and work. Bloch will get there. But he’s really excited, and it shows.



Alright, next up ,The Shadow from the Steeple

Alright, next up ,The Shadow from the Steeple

This clocks in at 17 pages in my reader.

This story is a definite sequel to Haunter. It takes place 15 years after the first story, and a writer friend, Fiske, of the deceased Robert Blake and Lovecraft’s arrives in Providence. He has been investigating the events of the death of his friend, Blake, for some time.

After the death of Blake, one Dr. Dexter arrived on the scene, took the box and special hedron, and dumped them out in the bay. Then he absconded with the nasty works in the church to keep them out of the reach of others. Meanwhile, most of the folks in the area that were connected to the church are gone. The church was raised, and people have died, or fled Providence.

Dr. Dexter has too. He joined the lecture circuit and turned to physics. He was helping the US military during World War II and recently returned to Providence for a short period of time. Fiske comes back to Providence to visit Dexter after pinning him down.

Dr. Dexter provides the information Fiske seeks, but Fiske guesses that Dexter is really the Haunter of the Dark who took and possessed Dexter’s body. Dexter has given humanity nuclear weapons and the atomic bomb. In fact, the Haunter is Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the old ones, and trying to bring about the destruction of humanity. The Haunter/Dexter kills Fiske before Fiske can shoot him dead, and resumes his path.

Review of The Shadow from the Steeple


First of all, this is basically our first Gen 2 story. It was penned in 1950, and was a direct sequel to an earlier work. It also shares some similar things with other Gen 2 stories – it tones down Lovecraft.

Lovecraft’s concept of this stuff is creatures that are so nasty, so powerful, and so past humanity, that if they wanted to, humanity would be gone right now. To use, they are gods. Yet here, one is running around doing his best demon impression possessing the form of Dexter. (They merged to use the Bloch term). That’s a huge downgrade in power. The Haunter is just a normal Mythos creature, like the shoggoth, nightgaunts, star vampire, or hounds of tindalos. It’s not on the level of the super-nasties until Bloch comes along and bam!

I’m not a fan.

Now, having said that, I do like the writing better stylistically, plus the use of the previous story is a bit much if you’ve recently read it. He spends pages recapping Haunter of the Dark, and does so by adding in Lovecraft as a character in the story as well. Not the first time we’ll see that trick, and certainly not the last. Lovecraft is, indeed, a character in his own mythos. It’s both annoying and cool.

Maybe Bloch foresaw that in Shambler when he created a pseudo-Lovecraft character who dies. Now we have the real Lovecraft that follows. It’s appropriate from Bloch – no one else would get to pull that trick and have it come off genuinely.

I again give it 2.5 stars for weakening the mythos, making the cool Haunter just another incarnation of a named character, but better writing.




Anyway, there is one story left – Fane of the Black Pharaoh.

Synopsis of Fane of the Black Pharaoh



Captain Cartaret has returned from a long exposition away researching the dark rumored Pharaoh Nephren-Ka in works like De Vermis Mysteriis and the Necronomicon. He encounters a strange Arabic man, who reveals the Seal of Nephren-ka and offers to take the Captain to the tomb of Nephren-ka

The Captain relates what he knows. Nephren-Ka is related to be a long ago priest who took over Egypt and forced everyone to serve Nyarlathotep instead of the other gods. He raised up temples and other monuments to Nyarlathotep and outlawed other faiths.

He was ousted and all memory of him was removed from history. He fled to a place outside of modern day Cairo and created a tomb there, and ensconced most of his followers, leaving behind a small remnant to keep the faith and protect it, for in seen thousand years, he would return. Meanwhile, he slew the blood of 100 of his followers and painted with their blood on the walls of the great tomb a long time detailed pictures.

The Arab admits he is one of those priests. His ancestor placed a large tapestry on the future, and each day, the high priest pulls back to reveal the history of that date, as it relates to Egypt. Today, it was revealed that Captain Cartaret would descend into the tomb.

They head down, and the captain is astonished to see it is all true, especially the images and pictures of events. Eventually he sees himself, and as midnight hits, the priest pulls back another section of the curtain, and slays the Captain as he glimpses the picture. On the wall is the image of his death, painted there by Nephren-Ka thousands of years ago, identical to how he is dying.

Review of Fane of the Black Pharaoh


This is, by far, the best of the three works by Bloch, to my mind. It’s not nearly as derivative, and it has some clever moments. For example, at first, you think Bloch tells you about the cult that lasted, and will reveal that this magical Arab is one of that cult at the end as a surprise. But nope, he volunteers that information immediately – and plays with expectations of the readers, and perhaps with Captain Cataret’s as well.

The goal of this story was to flesh out the tale of Nephren-Ka. And it does. But not that much. Despite the length (18 pages), we just get a bit on the guy - ,much of which could be guessed. Here, we see Nyarlathotep being worshipped, but not in the picture – he’s not around granting boons to clerics. It just illustrates how much of a set of idiots we humans are with this stuff. So he is used better in this story than in Steeple.

Bloch has a better understanding of setting and mood than in Shambler, and it shows. So the better polish, with the nice plot and well thought out elements brings this story to a nice 3.5 outta 5.

What’s next?

Well, we’ve seen the Mythos in lots of places. Underground and in ruins. The Black Stone had us in Central Europe, and Thing on the Roof in Central America. We just finished a second tale in the Middle East after The Fire of Asshurbanipal. We’ve been in New England and Olde England. We been in the past and the recent past. From the South Pacific and even in Antarctica. So where are we heading next?


Sub-Saharan Africa!


I was thinking of using The Mound as our first of the revision/edit tales of Lovecraft, but instead I want to begin with a really good story – well written and fun. Not a lot of Mythos elements, but with a good amount of fun.

Winged Death, by HP Lovecraft and Hazel Heald

Hazel Heald did five such stories with Lovecraft. This have been referred to as revisions, edits, ghost-writing or co-writing assignments. We’re not exactly sure of how they occurred, but the result in this case is really good.

It clocks in at 26 pages in my novel of reprints, which is smaller than the bigger ones my collections usually are.


"Winged Death" by H. P. Lovecraft

Let’s spend some time in the “Dark Continent”

Before we begin Winged Death, quick word warning. I don’t remember any Lovecraft story written solely by him using the N word. Just this and I think one other of the edits, ghost writings, revisions, co authorship stuff. Just so you are aware.

Synopsis of Winged Death


The scene opens with four men, a police inspector, a coroner, a doctor and a hotel manager looking over an odd scene in a motel room in South Africa. On the floor is a dead man, on the ceiling are odd signs, and in the room are odd accoutrements including an open inkwell, a container of nasty chemicals with a dead fly in it, and a few other bizarre things. The doctor picks up a journal and begins to read.


The journal is written by Dr. Thomas Slauenwite, who has decided to kill his colleague, Dr. Henry Moore. After writing some major works in the field of science and medicine, Dr. Moore discredited him somewhat by publicly revealing some letters than their tutor had written and come up with the same ideas, but died before he could publish. Slauenwite would no longer get the promised knighthood and major university position.

But he found a path to kill Moore. There is a local fly called the devil fly that bit one of his clients in Uganda. It came with an odd spectral looking purple ring around the bite. The natives claim that the devil fly sucks out your soul, and on death, your soul transfers to the fly itself. After giving the native some medicine he survives.

In gratitude, he agrees to show Slauenwite where the devil flies are. There was an outbreak of them a while ago, and killed thousands of locals, and they are in a few journals. They pass by some ruins in Zimbabwe that even the locals fear, but arrive at the place and Slauenwite captures several of the devil flies and some tainted meat for them to feed off of.

He decides to breed them with others flies ,the tsetse, to create a hybrid that Moore will not recognize. He even dyes their wings blue with a pigment, to further the disguise. He goes on holiday, grows a beard, and ships them to Moore claiming he is a fellow insect enthusiast who has this puzzle –an unidentified fly.

Sure enough, Moore loves the parcel, opens it, and eventually is bit by one of the flies. After a year or so of fighting it, he dies. There is some suspicion on Slauenwite, who decides to go into hiding with a new identity in South Africa.

After a short while, he encounters one of the blue flies, who must have been from his original parcel to Moore. It acts oddly and stalks him, eventually chasing him to his hotel, and even jumping into his inkwell and writing numbers. The fly bites Slauenwite who dies immediately from fright.

Up on the ceiling are words written by the fly, confirming that the flies are tainted, and that they are evil. He swoops into the container to commit suicide and kill the fly.

Review of Winged Death


I like the story a lot. It moves quickly, it’s set in an unusual place, It introduces an interesting element, and the idea of breeding a fly to kill someone is a lot of fun. It’s a good psychological piece, actually, and you could film it today with little variation.

The only Mythos element is this paragraph on the ruins in Zimbabwe they pass:


And there you have it, that’s it. Because it just kisses the Mythos, I think that makes it a much better story. Shoot, if I could, I would have pulled the word cyclopean to reduce it even more and just used gigantic or titanic. Because the story doesn’t have to fit the Mythos, everyone is free to breathe and have fun with it.

So here you have a crazy scientist, cross breeding the devil fly to create a new species that is just as lethal, feeding it on the tainted meat, assassinating his colleague in this way, and then being chased by the same.

It’s written well, paced decently, and is quite an interesting yarn. Because it takes place outside and away from the usual Lovecraft places, it has some nice space. You also really want to know what those ruins mark, and what are the Fishers from the Outside. Lovecraft knows when to just drop a few hints and leave well enough alone!


I actually like this better than a lot of Lovecraft’s solo work. I give it a full 4 out of 5 stars. It’s my favorite of the revisions. Some others may be more important to the Mythos, (Horror in the Museum, The Mound, etc) but this is just the best of the lot. Good job HP Lovecraft and Hazel Heald!

Next will be The Tree-Men of M’Bwa, by Donald Wandrei.


Donald is a minor pulp writer in the 20s and 30s. After writing letters to Lovecraft and being a part of his circle, he hitchhikes from Minnesota in 1927 to meet Lovecraft, who shows him the sights in Providence and a few other places in New England.

All in all, over the course of fifteen years or so he published more than 30 stories, but just a trickle made it out after that, found poor markets for his stuff. Two of his stories are fully enmeshed in the Mythos – The Tree-Men and The Fire Vampires. Others hit it too - such as The Lady in Grey.

Donald Wandrei is more famous for founding publishing company with August Derleth, Arkham House, which helped to keep Lovecraft alive for decades. He encountered legal problems with Reggie Barlow, another writer who was given control of Lovecraft’s estate, and even later would sue his own company for rights and such. While Derleth freely added his stories to Arkham collections, Wandrei never did so.

Despite being a very minor author (who frankly, could have benefitted from the publicity of being in these Lovecraftian collections), Wandrei held onto his copyrights and stories very tightly, and only occasionally doled them out. Today, to buy one of two short story collections, you have to pay for a high prestige printing that costs a ton of money. Much of his stuff is either dream stories or sci-fi, horror is the minority

Now, I scoured and found Wandrei’s writing collections (which were published long ago) in the Detroit Public Library and checked them out and read them. You won’t find them, legally, online. And, due to the lack of people who care about him (in large part due to the lack of press by fighting against being anthologized), there are not a lot of people who would even care to.

Now, having said that, I actually like this story. I’m glad that I tracked it down to read. So let’s take another spin here in Africa, and read The Tree-Men of M’Bwa

(There is a fun youtube link of someone reading the story. Takes about a half hour. If you want - "The Tree-Men of M'Bwa," by Donald Wandrei - YouTube.

Anyway, if you want to buy one of his collections, The Eye and Finger, published waaaay back in 1944, here’s the page to do so on Amazon:

The Eye and the Finger: Donald Wandrei: 9789997541369: Amazon.com: Books

Now, while we’re waiting for you to read Tree-Men, let’s look at another Lovecraft thing really quickly. Suppose you want to know more about the Fishers from the Outside and this outpost. Excellent! Lovecraft wrote a poem, that answers your desire

The Outpost
By H. P. Lovecraft

------=-O-=------
When evening cools the yellow stream,
And shadows stalk the jungle’s ways,
Zimbabwe’s palace flares ablaze
For a great King who fears to dream.

For he alone of all mankind
Waded the swamp that serpents shun;
And struggling toward the setting sun,
Came on the veldt that lies behind.

No other eyes had vented there
Since eyes were lent for human sight—
But there, as sunset turned to night,
He found the Elder Secret’s lair.

Strange turrets rose beyond the plain,
And walls and bastions spread around
The distant domes that fouled the ground
Like leprous fungi after rain.

A grudging moon writhed up to shine
Past leagues where life can have no home;
And paling far-off tower and dome,
Shewed each unwindowed and malign.

Then he who in his boyhood ran
Through vine-hung ruins free of fear,
Trembled at what he saw—for here
Was no dead, ruined seat of man.

Inhuman shapes, half-seen, half-guessed,
Half solid and half ether-spawned,
Seethed down from starless voids that yawned
In heav’n, to these blank walls of pest.

And voidward from that pest-mad zone
Amorphous hordes seethed darkly back,
Their dim claws laden with the wrack
Of things that men have dreamed and known.

The ancient Fishers from Outside—
Were there not tales the high-priest told,
Of how they found the worlds of old,
And took what pelf their fancy spied?

Their hidden, dread-ringed outposts brood
Upon a million worlds of space;
Abhorred by every living race,
Yet scatheless in their solitude.

Sweating with fright, the watcher crept
Back to the swamp that serpents shun,
So that he lay, by rise of sun,
Safe in the palace where he slept.

None saw him leave, or come at dawn,
Nor does his flesh bear any mark
Of what he met in that curst dark—
Yet from his sleep all peace has gone.

When evening cools the yellow stream,
And shadows stalk the jungle’s ways,
Zimbabwe’s palace flares ablaze,
For a great King who fears to dream.

Synopsis of The Tree-Men of M’Bwa

In this story, a man arrives in a Gold Coast town in West Africa and finds a dive. He intends to explore the inner area up the Congo river and past the Mountains of the Moon. He is warned off by a man missing both legs, wrapped deeply from where they were cut off.

The man warns him to head elsewhere, and reveals that he was the co-lead of an illfated mission earlier to explore the same route. He went with a scientist and himself a geologist looking for potential mining areas. He relates his story:

After splitting up, he heads into the Mountains of the Moon and quickly finds a pass through it with his local guides and porters. After a few days, they find a spot with an unusually shaped hill and they refuse to go on, telling him that this is the place of M’Bwa, and it brings bad magic. They flee after camping for the night and he pr3esses on after securing his things.

The hill opens into another hill around a circular impression, valley-like, in the earth. There is a ring of twenty-ish trees in unusual sizes but all man-shaped. In the middle is an odd red colored object that changes shape – first a cube, then a ball, then a pyramid and so forth. He pushes inwards, and one of the trees appears to look at him with human eyes. Then he notes a very old black man. He shoots him, but nothing happens. The black man finishes a battle with him, and forces a liquid down his stomach.

