The Cthulhu Dynasty - "The Nameless City" and "The Hound" by HP Lovecraft
 

As mentioned in a post in the general forum, I am interested in doing a dynasty where I read one of the great horror short stories in the Cthulhu Mythos. Then I post my own review and synopsis.

Here is how this dynasty will run:

1). I'll post what the next story in the dynasty is, and if possible, I'll supply a link to where you can find it on the Net. Then I'll wait a day or two before posting my review. This gives any reader a chance, if they want, to read the story. Some of the stories that I will be reading are among the most influential short stories in the history of horror literature.

2). Then I post my review and synopsis, and we can comment on the story, you can post your own thoughts if you've read it, and so forth. I'll also provide a historical perspective on many of these stories.

And thus the dynasty would go, slowly moving over the face of the great Mythos stories.

So, let's try it out! The first short story that I am going to review is "The Call of Cthulhu." You have to start with this story. It is easily one of the top ten or maybe even five most influential horror short stories of all time and the originator of the Mythos.

If you are interested in reading The Call of Cthulhu, clck your mouse at:

hxxp://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thecallofcthulhu.htm

And give it a read!


I will post more on the Mythos and this story in particular a bit later. I hope to post my review and synopsis on Friday, but if I can't, expect it over the weekend.


Good luck!


Let's include an updated Table of Contents, in case folks want to catch up. These are the stories we've read and discussed thus far:


1). The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft; 4.5 stars
2). The Shadow over Innsmouth, by HP Lovecraft 5.0 stars
3). The Dunwich Horror, by HP Lovecraft, 4.0 stars
4). The Haunter of the Dark, by HP Lovecraft, 4.0 stars
5). At the Mountains of Madness, by HP Lovecraft, 4.0 stars
6). The Colour Out of Space, by HP Lovecraft, 4.5 stars
7). The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, by Clark Ashton Smith, 4.0 stars
8). Ubbo-Sathla, by Clark Ashton Smith, 3.5 stars
9). The Seven Geases, by Clark Ashton Smith, 5.0 stars
10). The Black Stone, by Robert E. Howard, 4.0 stars
11). The Thing on the Roof, by Robert E. Howard, 3.0 stars
12). The Fire of Asshurbanipal, by Robert E. Howard, 4.0 stars
13). Worms of the Earth, by Robert E. Howard, 4.0 stars
14). The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long, 3.0 stars
15). The Shadow out of Time, by HP Lovecraft, 2.0 stars
16). The Challenge from Beyond, by CL Moore, A. Merritt, HP Lovecraft, Robert