He awakens in the form of an unusual tree. He is given the story by another – M’Bwa has been here for centuries, before Atlantis and Egypt, and the creature M’Bwa controls is an old corpse. A few weeks later, the scientist comes looking for him and finds the area. After failing to shoot him, he grabs his machete and hews off the corpse’s head and then hacks the bottom, bloody, stump of the tree that still has a bit of the eyes and voice of the one found here. He runs off with the tree/man and eventually is attacked again by the corpse but splits the body in half.

He flees back, and unfortunately catches malaria and dies before the geologist awakens. The geologist refuses to return to Europe and stays in Africa. The man who arrived refuses to really believe that this crazy story is the case, so in anger, the geologist pulls the bandages off his legs where tree-like growths are still growing from his body, and claims he has to hack them off once a month.

Review of The Tree-Men of M’Bwa


I actually really like this story. A lot. The setting is fun, the idea is sharp, and the body horror in the end goes in a different direction than is normal for Mythos stuff. In my opinion, it is one of the creepiest elements of the Mythos Stories, and they have a lot of creepy moments – this is one of the best/worst for me.

This story stays with me. Now, this is not a massively impactful story. You’ll read about M’Bwa more in things like Call of Cthulhu role-playing books that explore Africa. There are no overt Mythos elements in the story at all – no mention of the Necronomicon, Azathoth, a Hound of Tindalos, or a Shoggoth. That gives the story room to breathe and grow – which I really like.

The story is also just long enough – at 10 pages total. I want to know more about M’Bwa and his mysterious object. Is It a space ship? What’s going on? Why are some of the trees very, very tall? Were they giant people who were converted? I like these sorts of questions.

And the writing is pretty keen too. This 1932 tale is much better than the next story. I give it a strong four outta five stars.



Alright, next up is the Fire Vampires, which feels more Mythos-y in a variety of ways. Ready?

Synopsis of The Fire Vampires


Published in 1933, in this tale, that begins in 2341, depicts the story of an unusual comet, detected by one Gustav Norby. The unusual comet is about 18 years out from our solar system and on a course that closes near Earth. Then its disappears for a few days and reappears on the edge of the solar system on the same course. It apparently accelerated past the speed of light. As it nears the earth it angles to veer towards earth, circles around, the Earth, and then heads back for Arcturus. Before it leaves, thousands of people die to an unusual form of spontaneous combustion that seems somewhat like ball lightning.

Norby is one of the few to connect these actions to intelligence. A few years later, the comet returns and another round of death occurs. This time fiery letters appear in the sky (in the language of the local folks), that tell Earth that they are now the property of the people of Ktynga, the comet that encircles them. They will return in a few years to harvest some more humans, and they demand that four specific people be among those killed.

They return a few years later and Norby, one of the four who was demanded, refuses to show, and they kill 100000 people instead in punishment. The red fire-like creatures dance about, harvesting souls. One blueish one hovers about, calling himself FTHAGGUA, LORD OF KTYNGA.

The comet leaves and returns a few years later, with Norby offering himself this time. The blue one bends down, but he captures it in a flame trap and then shocks it with massive amounts of electricity, killing it. As Fthaggua falls, the other fire vampires disappear. Ktynga becomes another satellite of Earth, much like the moon. It appears that there was never more than one creature, and the rest were like its fingers. Gustav Norby figured it out, and saved the world.

Review of The Fire Vampires


This is a particularly grim story. Gustav Norby intentionally keeps himself from submitting to the fire vampires, knowing they had pledged to kill a hundred thousand people in response. There are vast rebellions, banditry, looting, and devastations to the earth after the comet arrives. It’s a dark story.

It’s also not a very futuristic one. I’m not a fan of setting a story far into the future as a plot device, and then making no major changes to the world. You are a writer of weird fiction – you can easily add flying cards, or jetpacks, or people colonizing others worlds, but nope. People are still sailing by boat across the Atlantic and reading newspapers from stands. Come on, work a little, won’t you?

That comes off as lazy. At that point, just set it in 1941, eight years after publication, and move on.

Like Tree-Men, this work has no mention of any Mythos element – although it is incorporated into it later. Fire Vampire is the name given the race by Norby, not their actual name, but it stuck in the Mythos. The character of Fthaggua would be later made the high priest of a nasty creature that will be created by August Derleth in 1944 in a particularly uncreative moment.

Just 2.5 stars outta 5 for the reasons cited above.


Anyway, there are other works by Don that either are fully Mythos (The Lady in Grey mentions Hali, Carcosa, and Cthulhu) or feel that way (Spawn of the Sea). But these two are the only stops on the Wandrei mobile we’ll make before heading back into Gen 1 land.

Next Stop, Ithaqua, by August Derleth – this is either late Gen 1 or early Gen 2 (1941). It uses Gen 1 stuff and fleshes out his own creation in The Thing that Walked on the Wind. This story is very important because this is where Derleth solidifies his creation and makes it more tangible (by a bit at least). Ithaqua becomes one of the more popular additions to the Mythos in the 30s and 40s. I actually think Derleth handles this character better than Lloigar and Zhar (in Lair of the Star-Spawn, which we already read)or Cthugha or a few others. So let’s look at this story that delves into the nature of the character, and explore Ithaqua!

Review of Ithaqua

In Canada, the mounted police have been under heavy suspicion for failing to solve a disappearance by one Henry Lucas that happened in Cold Harbor eight years previously by Constable James French. However, the case was solved long ago, and the department chooses to reveal French’s last submission and report to the department.

When investigating the area, it appears that Lucas left his house and then the footprints in the snow show him disappearing some distance from his house, and nothing else is marked in the snow at all. The investigation into Locus showed that he was generally disliked, especially by the local Native Americans. One drunken night he went out and insulted their religion, which appears to have really upset him.

After drawing a blank in his investigation, a local Priest suggests that he head out into the woods to check out some unusual rock patterns. He finds three circles of stone out there, with central altars at each, and a lot of activity by local natives. But he also finds a shoeprint identical to Lucas that appears here, and he moves around frantically before being picked up again.

Suddenly, he begins to feel something, odd. He looks about and encounters a whirling shape that is formless, but with two haunting eyes. Scared, he runs back to Cold Harbor, and the priest confirms his thoughts. This was Ithaqua, who has been worshipped by the local natives for millennia – their Asiatic stock runs deep. He explains in detail who Ithaqua is believed to be.

The local natives sacrifice their own children to the altars to feed Ithaqua. Then suddenly Lucas’s body is found, still alive, but deathly cold. They watch over him for a few hours, but he dies, but near the end, begins to spout paranoid delusions. It appears Lucas saw much that Constable French observed as well. He was taken by Ithaqua.

French orders his documents prepared and purchases dynamite to head out and blast the altars and destroy them. He is not heard from for days. Another constable is sent to destroy the altars as planned and does so, but not before French is found again, in a similar state as Lucas. Even the local Native population is rounded up and dispersed among the provinces to break up their worship of Ithaqua.

Synopsis of Ithaqua

Derleth actually has a really good story here. Again, I enjoy the Canadian location, the interaction with Natives, and the weak presence Ithaqua actually has. The investigation by a Mountie is fun, fast paced, and the story is decent. There are some issues and questions.

What is with this Priest? I thought all of his information might have been explained away because he was working with the Natives or a secret admirer of Ithaqua or perhaps a hunter thereof and an enemy of Ithaqua, or whatever, but nope. That’s odd.

Again, Derleth’s prose is cleaning up, he really likes the subject, and he’s not putting his foot into his mouth with his normal fluff. There are no Enemies of the Old Ones to call down (such as in Lair of the Star-Spawn), and no pulling back the curtain to explain everything. Even the stuff on Ithaqua is kept suitably solid.

So therefore, I actually think this is the best Derleth story we have read so far, and I give it a pretty good 3.5 stars out of 5.

Alright, next I want to move back to the Master for another key Mythos tale, The Whisperer in Darkness. It’s very long, and in my anthology, it clocks in at an incredible 57 pages, just two shy of The Shadow Out of Time. In Shadow, Lovecraft introduced both the Flying Polyp and the Great Race of Yith. Now he is going to introduce another race, the Mi-Go to the Mythos. Expect to see them later.

Published in 1931, this story shares with much of his later stuff a tendency to be more a science-fiction based story, not your typical fantasy fare with cultists (or natives) and pseudo-demons that gain power due to sacrifices. Get ready to enjoy!

"The Whisperer in Darkness" by H. P. Lovecraft

Synopsis of The Whisperer in Darkness


This story basically has two parts. The first accounts for two main characters and what is happening with them. The second is the subsequent story as things have shifted.

Dr. Albert Witmarth, at Miskatonic University, is a professor in linguistics and studies New England lore and culture. During a flood in 1927, a few odd things are seen in the waters in the first day washed out – in three places, odd crablike creatures are seen by backwoods folk. Dr. Wilmarth dismisses them as part of a collective myth-cycle that appears to everyone.

After he writes a particularly eviscerating article for a local paper, one Henry Akeley writes to him to detail some of his own person encounters with the creatures spoken of, and has evidence. They exchange letters for weeks, and during that time, Akeley reveals more and more about the Mi-Go, a crablike humanoid creature, with a set of wings. They have colonized part of Earth with mining colonies for minerals they don’t have on one of the local planets of Yuggoth. He shows pictures of footprints by the Mi-Go, a strange black stone goes missing when he sends it to Witmarth, and they have been attacking late at night.

As things look very rough, Akeley sends a letter letting Witmarth know that everything is now fine. He has established communication with the Mi-Go and learned so much from them. Apparently, a third party that serves Cthulthu and other old creatures have been attacking the Mi-Go, who are apparently fungoid in nature, and fly back to their outposts and planets with their wings in space. The Mi-Go just want to be left alone to mine quietly. They could take over Earth any time if they cared, but they want to mine in peace.

Witmarth is invited to Akeley’s farm and arrives to meet him, bringing the evidence to cross reference it. Akeley is falling badly, and speaks to him from a distance, and his face and hands look rather pale. There is an odd sensation in the air, but Witmarth can’t trace it. But it’s definitely Akeley, the face matches perfectly to the various pictures.

Akeley explains the universe and eventually tells Witmarth that the Mi-Go want to take them both with them to Yuggoth and beyond. They will surgically remove their brains, and then put them in these canisters, which are then hooked up to machines and sense, speak, and talk. They become immortal. He has Witmarth plug in the machine for one of the canisters and talks with someone from Tibet who has visited countless stars and planets.

Disgusted, after retiring for bed, Witmarth breaks out and seeks Akeley to find him, but cannot. He searches quietly, and searches the area. After he discovers what was on the chair he flees the place immediately. Behind was the area, lacking the sensation that he had before, and with Akeley’s head and hands, no longer attached to his body, and corpse-like. There is a container with his name on it.

Review of The Whisperer of Darkness

I don’t think any other Lovecraft story better demonstrates his view of the cosmos outside of Earth than this one. Allow me to demonstrate the universe, as per Lovecraft:

Even now I absolutely refuse to believe what he implied about the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organization.

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity—never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guessed—from hints which made even my informant pause timidly—the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao. The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. It was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of secret myth cleared up in concrete terms whose stark, morbid hatefulness exceeded the boldest hints of ancient and mediaeval mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe that the first whisperers of these accursed tales must have had discourse with Akeley’s Outer Ones, and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms as Akeley now proposed visiting them.


This is a thoroughly science-fiction story, and that makes wonderful reading in the light right now. One of the things you’ll note is the lack of true science fiction stories in many of the Mythos Stories. Sure, a knife, or rock, or entity might have once been from the stars, but then all you have to do is sacrifice a baby, innocent, virgin, etc on that altar, knife, etc and you gain power, summoning, etc. Or else you intone various words from an eldritch tome that leads to a summoning of some outer creature to punish you for your impudence. It feels very un-scifi. Even Lovecraft has stories like the evil Cultists of old (check out something prosaic, such as The Diary of Alonzo Typer by Lovecraft).

The dialogue in here is a bit tedious, and the story a bit long on the detail and short on the plot. Yet the language and content keep me going to the end breezily. I give it a 3 outta 5. Not Lovecraft’s best, but better than stuff like The Thing on the Doorstep or something)

Okay, next I want to do a group of stories by Henry Kuttner. Who is Henry, and how does he connect with Lovecraft?


At the young age of 20, in 1936, Henry Kuttner published his first short stories in the pulps, both of which were set in Lovecraft’s Mythos. He had been writing back and forth with Lovecraft for a few years, and it was Lovecraft that suggested he write to CL Moore ,a popular science fiction writer.

As you may recall, CL Moore is one of the early women authors in the genre of consequence ,and we’ve already read her a bit in The Challenge from Beyond, where she was probably the best actual author next to major name like Merritt, Howard and Lovecraft. Kuttner thought she was a man, and you can imagine the awkwardness of that! Anyway, both Moore and Kuttner were in the Lovecraft Circle and introduced by him. Eventually, in 1940, they would marry, and author a lot of stories together.

In fact, his pay was a bit better than hers, so sometimes they would publish her stories under his name to get the better pay. They would finish each other’s stories and help through writing block. He died early at the age of 42 in 1958.

Kuttner was an interesting author. He loved the Mythos, and wrote a variety of stories, some of which made some additions to the Mythos. He is an important Gen 1 author. He also began to write some Conan-inspired stuff with the character of Elak of Atlantis.

Now, after he cut his teeth on these homages, he began to move to hard sci-fi, and because a very talented author. His legacy is tarnished a bit by writing knock offs of Lovecraft and Howard at first (but even Lovecraft wrote knock offs of Dunsany and Poe in his early days). Some of his Sci-FI stories were downright classics that time has forgotten a bit. (Part of this reputation was covered by using a ton of pseudonyms)

Check out Mimsy Were the Borogoves, (co-written with Moore) which was so good, it made the cut by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1965 in their Anthology of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, 1929-1964.

CL Moore, despite living until 76 in 1987, slowed down and stopped writing soon after her husband’s death. She just wasn’t able to write anymore. She also never wrote a bunch of Mythos tales like her future husband would. (CL Moore made it in the 3rd class of inductions into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame). (A Merritt, by the way, made it in the 4th class).

We will be looking at a few Kuttner tales to examine this guy at the beginning of his writing, and see where he is, and what he gives the Mythos.

I picked up the Book of Iod, a collection with 13 stories, most of which were early Mythos tales by Kuttner. I want to start with a later story by him from 1939. It’s creepier and more flavorful than some of his earlier stuff, so let’s begin here, and then work our way back.

Bells of Horror

It’s a lovely story, that was never anthologized until the mid-80s. Some of Kuttner’s tales are online and available for free. Perhaps this one wasn’t. It wasn’t published under his name, so the general Lovecraft fan may not have had this in their collections since it was written in 1939 and then neither connected with Kuttner nor the Mythos generally. So unless your Google skills surpass mine (which wouldn’t surprise me at all) it’s not there. We’ll get some later stuff though, so yay!

The best I can do is a preview from Google Books that has the first three pages, and then a few here and there:

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos - Google Books

Synopsis of Bells of Horror


The lost bells of the Mission San Xavier were found, and then destroyed before even being hung and rung. The California Historical Society has been accused of destroying old items without giving them their proper due. So the secretary, who was there, begins to relate the tale to end some of these whispers.

The Bells were uncovered in a cave in the Pinos Range, and there is a carving on the cave saying that no one should hang the evil bells of the Mutsune people. Some unusual things were happening, according to expedition leader Todd, and the secretary of the CHS leaves to arrive on the scene. Open arrival, the secretary notes some unusual things, including a frog who smashed his eyes out against rocks. His own eyes are itching terribly as he ascends the ridge. One of the workers stumbles down the hill having done the same thing to his eyes, gouged them out. He smashes into a tree while running full speed down the hill and dies. They suspect that gases released from the expedition are an irritant to the eyes.

Arthur Todd, the leader of the expedition, Denton is assistant, and some locals arrive at the scene. They refuse to help anymore with the expedition and leave. Todd, Denton, and the secretary head back to the three Bells of San Xavier. They found a scroll tube with parchment relating the story of the Bells – they were hung and rung, and an evil demon called Zuchequon was called from his dwelling in the darkness, and brought black night across the area. The bells were removed and hidden away.

The bells are taken down, but not before crushing another assistant dead.

The secretary does some research in the Book of Iod, translated by Johann Negus, from the Huntington Library. There is a passage from the Book that is transcribed and read, that includes the Dark Silent One on the shore of the Western Ocean. He can be called to the surface before his time, he is Zushakon to others, be he has no name.

The Bells are hung later on at the Mission of San Xavier. Soon an earthquake hits and one of the bells rings. The bells clang against each other, and soul-wrenching feelings emerge from everyone nearby, and the day begins to deepen and darken. Soon enough, light is totally exhausted. Denton leads the two to the Mission. They penetrate the church and head up the stairs, but all are feeling very disquieted. They are tempted to put out their eyes – darkness is soothing, and welcoming, and keeps one away from the bright lights and harsh sun.

Denton manages to unhinge the bells, and the darkness fades. They had nearly fallen to the suggestions of Zuquechon. The bells are destroyed soon after. A few months later, an eclipse hits California. The old sensations arise again, and Todd calls the secretary. He is succumbing to the feelings. The secretary grabs the car ,heads out, and finds Todd dead, having shot himself with his pistol after being forced to put out his own eyes. It seems like Zuchequon was not sent back as thought, but may already be here…

Review of Bells of Horror


One thing I don’t like about this story, and let’s get it out the way now, it the massive amount of blood and gore here. You have people [putting out their eyes, being crushed by bells, severed heads, and more. It’s not real horror, and I think its lazy writing. It hurts the story. Keep in the gouged eyes, remove the rest of the gore, and you have a better, more atmospheric story.

Kuttner will get a lot better after all, but here we see him as a decent writer. The piece has a nice mood, and it also introduces The Book of Iod to the mythos, as well as Zuchequon, who’s a minor character, but fun. Like many recent stories, it has no aspects of the old Mythos in it. There is no mention of Yog-Sothoth or Miskatonic University. But it’s fully in flavor and ensconced in the Mythos.

I like the story overall, its fun to be set in California, and have bells that ring in darkness. Fun idea. I don’t like the backstory that much of the Bells – that sacrifices were done to bring bad magic on them. Feh – too much of that in the Mythos. Nevertheless, Kuttner does a solid here.


3 stars outta 5.

Alright, next up will be interesting. I’m considering The Invaders, The Salem Horror, and others. But let’s shift genres a bit and move to The Eater of Souls. It’s a mighty 4 pages in my Book of Iod collection. I’ve never read it either! So let’s read Kuttner together, for the first time. I’ll even time myself!

It clocked it at 6 minutes and 14 seconds. Whoa ho! Alright, let’s discus this one quickly – it’s really a piece of flash fiction or mood writing:

Synopsis and Review of The Eater of Souls


This story, published in early 1937, was one of a few Lovecraft commented on that year before he died. Eater of Souls is a clear Dunsany throwback. If you like Dunsany, you’ll enjoy The Eater of Souls.

The piece is short. It begins in far off Bel Yarnak, beyond Betelgeuse and the Great Stars. A creature called the Eater of Souls has arrived, and it is the responsibility of a local ruler, the Sindara, to fight him off. After being prepared by the local hydromancers and necromancers with various weapons, he has a vision from the god, Vorvadoss, who predicts doom. After encountering the Soul Eater and losing, the Sindra gets a vision from Vorvadoss, and as he merges with the Soul eater, flings the creature and himself off the cliff and to their doom.


I was surprised by some of the well written phrases in this story. For example, take this:

“An intolerable agony ground frightfully within the Sindara’s bone and flesh; the citadel of his being rocked, and his soul cowered shrieking in its chamber”

It’s very evocative stuff.

This story introduces Vorvadoss, and is a quick stop on Kuttner Lane. I give it a surprising 3.5 stars out of 5.


I thought about swinging by his other major Dunsany-like tale, The Jest of Droom-Avista. It’s also four pages, and I’ve never read it. Let me read it really quickly, and see if I want to use it for this Mythos dynasty or not.

I actually do like it. A lot. So I’m adding it.

Synopsis and Review of The Jest of Droom-Avista


Set again on Bel Yarnak, a city and beautiful place of beauty, gold silver and jewels. This 1937 piece from him explores the Black Minaret, a power of the area that is worshipped and served by powerful magicians, who seek to create the philosopher’s stone and create the rarest of metals on Bel Yarnak. The most powerful mage, Thorazor, has quested his life, but failed and failed again. Frustrated, he calls:


“Not the little gods, nor the gods of good and evil, but Droom-avista, the Dweller Beyond, the Dark Shining One, Thorazor called up from the darkness.”

Droom-avista relents to the wizard’s request and leaves behind a gem. The Stone! Thorazor creates the Elixir in his golden pot, and screams in delight as the potion is completed, and turns into the rarest of metals on Bel Yarnak. It continues, and in a flash, the stand, the table are turned, as is Thorazor himself, and soon, the city of Bel Yarnak is turned, quickly and quietly, into the rare metal.

No longer Bel Yarnak, but now Dis, City of Iron.


So here we have Droom-avista and another Bel Yarnak story. Apparently there are just these two. I couldn’t find Droom-avista in my Encyclopedia Cthuliana, but the story is listed as a Mythos tale. Although Bel Yarnak is listed briefly, as are the events of this story.

Anyway, it’s another fun story, quick and easy to read, and a lot of fun.


I give it 3 stars outta 5. Not written quite as well, although I like the plot better.

Where to next? Let’s hit up the 18-pound gorilla. The Salem Horror.

None of Kuttner’s Lovecraft tales are as well known as this one. It was in one of the first anthologies, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. This book helped to launch the Mythos as a concept and kept alive a lot of names and people. Because of its inclusion in that work, it’s a seminal Mythos tale.

But before that, we need to grab something else instead. I want to swing by and pick up a Lovecraft story that The Salem Horror is evoking. We should read the master first.


So let’s interject this Kuttner fest with The Dreams in the Witch-House


You can find this work here:

http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary...witchhouse.htm

Published in 1932, it also clocks in at 32 pages in my anthology, so it’ll take a while to read. Typical Lovecraft, eh?

Synopsis and Review of The Dreams in the Witch House


I wanted to show you Lovecraft at arguably his lowest (either this or Thing on the Doorstep) are among his worst Mythos works. It also has a Christianization of the Mythos, as Crucifixes work and the Black Man is arguably Satan with his black robe, coal black skin, and cloven hoofed feet. So before we see this move as purely non-Lovecraft authors, we need to see this story for what it is.

It’s a normal, haunted house story. From The House with Seven Gables or The Fall of the House of Usher through The Haunting of Hill House, this is a very common sub-genre of horror. And Lovecraft begins with the ideas of mathematics and physics as the foundation to explain these things. But then quickly he derails. The language is not there, the resonance is not there, and the story lacks realistic merit.

Even August Derleth was unimpressed, calling it a poor story to Lovecraft’s face in a letter. Lin Carter calls in unimaginative and one dimensional. Others have been equally unsympathetic. I completely agree. This story reads more like a bad Gen 1 story by another author than it does by Lovecraft himself.. That’s not a good thing. I expect more.

I gave it just 2 out of 5 stars.




Now, let’s compare it to one of Henry Kuttner’s most famous Mythos talks, The Salem Horror, which is an obvious homage to Dreams . So, which one will be better? The Master’s bad tale, or the Student’s good tale?


The Salem Horror is also online!


http://www.donaldcorrell.com/kuttner/shorror.html

Synopsis of The Salem Horror

Centuries before, a famous witch in Salem, one Abigail Prinn, was staked and buried in the local graveyard, but not before supposedly cursing the town. Her house was always hard to rent due to rat problems. A recent renter, Carson, is a popular author who has sold several light romance novels. He has come to get some isolation and write his next novel.

One day, Carson leaves to chase down a rat, who is acting very strangely. Ultimately, Carson forces the rat into a hole, and then crosses the spot in front of the hole to place a trap later. The rat refuses to come out, and he finds a ledge with an old handhold.

Pushing it open, he reveals a small hallways that ends at a room Carson labels the Witch Room. It’s beautiful, with many ornate gems, and such in a huge mosaic on the floor, centering on a large metal disk, with some ancient writings on the wall. Carson heads up, and phones his landlord, and gets wring and such sent here – it’s a perfect place to study.

A week later, an Occultist named Leigh stops by from California. He convinces Carson to let him see the Witch Room, which Carson has gotten tired of showing. He asks some questions “what happened to the rat” and quotes some etchings about something called Nyogtha. Carson admits that his writing has been much more lucid since using the Witch Room

Leigh suggests that the Room is sort of an echo chamber for something other than echoes, and concentrates and sends out thought. Leigh leaves. The next day, Carson awakes with a vivid dream that fades ,and meanwhile, someone has opened up the grave of Abigail Prinn and exhumed her body and killed a recent Polish immigrant. Carson uncovers the scene later that day.

Leigh suggests that Carson was controlled by the powers of the Witch Room, and now an undead Prinn is moving about. He looked up Nyogtha in the Necronomicon and has a passage quoted for Carson, who refuses to believe it. Leigh offers Carson $10,000 to leave the house, but Carson refuses. Leigh tells him that that’s because he has been hooked in.

Carson falls asleep and spends most of the day in bed. He awakens to find himself in the Witch Room as a black thing has emerged. A severely mummified creature is there, Abigail Prinn. She begins the summoning to pull Nyogtha into this world, but Leigh busts in with some sort of tincture and uses it to disrupt the ceremony, free Carson from his sleep paralysis, and send Prinn back.

Review of The Salem Horror


It’s not the best Kuttner work, but it does introduce Nyogtha. It was edited by Lovecraft, after the original script was rejected by Weird Tales. Lovecraft mentions that the work is a bit too fast with the horror elements, and does not build up tension. He also suggests that it’s hard to believe over centuries that no one else was in the room, so did this happen every time? He suggests making some changes. The only major changes Kuttner would make were about Salem itself, and making it more realistic after additional research.

And I agree with HP Lovecraft. Kuttner’s story lacks the pace and proper speed. For example, what was the rat? It’s an important plot point, and no mistake that the witch, Prinn, is kept back by a cross just as the rat was by a cross in the ground. Is the rat Prinn? But she was in the coffin at the time. Was it a manifestation of Nyogtha? Was it something else? Why did we drop that plot point after spending a few pages with the rat?

So, it’s not exactly barn storming. It suffices. I give it 2 out of 5 stars as well.

And which one is better? Really, I’m not a fan of either. So I’ll hit up just one more tale from this Gen 1 era, and then we’ll launch forward to the really strong stories that will come later.


I want to start hitting up really, really strong stories from later writers.

The last story we'll be doing in Gen 1 for a while is here for the historical interest. It's "The Black Kiss" which is written by both Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.

Now, recall that Bloch is a major writer of horror. His books were turned into films, and he is a big name for decades (among which is Psycho). He's a powerful and popular writer of his era. Bloch is.

Meanwhile you have Kuttner, another strong writer (later on for Sci Fi) who has more like pastiches of RE Howard and his Conan in one place, and Lovecraft and Cthulhu in others starting out. Both are still young, and this is among the first works ether will publish.

First published in 1937


Like many others, these two found each other by Lovecraft, who hooked them up. Lovecraft is, in my opinion, the 20th century's greatest epistolarian. There were times when he'd skip meals to afford postage to send letters. His letters were long, deep, usually about writing, and would often be 20, 40, or 75 pages long.



Anyways, I can't find a online copy of the story, so you would need it from various anthologies and such. Kuttner died a while ago, early on in his career, but Bloch was around for ages, and thus his family held onto his stuff longer and ,much of it hasn;t become free.

Synopsis of “The Black Kiss”


A young artist named Dean inherited an ancient house from his family north of San Pedro, along the beach, and near a small rocky cove. He finds the place brilliant for isolation and working on his art. He is meeting with a local Doctor after suffering very lucid dreams here. He tells the doctor the story of the house. His ancestor built it when California was still Spanish, and then went home to Spain before coming back with a wife, Morella.

Rumors are that Morella was a Moorish decent, from a strain of people that practiced black magic, and that she kept herself unnaturally young by performing foul rites. As his nightmares are of the sea, the Doctor believes that the legends about the house and Morella are pushing his dreams, and he prescribes some special drugs, and on the way out, Dean tells him that the dreams started before he found out about Morella.

On the way home, he gets the drugs and uses them. Then he finds a telegram at his house from a uncle Michael, a famous occult researcher. He tells Dean that he just heard he had inherited the house and was living ther,e and for him t ooove out for now, and see a Dr. yamada. The drugs ar estarting to work, it’s late at night, and the Dr lives far away. So Dean stays the night in his house.

Later that night he has a dream of heading into the cove at night, where there is a black unlit cave, nd heading in there, and will be kissed by some unknown, unseeable beautiful lips. The black kiss makes him feel a bit wrong and evil. He wakes later.

The next day, Dr Yamada arrives after getting a call from Michael, who is flying home from India to visit. He is an occultist, and he tells Dean about the history, and these dark and evil sea people that can shift forms, haunt boats, capture minds, and more. He suspects that Morella still lives, plying her trade in the bay, and has been the source of Dean’s nightmares. Dean lies about being kissed in the dream, but agrees to let the Dr stay with him. His uncle should be heading back soon.

That night hs falls asleep and awakens swimming in the bay. For three hours he is swimming with lizard/fish like creatures that have an odd language he understands and feels at home. Then he sees the Dr and himself walking to the beach, cautiously. He looks down at his body and realizes he is in the dark, twisted, form that mimic humanity, but has scales and such. He remembers that earlier the creature brought him to the cave, and again kissed him, this time switching minds.

He heads to shore a while later, and sees his uncle, Dr Yamada, and himself/Morella move. He spies Morella in the cave, slow and still trying to get adjusted to the new body. The others arrive, and she moves out from the cave and he arrives in her body. He sees her palpable evil in his eyes. The two occultists spy him coming to shore, and grab guns. He launches himself at his own body and bites down on her neck as bullets slam into him. He slays Morella in his body as he dies himself.

Review of “The Black Kiss”

All reviews are spoiler free, unless otherwise mentioned, except often for the first page or two.

This is another story with light Mythos elements, the basic core is here. Having read The Shadow Over Innsmouth, you probably already suspect that Morella is a Deep One hybrid as soon as he explains the history in the first two pages. Whether or not that’ll be the case is never stated, which is nice, but again, we won’t know.

I do like that Dr Yamada, a Japanese occultist, is never caricatured, in the middle of a Yellow Peril era of Asian stereotypes all over pulps. He;s actually pretty interesting as an expert on this stuff and explains it well.

The Black Kiss is an interesting thing. Standing on its own, it’s a story written by two major writers, in their youth. So the story lacks big ideas. It’s not like other stories that have really clever or interesting ideas. And the detail in places is intentionally missing to push home points of horror. It has some minor body horror aspects, I suppose, but it’s really just a decent horror story, using a lot of conventions of the genre.

With it’s lack of ideas, weak characterization of the lead, a tendency for too much talking and not enough seeing, and the plot needing a lack of details in places, the story isn’t one I’d put in a ist of the best horror stuff of all time. In fact, I’m including it here as an interesting historical picture of the combination of two major authors. But I do think it’s better that The Salem Horror. It has an earnestness to it that works and it avoids some issues that could have been landmines in other authors pens.

So I’m giving it a 2.5 star rating.

If you’ll recall, I’ve discussed before my view on the Mythos:

Generation 0 – Pre-Lovecraft stories that evoke, remind, and are adopted into the Mythos.
Generation 1 – Lovecraft and his immediate circle, up until a few years after his death around 1940.
Generation 2 – Built on Gen 1 stories, and the major pusher of this age is Arham House publishing and Auguest Derleth
Generation 3 – Starting around 1960, stories that push the genre, push against Derleth, and change the Mythos. Lin Carter kind of takes things and pushes them around and popularizes them again as editor.
Generation 4 - Today. From around 1980 through today.

Now I’m giving you my personal reviews of stories in the Mythos as well. I give them on a 5 star rating. For me, a 5 is a absolute masterpiece of fiction. 4.5 nearly so, with a few flaws. I rate Call of Cthulhu as 4.5 because I think there are some pacing things, and the racial aspects of the tribes can be a bit heavy. A 4 is a great story. Even a 3.5 is very trong, but starting to show flaws, and 3.0 is a good read.

Now I put most of the high quality Gen 1 stories early. You already read Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Seven Geases. I also loaded up the Gen 0 stuff with The Yellow Sign, another 5 start master.

So we’ve used up every 3+ star story from Gen 1 I know of by someone other than HPL himself. . There’s not that many writers in Gen 1, and they are writing for just about 10-13 years. It’s all Lovecraft’s assembled Circle of Writers. We’ve read most of those here. Some didn’t write a lot of Mythos stories (like Fritz Leiber or CL Moore) and others have been all up and down this list.

So what I really want to do is to push forward. The only stuff we’ve done so far is Gens 0-1 (except for one Gen 2 piece by Bloch that’s a sequel to a Lovecraft piece that’s a sequel to a Bloch piece).

By pushing forward, I can give you some of the best stuff moving forward.

Now I’m actually going to dance around a bit in Gens 2-4, as they are sometimes very similar in theme. Although Gen 2 is Derleth;s, 3 is Carters, and 4is no one’s, there are still similar, building-on-earlier-generations concept that’s quite strong. And there are good Gen 4 tales out there that don’t mention any later works after Lovecraft’s, and aren’t building off other writers in subsequent generations

One thing I thought would be fun is to fast forward to later story to show a major name, in a recent story, that is really, really good, and to see where things are right now. There have been times when the Mythos was sort of looked down on, and many writers were not writing authentic Lovecraft pieces, just stories of major genre-fication that have a few Mythos elements tacked on (often poor stories at that with tentacles, sacrifices, and the Necronomicon).

But there are lots of stories by major authors (and some major ones by lesser known talent) that are really, really good at doing what you want. Many won major awards.

So I want to start with a recent story, that really does something odd:

Say hello to 2004. Neil Gaiman writes a short story called, “a Study in Emerald”, which combines all of the fun of the Cthulhu mythos with the Sherlock Holmes one. A detective story, straight from Baker Street to you. This story won the Hugo Award for best short story of the year.

And the best thing?

It’s actually online!

Check it out and see for yourself:

http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles...es/emerald.pdf


It's a great award winning story!


Now I did not give you that much time for the Black Kiss, as it's not reallly easily available. But for this? Man you all need to read it! SO I'm taking a few days for you to.

So here's what I'm seeing right now.

Gen 4 stories to push stuff around, and then roll back a bit:


Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald"
Lawrence Watt Evans "Pickman's Modem"
Roger Zelazny's "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai"

And then these are in the queue sooner or later:


Basil Copper's "Shaft Number 247" or perhaps "Beyond the Reef"
Kim Newman's "Big Fish" or "A Quarter to Three"
Neil Gaiman's "Only the End of the World Again"
F. "The Barrens"
Maybe one or two stories by Alan Dean Foster
Stephen King's "Jerusalem's Lot:"

And then a few by lesser known authors that are good

And then I suspect a slide back to Gen 3 and a serous commitment to Ramsey Campbell for a bunch of stories.

And then Lin Carter, more Derleth, stuff like that.

Anyways, that's what I'm currently looking at right now.


And that is all very flexible as well. I could add stuff, move stuff, remove stuff, etc.


I looked at some other stories, like Harlan Ellison's or Barbara Hambleys, etc.

Synopsis of "A Study in Emerald"



Narrator, a retired army major, returns to Albion from Afghanistan, where gods and men are savages unwilling to be ruled by London, Berlin, or Moscow. The Afghan cave-folk tortured Major by offering him to a leech-mouthed thing in an underground lake; the encounter withered his shoulder and shredded his nerves. Once a fearless marksman, he now screams at night. Evicted from his London lodgings, he’s introduced to a possible roommate in the laboratories at St. Bart’s. This fellow, whom Major soon calls “my friend,” quickly deduces his background. He won’t mind screaming if Major won’t mind Friend’s irregular hours, his use of the sitting room for target practice and meeting clients, or the fact that he’s selfish, private, and easily bored.

The two take rooms in Baker Street. Major wonders at the miscellany of Friend’s clients and his uncanny deductive powers. One morning Inspector Lestrade visits. Major sits in on their meeting and learns that Friend is London’s only consulting detective, aiding more traditional investigators who find themselves baffled. He accompanies Friend to a murder scene. Friend has a feeling they’ve fought the good fight together in the past or future, and he trusts Major as he trusts himself.

The victim lies in a cheap bedsit, sliced open, his green blood sprayed everywhere like a gruesome study in emerald. Someone’s used this ichor to write on the wall: RACHE. Lestrade figures that’s a truncated RACHEL, so better look for a woman. Friend disagrees. He’s already noted, of course, that the victim’s of the blood royal—come on, the ichor, the number of limbs, the eyes? Lestrade admits the corpse was Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia, her Majesty Victoria’s nephew. Friend suggests RACHE might be “Revenge” in German, or it might have another meaning—look it up. Friend collects ash from beside the fireplace, and the two leave. Major’s shaken—he’s never seen a Royal before. Well, he’ll soon see a live one, for a Palace carriage awaits them, and some invitations can’t be rejected.

At the Palace, they meet Prince Albert (human), and then the Queen. Seven hundred years ago, she conquered Albion (hence Victoria—the human mouth can’t speak her real name.) Huge, many-limbed, squatting in shadow, she speaks telepathically to Friend. She tells Major he’s to be Friend’s worthy companion. She touches his wounded shoulder, causing first profound pain, then a sense of well-being. This crime must be solved, the Queen says.

At home, Major sees that his frog-white scar is turning pink, healing.

Friend assumes many disguises as he pursues the case. At last he invites Major to accompany him to the theater. The play impresses Major. In “The Great Old Ones Come,” people in a seaside village observe creatures rising from the water. A priest of the Roman God claims the distant shapes are demons and must be destroyed. The hero kills him and all welcome the Old Ones, shadows cast across the stage by magic lantern: Victoria, the Black One of Egypt, the Ancient Goat and Parent of a Thousand who’s emperor of China, the Czar Unanswerable of Russia, He Who Presides over the New World, the White Lady of the Antarctic Fastness, others.

Afterwards Friend goes backstage, impersonating theatrical promoter Henry Camberley. He meets the lead actor, Vernet, and offers him a New World tour. They smoke pipes on it, with Vernet supplying his own black shag as Camberley’s forgotten his tobacco. Vernet says he can’t name the play’s author, a professional man. Camberley asks that this author expand the play, telling how the dominion of the Old Ones has saved humanity from barbarism and darkness. Vernet agrees to sign contracts at Baker Street the next day.

Friend hushes Major’s questions until they’re alone in a cab. He believes Vernet’s the “Tall Man” whose footprints he observed at the murder site, and who left shag ash by its fireplace. The professional author must be “Limping Doctor,” Prince Franz’s executioner—limping as deduced from his footprints, doctor by the neatness of his technique.

After the cab lets them out at Baker Street, the cabby ignores another hailer. Odd, says Friend. The end of his shift, says Major.

Lestrade joins our heroes to await the putative murderers. Instead they receive a note. The writer won’t address Friend as Camberley—he knows Friend’s real name, having corresponded with him about his monograph on the Dynamics of an Asteroid. Friend’s too-new pipe and ignorance of theatrical customs betrayed that he was no shag-smoking promoter. And he shouldn’t have talked freely in that cab he took home.

Writer admits to killing Prince Franz, a half-blood creature. He lured him with promises of a kidnapped convent girl, who in her innocence would go immediately insane at the sight of the prince; Franz would then have the Old One-ish delight of sucking her madness like the ripe flesh from a peach. Writer and his doctor friend are Restorationists. They want to drive off man’s Old One rulers, the ultimate act of sedition! Sating monsters like Franz is too great a price to pay for peace and prosperity.

The murderers will now disappear; don’t bother looking for them. The note’s signed RACHE, an antique term for “hunting dog.”

Lestrade initiates a manhunt, but Friend opines the murderers will lay low, then resume their business. It’s what Friend would do in their place. He’s proven right—though police tentatively identify Doctor as John or James Watson, former military surgeon, the pair aren’t found.

Major consigns his story to a strongbox until all concerned are dead. That day may come soon, given recent events in Russia. He signs off as S____ M____ Major (Retired).




Synopsis Courtesy of Tor.com

Review of "A Study in Emerald"


Holy Crap!


Are you serious?



That's a good story. All reviews are spoiler free, and there is no way I can discuss this story as the first page opens with major stuff happening, and things continue from there.


I will say that this story is highly evocative of the Mythos. And the Holmes one as well, and our good detective does a very good job chasing down the core mystery of the story.

Gaiman plays well with the two. He balances the sort of dual relationship between the Lovecraftian side and the Doyle-esque one. And as someone who has read both, I know the very few people I'd trust in this role. Gaiman is well suited for it. I'd trust Kim Newman, modern-day Ramsey Campell, and maybe one or two more. And that's it.


Anyways, with a great mood, story, and world crafted, Gaiman hits every single note. This story is a masterpiece, and it's one of my favorite short stories of the Cthulhu Mythos of all time.


5 out of 5 for the Hugo Winner.

Next let’s do another Gaiman story, “Only The End of the World Again”. Written in 1994 for the collection Shadows Over Innsmouth, commemorating the pivotal story, by Del Rey, Gaiman writes a story that’s around 15 pages or so in the collection. It’s actually the major selling point, and the first story listed on the back of the cover, for the best tales included.

This story was liked so much that it was adapted to comics by Oni Press.

So let’s read it up!


https://humblebundle-a.akamaihd.net/...ed331aa3c1.pdf

Synopsis of “Only the End of the World Again”


This story is set in the city of Innsmouth in the mid-90s, after a bunch of people moved in in the 80s, and then left again. The city and the main character are very squalid.

The main character awakens after a night of transformation, and then vomits up a dog’s paw and a few fingers of a small child, and then flushes them. He heads out to a local bar, and meets with the locals. A barkeeper is there, reading Tennyson. Our werewolf has been in Innsmouth for just a couple of weeks, and various folks are talking to him about remedies for lycanthropy.

After knocking back a few shots, he heads to his office where is is an “Adjuster” and finds an old fat man on the room, talking about the history of the town and the new day. He leaves, there is a salesman who calls trying to sell him siding, and then a woman who wants to hire him to track down her missing infant and dog. (These folks also tell him what to do with his werewolfism)

After refusing, he finds a young woman’s tarot card reading, and after concentrating on the tarot cards like a lover as she asks, the cards change and warp. The first one is the Warwolf, the second the Deep Ones, and the others are all blank. She forces him out and believes he damaged her card.

He heads back to the bar, downs some drinks, and the barkeeper quotes Tennyson’s Kraken poem. Then they head down to observe the commotion that people have been talking about, and the rise of the Deep Ones. After arriving, the woman, the fat man, and the barkeeper reveal they are the leaders of the movement, and need to sacrifice something better than normal to bring back the Deep Ones.

They move to slay him with a silver knife as the bright eldritch moon risers, and unexpectedly, he turns into a werewolf again (normally you only can once/month) and slays her, kills the barkeeper and then leaves to kill some deer, stopping his sacrifice and the rise of the Deep Ones.

Review of “Only the End of the World Again”


Written as an homage and honor of the recently deceased Roger Zelazny, a major friend of Gaiman’s, this short story is also written in the ouvre of a sort of Lovecraft/Cthulhu homage or pastiche. It takes one of the basic core concepts of the Mythos, and puts it out there as the basic conceit of this story. And when it is stopped at the end, it’s clearly just a matter of time before the End of the World comes again.

The story itself uses the core concept of stories like The Dunwich Horror and such, and paints a suitably squalid view of Innsmouth, the town first seen by Lovecraft. Now, unlike Lovecraft, Gaiman’s visit here is okay, but it’s hardly the piece de resistance that Lovecraft’s was. It’s not Gaiman;s best work, but it does work as a central conceit that knowingly winks at the worst of the Mythos stories as it evokes them in a different way, and even has that wink in the title. You can’t escape it.

I give it 3.5 stars out of five.

Next I have a real treat!

So I researched and found that a short story by Gaiman, “I, Cthulhu” was written, and while its not in any of my collections, like others, it’s online at Gaimans own website. So I thought I’d read it right now for the first time. Most of the stories I’ve selected for here I already read elsewhere and then brought them here for their value to this project. So how will this story work out? I don’t know! But I’m excited to find out:

Neil Gaiman | Cool Stuff | Short Stories | I Cthulhu

It’s very short, and it took me 16 minutes to read just now.


Synopsis of “I, Cthulhu”



We open with Cthulhu telepathically telling Whateley his history and story. He begins with his birth in the dark swamps of his old planet and the eating of his parents. Then he hid from others and ate for around 2000 years when Uncle Hastur arrived and took some of the family to another plane. They ultimately arrived in this plane, and were talking and finding places like Carcosa and such before Cthulhu arrived on Earth, set up a nice little empire, and waged war against these dim Old Ones that arrived with their 5 sided heads, and then eventually was forced to move, and then fell underwater and has just this little island left of R’lyeh, but he’ll rise some day, and reestablish his domain.


Review of “I, Cthulhu”

As a reminder, all reviews are spoiler free, save for the first few paragraphs or page.


Anyways, I was hoping for a more, serious, story. It’s a Cthulhu Mythos parody. Cthulhu is telepathically speaking with his minion Whateley, about his history, his time on the planet, and more. It’s delivered in a manner of frank way, using a variety of common modern Earth slang, and then has Cthulhu telling jokes and such.

Clearly, it’s not what you think. It’s pretty quick as a read, and the core concept is obviously as well. Overall, it’s hard ot rank, so I’m giving it 3 stars only, sorry Gaiman! But it’s tonally odd at times, and while it tries to be funny, I never laughed, and I prefer a Kim Newman sense of humor I suppose.

Next is Pickman’s Modem, by Lawrence Watt-Evans, published in 1992 in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.



6 pages long, very quick read, and I can't find it online. Sorry.


So let’s talk about Lawrence Watt-Evans first. LWE is one of my pet authors. By that I mean that he’s someone for whom I have an affection and follow his stuff, even though he’s not a guy I’d put up there as one of the best writers of his era, or top of his craft.

He tends to have dark humor all over his works, and you can see that here in this story as well. He also has won some modest awards, like a Hugo for best Science Fiction short story in 1988 for Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburger Stand, a story about a dive-bar in Sutton , WV that is the only place in every alternate earth, and many ships, aliens, and people from different worlds come there to eat. It was nominated for a Nebula award as well. S oit’s not like he’s never done nothing.

Anyways, he loves lesser known non-heroic “heroes” like a wizard apprentice who only knows one spell when his master died (he can set something that’s flammable on fire) in With a Single Spell or stuff like that. One of his early fantasy series, leading with the Lure of the Basilisk, was very, very formative on me, particularly the 2nd – 4th books of the series, and definitely the 2nd book the most – The Seven Altars of Dusarra. Again, Watt-Evans has a career as a writer I’d kill for, and you probably never even heard o him, you know? He went to Princeton, sold stories as soon as he sent them out, and more. He ran the Horror Writers Association for a while, he was one of the heads of the Sci Fi Writers of America, ad such. He was one of the first to write serials online for fans who paid for them direct, and began that in 2005. He’s published 46 novels, including two Star Trek ones, and Spider Man and Predator stuff. More than 100 short stories. So he’s not some chump. And I certainly enjoy him, although, again, he’s not anyone I would toss out there as this definitive writer of his time or others.

Anyways, that’s Watt-Evans

Synopsis of “Pickman’s Modem”


A long time contributor, Pickman, is back on the internet after being away for a while. His modem has died and he had to get a new one. After getting another one second hand, the Miskatonic Data Systems one, he logs back on, and in perfect English (very much not his forte) welcomes back to the forum he haunts.

A day later, an imagined slight by another person from Kansas City about something in his welcome back post is viewed as anti-Mid West. He lays into Pickman, and a flamewar begins. Pickman’s attacks are perfect English and extremely gross, vile, and beyond the norm. After a while the flamewar grows, and the inventive goes to a whole new level.

Not sure what happened, our narrator heads to Pickman;s house ot meet up. Pickman shows him the used modem he got, and that the messages and such the modem showed him showed his flamewar opponents were misquoting him and such. After exploration, they realize that the Modem is cleaning up his English. So he decides to try his hand at writing, his posts becoming more and more florid and archaic, and then he is never heard from again, save for one e-mail to the narrator about how he turned off the modem and is sending a quick e-mail about it, and the modem is still on, and connecting to someone, and then the message cuts off. There is a fire in the apartment and Pickman never heard from again.

Review of “Pickman’s Modem”

This is a short piece, just six pages in my collection. It’s the sort of quick piece you use to bulk up a collection, and it’s by a guy who’s got a reputation for this stuff.

this story is inspired by a non-Mythos story by Lovecraft called “Pickman’s Model” . I won’t spoil that for you, in case you ever want to read it. (It’s good too). But this work certainly is in the Mythos, with the light elements in the Modem’s details. And that’s it. You wouldn’t expect too much in here, right? Right!

Now due to my predilection for LWE, I need to make sure that I honestly evaluate this short. It’s good, moody, funny in places, and solid story. But it’s framed in an era when modems and phone connections will obviously evoke some time-laced stuff. But that’s how fiction works. Any fiction using technology of the day looks dated later. From the antiquated views of Antarctica from Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (despite his massive research) through the telegram arriving too late in The Salem Horror to matter. Obviously, a text from your iPhone would arrive in plenty of time. But still, given that, I think it’s a solid quick piece.

I give it 3 stars out of 5. But I do like the moodiness. This is a good example of a Gen 4 story that basically ignores the other stuff, and has light elements from the original Master himself.

Alright everyone, it's time.


Time for the Z

Roger Zelazny. One of the greatest writers of fantasy. Winner of many awards. Nebula. Hugo. A bit of a legend himself. The Z.


In 1986 he wrote the novella, "24 views from Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai". It won the Hugo.

If you can find it somewhere, you need to. This is a major work of art. It's beyond the normal stuff, and I'm going to give you a hint, that's it's going to get 5 stars in a review from me, right up front. I's around 60 pages in one of my collections.

The Z regualrly experimented with form of the stories, and pushed teh boundaries of what was expected and accepable. He is a discovery and a devotee of Michael Moorcock.

And this is amn anazing work.

I know people who think his magnum opus, the Chronicles of Amber, is overated or without a lot of action, but who just love this. This is just mythic. It's good good.

Orginally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and was nominated for a Nebula, and lost, and won the Hugo., It's also in Frost and Fire, The New Hugo Winners, Volume II, Urania #1199, The Last Defender of Camelot, and Cthulhu 2000.

Find a library. Get it. Read it. Love it.


Oh, and while you are looking for Zelany's stuff, do yourself a favor and pick up "A Night in the Lonesome October", his last novel, published in 1993. It's his best, my favorite, and one of my favorite novels by anyone ever. It's set in the Mythos, and I'll tell you now, that the main character is Jack the Ripper's dog. Grab it. Love it. Thank me later.

I'm a big Lovecraft fan but this is the first time I've seen this thread... looks like I've got about a decade's worth of posts to catch up on. :D

I don't believe I've ever read any non-Lovecraft fiction actually set within his "universe" - just stuff heavily influenced by it. I saw a book titled Lovecraft Country on the shelves by Matt Ruff that seems to have good reviews - if I could buy the ebook down here in Australia I would've read it by now.

That doesn't sound too bad, just a decade! :)

I'd recommend just doing A Study in Emerald as your first non-Lovecraft Mythos work. Skip my synopsis, check i out online on Gaimans homepage, and then read it and enjoy.

Then you can head back and do anything else. Gen 1 stuff like Howard, Smith, or Long, or later stuff, whatever your heart wants, you know?



Or nothing at all. There's no pressure here. (Until you read A Study in Emerald :) )

I'll track it down tonight, I'm a big fan of Gaiman too, especially the first couple of volumes of Sandman. In hindsight, I can definitely see some of the Lovecraft influence there.

Synopsis of “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai”

This Novella is around 50 pages in my oversized collection, and would be larger in a normal sized world by far. Therefore I’ll be briefer with this review that with others due to the length.

Our heroine, Mari has arrived in Japan to do one final service for one Kit, who has recently died. She has a book of 24 of the 48 views of Mt. Fuji, which she adores, and she’ll be going from one place to another in these views, comparing them to the real life scene, and she imagines that the spirit of dead Hokusai is her companion for this quest. Her goal is to reach the mountain, where she will complete that final task she has do do for kit. Each View is listed as a sort of quick little page or 4 and has one story, day, or section.

As the story progresses, we find out more and more about her and her world. She is attacked by electric creations that are made from electronic devices, and she has to fend them off. She deals with personal attacks as well as her own body, racked with a deadly disease.

Using the Views as a spiritual Rorschach, we find out that she was married to Kit, and he was obsessed with living forever, and translated himself to the internet and died physically. He took her there as well, but she demanded her return because she was pregnant (which he never knew). He has become unhinged from any form of conscience, so she moves off the grid, raises her daughter, and trains for the day she’ll be needed.

After gathering power and learning how to make those constructs, she notices that he has been using his powers behind the stage to push things into the proper angles and avenues for control. She has created a weapon that should take him out, and she leaves her daughter and flies to Japan.

Eventually she passes an era with a legend of monks that gave up Shinto for worshipping dark forces in R’yleh, and the island sank beneath the seas. Soon a pair of monks of unknown and uncertain features will begin to track her.

At the end, she will find the two monks attack her, and they have webbed hands (reminiscent of the Deep Ones). She takes them out, and then Kit sees her, jumps out from his various electric possessions to enter her and begin to transform her to energy so she can enter the internet, just like before. As he dies, she drops her staff, with the circuitry, and it cuts off the power from others and keeps them from connecting. Kit is trapped in her body, albeit only temporarily until something electronic arrives. Then she commits suicide in a Japanese tradition in order to ensure that Kit will die with her. And she is most sad that she failed to make the 24th and final view of Hokusai in her abbreviated collection

Review of “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai”


This is, without a doubt, the single most unusual Cthulhu Mythos story I’ve ever encountered. For those unaware, Roger Zelazny is a highly respected writer who won a variety of awards for fantasy and sci fi. He’s a big name, and was a progeny and mentee of Michael Moorcock in the 60s when Moorcock published a British New Wave Sci Fi book and created a new form of Sci Fi that abandoned a lot of the traditional accoutrements of the genre.

Roger has a lot of famous works, but one of the things he is best known for is mythology. This guy studied other mythologies with a great zeal that just ignites much of his work. And he’ll set a story in the right mythology based on the needs of the story. He’ll write stuff in Chinese, Greek, Hindu, Egyptian, whatever. He gets it. And while not all works are suffused with a mythic feel, most of the ones I’ve read certainly are.

So he does not use the Cthulhu Mythos elements just off the cuff. This is not some story of maiden sacrifices. And the only Mythos elements in here are very light, and in places, are inferred. But they are here. Why?

Because he had to. The story required it. And there are times, not many, where he’ll do it again. He’ll embrace the Mythos as a needed part of the story he is telling. Because he is a craftsman.

Now Zelazny is never known as the best wordsmith, but he gets more and more on point as he ages, and this story even has lines, paragraphs, and concepts that just deliver.

This is unique. It’s award winning. This is one of the best written stories we’ve read, on of the most interesting, and totally different than anything that came before.

And yes, I;m giving it a 5 out of 5. Enjoy!

Alright, let’s do Kim Newman Next:

How about the short quick story first, right after the novella of Roger’s?

A quick 6 page short, written in the early 90s, for a small magazine, and then published elsewhere in a few places. Here is, “A Quarter to Three”

The entire story is on Google Books:

Shadows Over Innsmouth - Google Books

So let's talk a little of Kim Newman for those who don't know him. He's published a variety of works out in the UK for a while, including the Anno Dracula series which is very popular. I haven't read all of his works, but there is one novel of particular note.

Life's Lottery. It's a choose your own adventure novel for adults that's dark, somber, and philosophical. At the first choice, you can choose free will or destiny, and then go down a variety of choices down those paths. if you choose otherwise, you can read the book straight from beginning to end, and skip the choices, and you'll get another poltline. It's just so well written and conceived.

So I'd recommend Life's Lottery to anyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life%27s_Lottery

Synopsis of “A Quarter to Three”


It’s quiet here in the fish food joint that’s open all night here in the ‘Mouth. There’s no one here at Cap’n Cod’s 24 Hour Diner. The narrator is working, and reading Moby Dick for his test tomorrow. Then he looks up and a pregnant young lady had walked in and sat down. She’s egregiously angry at the monster growing in her belly, and the end of any future she’ll have.

The narrator feeds her and gives her some alcohol under the table (illegally) since it’ll go strait to her child. Then the father walks in, half amphibian, wabbles to the table, and orders some fish. And she moves over to him, and sits beside him, and then orders another drink for her baby and one for her companion.

Review of “A Quarter to Three”


Hey look, you just need to go into this story knowing what Kim Newman does. He’s a serious dark humor kind of guy. And there are no laughs here for me, but some groans and smiles and stuff certainly follows. That’s who he is.

The story starts with you thinking one thing, and then it slides to something else entirely, which is suitably fun, moody, interesting, and again, that’s a flash of Newman-esque writing.

So having said that, there are a few lines I really like, and the concept is good enough to warrant a 3.5 star rating from me.

But get ready…


The Big Fish is next

Synopsis of “The Big Fish”

Set in World War II right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the west coast in CA, our detective of the noir persuasion. He’s got a strong sense of irony, and will note the irony of the good and productive Japanese being taken away while Italian mob bosses are tearing into people and living in mansions.

Anyways, he has just been hired by a powerful movie starlet, Ms. Janey Wilde, a starlet in the movies, her big name producer//mobbie Mr Brunette, and his even bigger name mobbie Mr Pastore. She hired the detective to find Brunette, who hadn’t been seen in a while especially after pushing her out for a younger up-and-coming starlet named Ms. Janice Marsh.

He arrives at an old building of Pastores, and eventually finds him drowned, dead, in a bunch of water that stinks of old fish with some suspicious elements. Then a trio of people come in, hold him at gunpoint and take in the scene. A French woman, British man, and USA man introduces themselves, after verifying his identity, as members of high level secret services, such as the FBI, investigating the case. They chose not to kill the detective, but pay him to get him off the case.

He returns, reports his findings to Ms .Wilde, and agrees to continue to find Mr. Brunette, after finding out that she had, hush hush, born his baby. Brunette took the baby, and she thinks something awful is happening. She had mentioned a mysterious cult, named the Mysterious Order of Dagon. He researches it, and finds out that it has two headquarters, one here in Bay City and the other in Innsmouth, and that’s its leader is Janice Marsh, the decent of the Cap’n Marsh who founded it.

He heads to its headquarters, has an odd conversation with Marsh where she kisses him for a while, and then he gets warned off the case by various police and others. He finds out that Mr. Brunette is on his own floating casino, and heads over on a motorboat.

He ties it up, looks around, finds Brunette have crazy and talking about blowing up their place, and suddenly these half fish people begin to emerge from the water on the boat. He finds Ms Marsh here as well, with the baby, who is talking, and is apparently not to be sacrificed or anything like Janey Wilde feared, but instead is the next generation’s incarnation of Cap’n Marsh.

After some gunplay, and a major attack on the vessel by the military, they head out. He rescues the baby, is pulled in by the agents and such ,and they defeated the Deep Ones for a time, just off off the reef in Innsmouth back in the 20s. The baby is secured, and they discuss that they knew what happened to it, and it’ll be fine.

Review of “The Big Fish”

It’s important to know up front what the genre of this piece is. This is a detective film noir style. It’s set in the 40s, and Newman is at his best here. His details of the piece are amazing, and moreover, he doesn’t explain anything. For example, when talking about the details of an actress in a movie serial, the narrator doesn’t think to explain what that is. He just gives a few bits of information and moves on. But that genre of visual media died out in the 50s, and hasn’t been around sense. Another is that one actress followed Crabbe to Hollywood. Well, if you don’t know who Buster Crabbe is, then that is just a quick in and out line you may not get. If you do, it fleshes out the story. So I like that Newman researched this hard, or just knew about the era already, and he just nails it.

Another is that the lines and sentences in her are just downright graet at times. Here’s just one example.

“She’d hired me for five days in advance, a good thing since I’m unduly reliant on eating, drinking, and other expensive diversions of the monied and idle”

The story just reeks of flavor, detail, research, and characters. They are all very well fleshed from Shadow over Innsmouth, and the story shows it. In fact, there is an obviously continuation in a lot of places.

This story is a lot better than you might think. Especially if you’ve not really encountered Kim Newman before. Again, it has his dark humor in full display, although often more subtly than “A Quarter to Three”. Also, that piece used music and lyrics to set the various tone of what was happening, and this one does as well, although a little loosely.

Anyways, due to the sheer atmosphere, drama, fun, and details, this story gets a very, very strong 4.0 stars from me out of 5 and I put it on a level better than some Lovecraft stories (although it’s like a good 60 years later being written, so there’ that too)

Alright, now let’s leave behind all things British for a bit.


How about Stephen King instead?


Let’s start with “Jerusalem’s Lot!”

Synopsis of “Jerusalem’s Lot”

Set in 1850, this story is told by a variety of letters by the new owner of an old house in Maine, Charles Boone, who inherited the house, and goes with his manservant Calvin, out in Chapelwaite Mansion, near Preacher’s Corner, a small town, and little farther away from an abandoned town called Jerusalem’s Lot.

The mansion has a ton of character, and lots of old oddities. As they settle and try to find people to help, they refuse unless it’s the middle of the day. There are odd sounds from the walls at night with Charles puts down to rat.s One older woman who’s worked there for three generations of Boones onc a day tells about how it’s a bad house, and lots of bad thing happen to folks who live here. She also mentions a variety of legends.

That night Calvin hears a crazy sound behind the walls and starts looking for secret doors or passages that would explain it. He finds a small room behind a bookcase that they didn’t know about before, and brings Charles Boone to the room. They find an old map of Jerusalem’s Lot, from decades ago, with the name “The Worm That Doth Corrupt” over the church on the map.

The next day they head to the small town, and arrive at noon. They explore, and find out that the town was abandoned long ago ,but unlike other places that are rumored to be haunted, this one has never been vandalized. It has a lot of stuff left behind, and nothing disturbed, and many expernsive items are left. The town has a old smell of rot and mold.

They arrive at the chapel and step in. Inside is a foul group of art, the smell of the rotting tomb, golden cross upside down, and an old manuscript on the lectern called “De Vermis Mysteriis” or Mysteries of the Worm. Boone takes it, and then a bunch of noise begins, and they flee the town.

The people in the village begin to fear and push back from Boone. Crazy sings have happened in the last week. One person gave birth to a child with no eyes, and other signs have occurred. The old lady who works in his mansion pleads for him to move away out of Chapelwaite. The book they found is confirmed to be his ancestors’ who built the mansion. Calvin opens the lock and the book is ready to be deciphered.

Boone begins to be physically disturbed by the house and the book and everything. He thinks he sees a ghost of one of the dead Boones who hanged himself in the basement. Blood is calling to blood, and Charles can’t leave the manse now. Calvin finds the code for the book while cleaning another bedroom far away in Chapelwaite. He checks it out himself first, to make sure that there is nothing bad in it. An earlier ancestor founded a nasty cult of inbred women in the town of Jerusalem;s Lot long ago. He begins to get a full history of what happened back in 1789.

They head back out to JL to inspect it and to head to the church. They find it badly disheveled form before, with broken pews and floorboards and such. They find a sacrifice of a goat back here, and blood in a few places. Pulling out De Vermiis, our Boone begins to see and feel the ghosts of his family that were here, and then blood calls to blood and chants and intones things from the book. After a bit, Calvin knocks him around, he he regains his senses . He ignites the book, the pulit bursts, and great giant worm below is attacking, just one part of the great creature he was about to summon. It swallows Calvin and then he sees someone come into the church. It’s the original flounder and his ancestor, who founded it in 1714, long ago, still alive. Seeing as he is the last of the Boones, he commits suicde

Later a descendant from another line he didn’t know existed inherits the house in 1971, and reads the letters, chuckles at it. As the church they found never had the damage described there. Only the rats in teh walls are similar.

Review of “Jerusalem’s Lot”


This is a very Mythos-ish story. New England. Aspects of the Mythos. Inherited mansion. And a lot more that will be revealed later. (No spoilers in my reviews)

This short story is a prelude to the novel ‘Salem’s Lot, that he published back in 1975. ‘Salem’s Lot is not in the Mythos (I don’t think, maybe there’s a random mention here or there, but I don’t recall). This short story was written first in college, but not published until post-novel. There’s another short story set here as well.

Anyways, the various elements are here in full scope. This is a story that doesn’t really get outside of the basic concepts of the Mythos story much. So the only interesting things are in King’s style. But this is early King. So it’s a fun diversion, but this isn;t Gaiman or Newman or Zelazny. Three stars.

Also, there is an obvious question to ask of King’s works due to this story. It’s also a question we asked of RE Howard’s Conan and such. Here is is:


Take Conan. His time is set in the past on Earth. And there are nations and people that exist during the era of Conan or Kull. Some of those are mentioned by Lovecraft himself as the history of the world in his own Mythos stories. As are Clark Ashton’s Smith’s stuff, and vice versa. So you have, in the mythos, a connect with the world of Conan and the world of Mythos. Therefore, loosely, every Conan story is in the Mythos (certainly those originally written by Howard can be saidof)

Remember the whole point is that everyone is sharing everything

So now here’s the thing. Jerusalem;s Lot is in this story, ‘Salem;s Lot, and other stories. It’s mentioned in other King works and is a part of his fictional Maine area. It’s his Miskatonic River and University and his Arkham, Massachusetts. So if all of those stories take place in the same universe and place as this one, with the various accoutrements of the Mythos and everything, then King’s stuff, in this area at least, certainly could be called loosely Mythos, just like Conan. That’s how it goes.

Next let’s do his “Crouch End”

This was written in 1980 as part of a Lovecraft Anthology. King reprinted in some of his stuff later as well. Now this will be fun, because I’ve never read it before. So we can sort of read it together if you wish.








In my anthology, about 50 pages, took around 45 minutes to read.

Synopsis of “Crouch End”

After a woman leaves the local police station in Crouch End, a suburb of London, the two interviewing officers, the older Vetter and the younger Farnham are discussing the oddity of the case. The young man, Farnham, thinks she is lying ir deceived, and the older one, Vetter, discusses some odder cases in Crouch End that have gone back a while, and suggest that Vetter check out older open cases for examples.

They flashback to the woman’s story, Doris, and her husband Lonnie. Doris and Lonnie take a taxi cab to Crouch End, where they are trying to meet up for dinner with a business associate of Lonnie’s. They get lost and call from a phone booth, and after they do, the taxi had pulled away and left them . They start to walk, as a pair of local children chide them and make fun of them as American tourists.

After a while, they begin to struggle to suss out where they are, and then there is a maoing from behind a giant, closed, hedge. Lonnie pushes himself through the hedge, and after a moment, Doris hears him shouting, screaming, and then fleeing. He pushes himself back out of the hedge, and he’s disheveled, and something is on his jacket. They flee down the street

They keep fleeing, as as they do, things get odder. He tosses aside his coat, he begins to look older, they refuse to talk, and even the stars begin to feel like others. They arrive at an overpass, and head under, and arm grabs her shoulder as they cross under he disappears, and as she tires to find her location, various names and words are spoken, and she’s accosted by the two children who imply that she and her husband met a powerful ancient power, and they are at another place. After a bit of seeing elements like carved names such as Nyarlathotep and R’lyaeh and trying to returned, she finds street lights, cars, and the main thoughoughfare in Crouch End.



She finds the local police station, and then arrives to tell her story, and then heads back ot their hotel o meet with her children. Meanwhile Officer Farnham, totally unbelieving, steps out looking for others and is lost that night as well. Neither Lonnie nor Farnham are ever heard from again, and a few months later, Vetter takes early retirement, and then dies from a heart attack while Doris goes crazy, and spends a year in an insane asylum before emerging a bit better.

Review of “Crouch End”


I like Crouch End better than Jerusalem’s Lot. It has a lot to offer. You have a moddy setting outside of the norm, you are taking place in streets in a major city, and there’s no massive accoutrements of the Mythos.

And yet, the elements are there, clearly and obviously. But this is a nice, mature, Generation 4 story. It has the important stuff – that sense of atmosphere, disdainment, and an odd combination of unreality, horror, and a bit of wonder as well. Here, I’ll quote you a quick example. This is, technically, a spoiler, so I’m putting it in tags:

“The buildings leaned. The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman. These were crazed stars in lunatic constellations.”



That’s a good line at the end there.

Anyways, you get the idea. Fully Mythos in the important ways, and yet also in new places and territory and not in the previous overly-evocative style of Jerusalem’s Lot.

So I’m trying to figure out if its 3.5 stars or a full 4. I do like it. Hmmm. How about giving this a solid 3.5 stars. It’s close to four, but I save 4 and above for true strong stuff, and this feels short of that mark a bit

Ramsey Campbell Time!


Who is Ramsey Campbell?

This guy was obsessed with good, quality, fiction, and horror, in the Lovecraft ouvre, and he is arguably the best of the Generation 3 writers. He devoured works at a young age. By age 8 he read The Colour out of Space in a Sci Fi anthology, and by 12 he had read all of the works of Arther Machen, Algernon Blackwood, most of Poe, and such. He found two more Lovecraft stories in a horror anthology – The Dunwich Horror and The Rats in the Walls. And he was hooked. Over the next few years he wrote a ton of juvenilia and aborted some novels that were deep. Then at the ge of 15 he wrote and submitted a short story to Arkham House in the Mythos, called The Church on High Street. August Derleth bought it, published it in the next Arkham House collection, and began to mentor and tutor Campbell on writing and style and such.

For the next decade, Campbell wrote short stories, collections of them, and more. His singular work in 1969 called “Cold Print” was one of the best works he does, and sort of signifies his transition. He moves to a full time horror writer, disowns his Lovecraft and Mythos works for a while as he embraces his own, mature voice, and then publishes a ton of novels. More and more he becomes a guy with a sense of awe and horror, much like Blackwood and Machen, and less like Lovecraft.

By today, at the age of 70, Campbell has penned 38 novels, hundreds of short stories, still has written the occasional Mythos short story for collections here and there, collected and edited several Lovecraft anthologies, as well as others, and has won an epic ton of horror awards, and a Lifetime Fantasy one in 2015. He had a prolific rate of novel production in the 80s and 90s. His works are extremely popular in Britain, and he just dominates the charts and horror stuff there. He is, basically, the British Stephen King, if that makes sense. Only a better writer. (No disrespect to King, we’ve read some of his stuff here. But Ramsey has polished a very gifted style of writing. Take a novel like Midnight Sun and it’s just so much better. )

In my opinion, Campbell is the best of the widely known modern and living horror authors. Now I think there are some lesser known talent (Thomas Ligotti) that you could argue is better. Maybe, if he’s your style, Poppy Z. Brite. (He’s not mine, but I hear you if you like him) But that’s about it.


So let’s go ahead and start with his first short story, “The Church in High Street” written when he was 15. Despite that, it’s a frequently anthologized story. Written in 1961, and published in 62, I have this in multiple anthologies I own.

Synopsis of “The Church in High Street”


Arriving at the village of Temphill to find out what happened to his friend, Richard Dodd arrives at a dilapidated broken down town. Letters stopped weeks ago, and worried ihe arrives. He finds his friend’s house with the door open, cobwebs across the doorway, and no one in sight.

He talks to a neighbor first, who tells him that his friend is gone to another world and was taken by them. The church in high street is connected to another temple and that temple to another world’s. His friend saw it, went into the church, was marked by them, and then was taken.

Richard Dodd thinks the man crazy, and enters the house of his friend. After a bit he finds his friend’s research into a deep pre-man myth of creatures and such that settled from afar to Earth to take it as it’s own, and of dark and eldritch powers. He finds a link to the church, and that some still believe this happens. Dodd follows his friend to the Church to see if he can find him

After pushing aside some pews, he finds a way down, and grabs his flashlight from the car and begins to head down. Countless time passes, and he arrives through some arches at a huge tomb, cyclopean in size, with various charnel areas of corpses, and a variety of odd architecture. As he watches, a ritual begins, ends, and a large doorway to another world opens up, and 13 gelatinous creatures leap across the void and arrive in that large room. One moves near him, and he cries out and passes out.

He awakens and dashes up the stairs, and tries to get out, but whenever he tries to leave by a road, he winds up back at the church. A doctor passing through the town hits him in a panic and takes him to a nearby hospital. He is diagnosed as hallucinogenic. He feels connected and is drawn to return. He asked to be placed in jail or prison, but they refuse to. So he decides to take things into his own hands. Better death than what awaits him.

Review of “The Church in High Street”

Welcome to Severn Valley, one of the most detailed fictional areas in the Mythos, created and inhabited by the characters and concepts of Ramsey Campbell. Temphill, the location of the setting here in his first story, is one of many towns, villages, and creepy places here in the area, near the border between Wales and England. The River Severn is an actual river, but he places fictional locations along it.

Derleth told him to move the setting of this story out of New England, so he did. Welcome to Gloucestershire!

This is a very derivative tale. All of the elements are previous elements of the Mythos. Tiny little town, check. Rundown church, check. MANY OTHER THINGS I can’t tell you due to spoilers, check, check, and check. But the story does have an energy and verve . An innocence. So I give the guy 2.5 out of 5 stars.



And now let’s head to the story that shows his growth, “Cold Print”. He’s written lots of stories in between by the way.

Synopsis of “Cold Print”

The bibliophile Sam Strutt arrives in the cold snowy day of the big city ,and is looking for more books that meet his interest. He arrives at another shop, only to find that they don’t have the special books he likes. He heads out to another. As he leaves, a tramp who was looking at the book he had with him, The Caning-Master by Hector Q from Ultimate Press, is something the tramp recognizes. There’s a book store that sells other books like those, and he lists Adam and Evan as one title and Take Me How You Like as another. They head out into the snow, and Sam stops to give the tramp some beer.

They arrive at the bookstore, hidden away in a back alley. After the store initially looks unfulfilling, there is a clerk who pulls out a book he thinks that Sam will like – The Secret Life of Wackford Squeers. He agrees, and tries to pay, is told to pay when he comes back, but forces the man to take the 2 pound and heads out.

He arrives home to find that his landlady has put two copies of his books, Miss Whippe, Old Style Governess inside of Prefects and Fags, with the one straddling the other. He unwraps the book he has and relaxes. He decides to head back tomorrow for some more Ultimate Press works, since he’ll need more for the upcoming holidays.

He arrives, it’s closed, and the actual bookseller is here, and lets him in after he introduces himself. After some talk, he pulls down an ancient manuscript of the Revelations of Glaaki. Sam reads a few pages pointed out to him and they are about a high priest needed for an entity called Y’golonac. The bookseller and him talk for a while, and he’s not interested in the rare book. The bookseller tells him that he is offering him the role of the High Preist, and that if he refuses, he will be killed. He refused, and after a moment, threatens to burn the Revelations, still in his hand. He does so, the script ignites.

Angered, and without anything to keep him away, the bookseller moves on him, grabs him with his hands, opens the mouths on those hand, and then begins to feed.

Review of “Cold Print”

This is a better story for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, although clearly with Mythos elements attached, it’s different. It’s set in a modern day city, in a few locations but mainly a bookshop. Not some quiet den, not some disquieting tunnel found beneath that den, not some long lost cultic site or temple/church/shrine, etc. None of the typical areas, This is a modern city.

Secondly, the main character is gay. It’s never mentioned outright, and not a major part of the script, but it’s there. If you read it and didn’t see it, head back to my synopsis, because I included the details of a lot of minor plot points but skipped some major ones. Those very, very minor ones are points of homosexuality.

Thirdly, and this is very important – Ramsey Campbell has learned a very important lesson as a writer. Showing, not telling. Not only is this an issue with his own first story, but it’s a problem in the Mythos generally, with his heavy fascination for all things adjective. Homosexuality is one. He never states that the character is gay. You figure it out. Another is the first page. You see him on a bus on a cold day. He takes a book out of the plastic wrap that he uses to protect it, and then reads it without touching it, using the bookmark to follow. But maybe that’s just one book or because its snow or it’s a sentimental book? So then when he steps off the bus and sees a magazine press, with soft cover novels in a section that’s not quite closed, and a bit of snow is heading in and dusting the covers, he makes sure he heads up and tells the person about it. When the seller doesn’t seem to care, he gets rather snarky. Ramsey Campbell shows you that Sam is a lover of books and can’t allow people to damage them. He doesn’t tell.

The more adult, fleshed out, different, mature story definitely shows. When you read Gen 2 stories, you’ll see that they tend to really embrace the Mythos elements tightly. In Gen 3 you have that, but you also see folks sort of breaking out of that mold, although it’s until Gen 4 that this really happens.

So Church in High Street is sort of like a Gen 2 story, coming in the early part of 3, and this one is fully ensconced in the Gen 3 era of the Mythos. It’s a better story. 3.5 stars.


Two years later, after Church was published and at the age of 18, Campbell publishes a collection of Lovecraft stories in the same vein, set in the Severn Valley. I thought about doing a few of those tales, and we still could, but they are roughly of the same quality and value as many others here. So I’m heading out for now, and what I may do is return to Campbell later for stories later in his life.

How about Alan Dean Foster – Did you know that his


“Some Notes Concerning a Green Box,” 1971 –

This is the first professional “story” Foster sold. In fact, it’s not even a real story. He read and really liked some Lovecraft’s Cthulhu works the previous day. The next day, as a joke, he wrote this letter and sent it to August Derleth. Derleth knew a good thing when he saw it, and Foster was shocked when that joke turned into an actual sale.

So let’s look at the first story penned by Foster, a guy who goes on to have a healthy career writing sci fi and fantasy.

It's a short short story, so I'll run the thing today.

Synopsis of “Some Notes Concerning a Green Box”


A letter is written by a grad student about a green box that captured his fancy in the lower level of the library. He heads over to it and three is a lock to it. He;s in an area only accessible by grad students and prof.s The lock is not secured, and he opens it, and finds there to be letters, pictures, and more in here. As it is a bit related to his own work, he moves to begin copying it, but is interrupted by a librarian before he does too much. They take the stuff from him, and he lies about the copies.

In the copied stuff are some letters back and forth, experts in the fields of archeology and anthropology. They decided to go an research sabbatical together to Easter Island and near by. They were on an island by Easter Island, and returned with a bunch of rare and valuable items they found. They quit their jobs as faculty, and then left for another expedition, sending back letters.

They are looking for something in the water south of Easter Island, where nothing could be. They don’t seem to find it. They are looking for something from various sources are mentioned, including the name Cthulhu. They are never heard from again.

Our grad has done some investigations. He checked various newspapers and with local authorities. He has found a story that an earthquake in Chile was caused by one of the Professors and the mountain by him got up, walked over, and stepped on him, killing him. Another story is of their boat taking a lot of damage and needing highly unusual repairs. He includes all of the copies, and everything he found, in this letter. And he’s moving because he feels he is being stalked by someone.

Review of “Some Notes Concerning a Green Box”



This is a letter penned from an archeological grad student at a university. It sums up all of the research he did regarding a green box and it’s contents he found. It’s basically a sequel of sorts to Call of Cthulhu. In fact, the author of the letter researches what’s happening by reading that short story. The only major mythos mention is from that story.

Basically, we have a grad student mucking about where he shouldn’t investigating where he shouldn’t. Now this is a really interesting framing device, as the author is just talking about what he found, what he read, what he could research, and more. It’s done matter of factly, much like a professional letter that does precisely what is stated here.

I also get that Alan Dean Foster read The Call of Cthulhu, and pens this letter, where the main character is reading the same story. I get the self-referential stuff. But this is a surprising early Mythos story. Most first Mythos elements tend to be very Mythos heavy, and evoke the highly derivive stuff. But this is light and doesn’t. It’s not written by someone who read a ton of Mythos fiction. And despite the first work, this is more realistic and refined than the first Mythos/first works by others we’ve read, like Kuttner or Bloch or even Campbell. I can see why it sold.

I think part of it simple – this was not written to be a story. It was just written a a fun little letter. Because of that, I think the story is surprisingly free of the accoutrements of stories and such. It’s better than you’d think, and I give it 3 stars.


While on a Foster kick, let’s hit up his “The Horror on the Beach”

Written in the mid 70s.

Synopsis of “The Horror on the Beach”


Dave and his family purchase a secluded house and set of land next to a beach in Santa Barbara. There are few n neighbors out here. Rumors about the house abound, and it used to be owned by grim merchants and travelers. Dave confronts and finds out about them, and even the real estate agent relents and gives them some info. Then they begin to hear drums out on a peninsula near the harbor each night. Both Dave and his wife imagine that the house is moving in sympathy with the drums and the cultists.

A few nights later, one of their neighbors calls hastily. Their house is under attack. They head out, with the police, and see their neighbor’s house flattened by something that came from the sea. Another neighbor mentions that Cthulhu was involved and is leaving to head back home to Massachusetts. Dave finds an biologist buddy of his from college, Pedro, and tells him everything. Pedro becomes worried, recognizing the name and what is happening.

Later that day their house is attacked while they are there, and they flee to the wine cellar and hide out, and only a sacrificial run by their pet to head outside distracts the attacking creature. Their house is denuded and he flees to Pedro;s. They have seen the creature.

After summoning a military officer from a nearby base as an ally,they head to the peninsula, the cultist sare invoking a ritual, Pedro paints the elder sign on him and heads out, counter-invokes them, but Cthulhu is sort of teleported from his prison, but Pedro works, stops the ritual, the leader of the cultists is killed by Cthulhu, who heads back.

Review of “The Horror on the Beach”


Meh. This is not nearly as good as Some Notes. Maybe because it was intended to be a Mythos story. We have an old house, with a creepy history, leading to cultists trying to summon everything, and a few pages of one character telling everything that’s happening to another instead of leaving it hidden. Meh.


Heavy handed plots. Rotate the characters. Not really something that moves me. The writing was fine, the pacing was a bit slow and I wanted to get to the good parts, and so forth. Anyways, there you are. Just 2 stars. Sorry!


How about Donald Burleson's "The Eye of Hlu-Hlu" next?

Synopsis of “The Eye of Hlu-Hlu”


The author, Charles Hutchinson has inherited his grandfather’s estate in New Hampshire. His grandfather was a famous professor of archeology and linguistics who was researching an uber-myth about Hlu-Hlu, or Cthulhu. He discovered that one of the myths that people had, no matter where, was that in the north, in a forest, there was a lingering Eye of Hlu-Hlu, tha was the only physical part of hi. To look at that is to go mad.

After doing research, he found a circle of stones and a similar place in Southern New Hampshire, and he bought an old hous,e some woodland, and the stone circle. Fixed up the house. He dug it up and found something nasty under, and covered it up. He passed away shortly thereafter

After grabbing some spades, Charles heads out, uncovers a stone well that heads down, and secures some stuff and goes down this great well-like structure. 3 hours pass and he hits bottom. Hre’s nothing here but a tight tunnel that you have to crawl through. Two hours of that brings him to a huge giant, vast cavern.

In the cavern he finds a great pool, but it’s not water, but an undulating eyelike structure, that moves and looks at him,and summons these blind, grey, eyeless humans living in the cavern to attack him. He runs from them flees down the tunnel and up the well, co vers up everytig, and move sto New Hampshire. The end

Review of “The Eye of Hlu-Hlu”


Written in 1993, by a guy who is more of a critic than a writer, he’s written many shorts, but only one novel, and more non-fiction and critiques. Anyways, I chose this story for the Mythos Dynasty collection because I was looking over one of my Mythos collections. I read it in one sitting in an airport, so some of the stories are a bit fuzzy. I mined it for stories for this Dynasty, and the editor, Robert Price, says this of our good writer:

“Don, along with a very few others, is able to invoke a sense of the classic model of weird fiction narrative that we savor in Poe, LeFanu, HPL, Machen, and the other Old Ones.”

So with that recommendation in hand, I felt okay grabbing this story again! Normally I try to cherry pick the better stuff from these anthologies. Big names, different ideas, that sort of thing. But, um, nope. Sorry. That didn’t work here.

I get it I do. But this is 1993 and Gen 4. I don’t expect an inheritance/big tunnel, something dark under it anymore. That was overly derivative when King did it with Jerusalem’s Lot in the 70s, 20 years prior. It’s overdone. Going underground in vast spaces has been done in everything from Ramsey Campbells, Church in High Street when he was 15 to many, many others. So sorry for that.

I give it just 2 stars. Nothing new is here. Nothing. And it’s not even that interesting in the language details, word smithing, etc.

Robert Price lied to us! :0

I wanted to divert to Gen IV again for an interesting story. Let’s hit up Frank Belknap Long again. Now if you forgot who he was, Long is one of the protégées and inner circle of Lovecraft’s Group of Writers. The Inner Circle is Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Long, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Howard. All successful long-lived writers. Long wrote the first non-Lovecraft piece in the Mythos with the Hounds of Tindalos in the late twenties.

Long continues a decades long career by continuing to move to new forms of written media as the pulps, where he cut his teeth, begin to fade. As his career came before many awards were given, he was given a lot of lifetime achievement awards instead, and he has a Stoker, World Fantasy, and such. He passes away at the age of 92 in 1994.

This guy published poems, 30 novels, short stories, comics, a play, and more. He wrote comics for Green Lantern, Superman, and Captain Marvel all in the golden age.

Anyway, in 1980 he is asked to contribute to the New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, an anthology put together by Ramsey Campbell. I just got it, and I wanted to check it out.

So let’s read “Dark Awakening” and see where Long is as a writer at the end of his career vs his start back in 1920s.

Synopsis of “Dark Awakening”


After arriving at a New England beach in the summer time, our narrator notices an attractive mother of two, with no man around, and they exchange glances while shes’ caring for her children. He heads over when she asks for help, as she recently cut her hand, and he uses his handkerchief to bandage it.

She is Helen, and her children are John, age 8, and Susan age 6, whom the mother describes as an avid dreamer. They exchange some small talk, and then John suddenly stands up and moves out very quickly, heading to a very dangerous place over deep waters from a damaged and rotten board.

They head out, and John has a listless gaze about him, and won’t respond, staring at something in his hand. The board breaks, he falls down into the surf. After failing to surface, the narrator dives down to find him and does, still calm searching the bottom for something, and pulls him up.


John arrives, and tells he story that he was forced I nto the water, and pulled. He is still tightly clenching some unseen object in his right hand and can’t let go. The narrator opens his hand for him, and inside is an odd amulet with a sort of humanish fish thing in the art. Suddenly he feels the same compulsion, leaps for the sea intoning that the Deep Ones are rising, and more.

The children risk themselves to stop him, and bring him back, and the object was collected by some odd, creepy occultists later, and our narrator is convalescing in an asylum as others talk about what they think happened.

Review of “Dark Awakening”


This is a very moody piece. It’s not a major atmospheric one, like others we’ve read (Including Shadows Over Innsmouth, which this certainly resembles) but it’s not bad. From the beginning, I was in. I read it in around 15-20 minutes, so it wasn’t overly long.


At the end, I felt there was less that happened than the piece should have had. There’s a lot of dialogue about questions over what has happened and such. Flirting. Guesses. Interrogations. It seems to take up a lot of the story. But it’s also totally devoid of all of the typical (by this time) flaws of a Mythos story as well. Only New England beaches remain. No caves, no sacrifices, no otherworldly objects, no moldering tomes, and such. There are only two Mythos elements here – the object and what it was, and the end of the guesses of what might have happened. And frankly, you could have cut that guess out.

Anyways, the story works, the writing is solid, and the narrator suitably interesting. My own guess as to what was happening didn’t happen. Which was good. So I’m giving It a solid 3.5 stars. Slightly better than the Hounds of Tindalos, but not the best work by far. I think Tindalos had a better idea, but this was better written. (I also think Hounds has a bit of timelessness than this story lacks.)

I think it’d be cool to head back to the Gen 1 and pick up another story I’ve never read by someone, and then see how I like it.

Say hello to Manly Wade Wellman, arguably the coolest name in writing history. Manly Wade Wellman in a big name in the pulps, and was the major force to join the Weird Tales cast of writers as others left, like HPO Lovecraft and Robert Howard. He was a prolific writer with fantasy, sci fi, horror, and other genres to his credit. He wrote comics in the 40s, and was the first writer for the CaptaiN marvel Adventures comic out at Fawcett, the first solo series starting the 40s best selling and most iconic superhero. Manly is also in the famous Appendix N, in the first Dungeon Master’s Guide, of people and stories that Gygax felt were heavily influential on the game and the genre.

Manly Wade Wellman is incredibly interesting. Born in Mozambique as the son of an army doctor, and was an adopted son, for a time, of a local powerful chief. Part American Indian. Star professional football player, then a law degree from Colombia Law. Expert folklorist. This guy’s life was a pulp hero!

Anyways, he was another of the cadre of folks who wrote to Lovecraft, although not as many letters or as prolifically as others did. I recently found out that he penned a couple of short stories in the Mythos in the late 30s, one as an homage to Lovecraft after he had died. I think it’d be fun to read it!

And it’s online as well. So let’s start with

“The Terrible Parchment”, 1937, to the memory of HP Lovecraft


LINK:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Terrible_Parchment

Synopsis of “The Terrible Parchment”


When getting a copy of the magazine, Weird Tales, Wellman and his wife Gwen they find inside an old piece of parchment with Arabic writing, and a Greek title, the Nekponomikon.

They think it’s some sort of joke, stuck into the magazine to thrill subscribers, but it’s well made, and looks old, with an odd reptilian skin back. The set it down and move away, and it blows off the table. It’s getting clammy. They notice the words re actually in English after all, and its an incantation to summon Cthulhu.

Of course that’s nonsense, Lovecraft made it all up.

They argue about it for a bit, and then head to bed. The parchment begins to act as if it had a mind of its own. It dodges a water glass tossed at it. He stabs it with a nearby umbrella, and then the page reacts and the characters shift/ He sees something dark and powerful. He eventually burns it. Then holy water from a local priest finishes it. And the parchment was finally ended.


That took 11 minutes to read.

Review of The Terrible Parchment

I always find these quick stories hard to figure out, from a review standpoint. The story might be the first place where Lovecraft appears as a character in the Mythos itself. We’ve seen characters based on writers before, like Robert Bloch or Clark Ashton Smith on some of Lovecraft’s stuff of Lovecraft in Bloch’s. And many later stories will incorporate this idea of Lovecraft actually writing, creating this work of horror, but there was something real to the story. It’s a common Mythos motif, and Manly Wade Wellman might have started it!

Anyways, it’s solid, but I’m not a fan of the final way they deal with the problem. While it’s happened just a bit before, I’m not a big fan of the Christian-ization of the Mythos. But that’s probably just me!

So I like it, but it’s hard to give this quick read anything more than 3 stars.

What about the next story?

“Letters of Cold Fire”

Originally published in 1944 for Weird Tales, and anthologized in three Manly Wade Wellman works, as well as one Cthulhu anthology (Acolytes of Cthulhu).

It’s in the John Thunstone series, a sort of supernatural detective. A scholar, playboy, and investigator.

Back in 1976, an editor asks Wellman for anthologizing a a story of his for Cthulhu Anthology. Wellman writes back that only The Terrible Parchment specifically references the Mythos elements. He writes of the Lovecraft influence is not huge, not like other writers, but certainly is there. He lists about 4 or 5 stories that were inspired by Lovecraft. Although he claims not to have corresponded with Lovecraft, it doesn’t seem like that’s the case, as evidence of small letters are elsewhere. (It would be easy to forget that you wrote a few letters back in the mid 30s 40 years later in the mid-70s at the end of your career). (I can’t remember all of my work e-mails 40 days later sometimes  )

I don’t have access to Acolytes of Cthulhu or the other works, and I can’t find it online, so no Letters of Cold Fire for now, sorry!

So let’s head back to Gen 4.

One of the stories I was most looking forward too in that New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos that I’ve used for stuff like Crouch End and Dark Awakening was a short story by an author that I own a few books on my fantasy bookshelf – David Drake’s “Than Curse the Darkness” a short story in this collection published in 1980.

So who’s David Drake?

He’s a prolific publisher of science fiction (mostly). He’s one of the best known military sci fi space opera writers currently out there, having served in the Vietnam War. That service in combat and the military informs his stuff. Soe of this stuff has been turned into RPGs or board games. His stuff, particularly the Hammer’s Slammers stuff, is very influential on things like the BattleTech universe.

He also writes some fantasy. In 1997, he began a 9 novel series with Lord of the Isles, and some of those novels sit on my bookshelves


Anyways, let’s look at his short story, “Than Curse the Darkness”

Synopsis and Review of “Than Curse the Darkness”



Due to the nature of this story, and my visceral reaction which I’ll give you below, I cannot separate the spoilers from the review.



Wow. That’s a hard story to ummm….deal with. Here’s the basic synopsis in a paragraph:



These nasty people in Congo, during the days of King Leopold’s darkest and most vile Belgian Congo, are doing some really dark things in the Congo against natives, and sometimes other whites. The stuff these Belgian, Germans, and others are doing is so evil, that the local natives have apparently turned to worship an old god called Ahtu, the local name for Nyarlathotep. A female scholar arrives, and breaks down a local rebellion, and stops the ritual after it has begun, and Nyarlathotep is taken down. At the end, they wonder at what drove these natives to do something to set the world on a path to destruction.

These people were extremely dark, wrong, and vile, and yet here they are, ganging up to save the world.

David Drake made the unusual distinction to focus on race almost entirely. Not only do you have white people calling natives “niggers” and worse, but you also have not real irony of how things should be. For example, you have no character who acts as a voice of reason or conscience. No one even mentions that the evil down to these locals leads to the worship of Ahtu. It’s not even stated by the narrator. Meanwhile, local natives are often described as cannibals by the narrator, and there is no defense given for the other natives.

The story evokes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as well as Drake’s time in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and it certainly feels real. But the story reads like one of the bad Robert Howard works written back in the 10s, 20s, and 30s, not the story of someone in 1980. If I had written this, and I decided to keep the same basic plotline, I would have made it more ironic, and made the natives more sympathetic in some places. But they aren’t.


Anyways, as a clear Mythos story, it shares with other Gen 4 the laudable goal of getting out of the same settings and places. Here we are, in the deep jungles of the Belgian Congo during the height of the rubber trade. That’s certainly not your normal Mythos story, and I give David props for that. And yet the story lacks the nuances that I want from a Gen 4 story, especially one that’s more than 20 pages long. Characters aren’t very well fleshed out, they play into old archetypes that are unfortunate (Savage black cannibals, dark African natives that are subhuman) and it just doesn’t feel like the ironic, serious, look at evil and darkness and horror that I think Drake was looking for.

It’s hard to rate. There are pieces by Lovecraft and other writers back in Gen 0 and 1 that are of the times, and have typical non-roles for women and minorities, and often little positive views of either. So that’s unfortunate to read. I found it stifling here. And even though the story is trying to evoke that language, that view, and such from that era, there are better ways to do so. I get what Drake is trying to do, but man did he ever miss.

So again, hard to give a rating for. 3.5 for the story and writing and setting, and 1.5 for the characters and stereotypes. I am giving it a 2.5 as an average.


Wow.

Next up?

I picked up an anthology called A Starry Sky, put together in the 90s by Ramsey Campbell. It’s got some major writers like JG Ballard, Alan Moore, William Burroughs and Grant Morrison in it, so I thought that would be something really, really good. His goal was to unhinge the sexual aspects of the Mythos. And frankly, I don’t like any of the stories I’ve read yet (well, other than Ballard’s, but that one is not in the Mythos anyway, it’s just in the “Spirit of Lovecraft” instead)

Anyways, due to the overt sexual nature and shock value of a lot of those stories, I just don’t see them here. In this dynasty.

But if I come across one laters, I’ll let you know.

Actually, there’s one major story I was looking forward to that I hadn’t read yet. Lt’s check it out blind and see if I do.

This is Alan Moore”s “the Courtyard,” which he will later turn into a comic, and that will create more comics in the Mythos by the freaking Alan Moore.

I’m assuming you know who Alan Moore is, but if you don’t he wrote a ton of popular and influential comics like The Watchman, V for Vendetta, From Hell, The league of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and tons more. That Alan Moore!

Synopsis of “The Couryard”

Welcome to 2004. Our narrator is a officer for the federal government tracking down some major crime. They give him cases that are a bit hard at figuring out as he is good at creating and seeing patterns that others miss. Some people have been killed, and parts of their bodies taken away. All of the culprits who confessed to some of them were unrelated, and yet did very specific, similar places. After investigating them, he finds some odd things about them – a bookmark for Club Xothique, some low level drugs known as The White Powder, and a local NY band.

He is in red Hook, tracking down what has been happening. He heads to the Club to find a band is about to play. Their opening act is the Yellow Sign, and once of their songs is Leng. The main band arrives, their lead singer is Ramsey Campbell, and they are singing songs that quickly move into spouting gibberish, and some of the crowd is joining them as they took a drug called aklo.

He finds a local drug dealer, Johnny Carcosa, and follows him home to get some of his drugs, and finds them talking to his ancient mother. He is forced to use the White Powder first, because he is told that aklo won’t take without it. He snorts it, and then Carcosa speaks three words of nonense, and understands them. Aklo is not a drug, it’s a language, and new words are added to his vocabulary.

He heads home, and wants to use the new concepts and words on his housemate, and begins to do to her the same things that the murderers did to others. And he spouts gibberish

Review of “The Courtyard”

Wow Alan Moore.

At first I felt that the beginning of the story felt a bit like Harry Harrison’s “Make Room, Make Room” which was turned into the Soylent Green movie. The book’s a lot better and more complex, but it has this heavily populated place in the future where people are forced to share space with strangers they hate.

The main character is living in a future world of squalor. And Moore writes what he thinks, and he iis calling people fags, spics, kikes, and niggers. He also sometimes uses very vile language and concepts to get a point across. But it’s very well written when he does. Here’s an example that has no spoiler attached:

Outside the Pachinko arcade coloured condoms bask in the blue moonlight and drool a potentially dangerous venom.

Here’s another sample:

Hypodermics crunch underfoot, frosting the cobbles with glass in a scintillant Disney-dust, one thousand points of light.

I can’t fault him for the great writing. But the heavy use of the pejorative terminology is something I could do without. The end is great, and he does some strong things and speaks of an important aspect of the Mythos that I can’t recall anyone else ever really exploring, and I like that. He also fully gives us a strong feel for the area.

So I liked it a lot.

I give it four stars.


I’m going to order the graphic novel for a squeal to this, Neonomicon, by Alan and see if I like that too. He’s doing a sequel to that called Providence and writing that right now.

So next up is the Graphic Novel, Neonomicon, a sequel to Courtyard.

Synopsis of Neonomicon


In this follow up, two agents, Lamper and Brears, are investigating the cases of the various murders, as a follow up to Aldo Sax, the narrator from the previous story, who’s now in a jail at a mental health prison and facility. He’s still talking a pseudo-language and they have a copycat killer out there right now on the loose.

They make a raid on the Club Zothique, and try to get Johnny Carcosa, but he flies, and they chase him to his place out on Court Street. His mother committed suicide, and he melts into the wall after telling the cops that he has to go.

The lead detective begins to put together the literary aspects of the case, club named after Clark Ashton Smith’s world, Carcosa from Bierce, the Yellow Sign, the popular singer Randolph Carter, the White Powder from Arthur Machen, and so forth. All of these details in real life are following from literature. Here at Red Hook, where the original case occurred in the 1920s, there is every connection to the writings of HP Lovecraft.

They follow a lead out to Salem to check out a store that sells porn and adult toys in the Cthulhu Mythos, and for fans, go undercover, and connect with the local populace. The male cop is killed, the female is repeatedly raped by a Deep One down in some orgy below the store they were at. After a while, they begin to connect, and the Deep One and her escape and head out, and she is released by it. SWAT team attacks, and destroys the group, and kills the Deep One underground in the shrine, and kills it too.

Afterwards, Merril Brears, the surviving agent, heads to see Aldo Sax again in custody. She speaks the aklo back to him. He gives her answers like Johnny Carcosa is an avatar of Nyarlathotep. She’s realized why the Deep One let her go. She;s pregnant with him and R’yleh is inside of her.

Review of Neonomicon


So let’s start. I would not recommend this graphic novel to anyone. The sheer amount of nudity, porn, people jacking off Deep Ones, and more, just pushes this book into an unfortunate territory. With that said, there is a clever connection here. But again, everything is up front and in obvious places. Not only should the curtains be kept back for mystery, but I appreciate that you don’t see people having sex in basement scenes with Deep Ones in Shadows over Innsmouth or something. This is worse. It’s like anime porn scenes, but of a very disturbing nature. I don’t like it, I don’t recommend it, and I only decided to finish it because I bought it and I wanted to finish it for this project.


Therefore I am not rating this graphic novel. Sorry. Now, it’s won an award. It won the Stoker award for horror in 2012. But I’m not ranking it.

Alright, it’s time for one of my favorite Gen 4 stories, written in 1980, and anthologized many times in major Cthulhu works, here is Basil Copper and his “Shaft Number 247”


So who is Basil Copper?


A part time writer for much of his career, he finally became full time in 1970 with a penchant for penning stuff on horror and detective mysteries. Since he didn’t become dedicated to the craft until later in his life (he was born in 1924, and turned pro at the age of 46) he didn’t write a lot. About 10 novels, some short story collections, and that sort of thing. He has been mildly awarded in his career before passing a few years ago. Most people aren’t going to notice his name, and that’s fine.


This story we are about to read is one of the most popular works. It’s made it in the cut of collections that are trying to show what modern authors can do, and has been printed alongside some of the biggest names in the world, and there’s no drop off in quality. I have met many Mythos readers about whom this story holds a special place. So I wanted to get to it now.


I led with a lot of big name writers for the Gen IV part of this dynasty – Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Roger Zelazny, and even folks like Lawrence Watt-Evans, Kim Newman, Alan Moore, and Alan Dean Foster are no jokes to most. Soon enough we’ll delve into great stories that I like from folks whose names you may not recall, and it may be time for that.


In the mean time, let’s get us some Shaft Number 247!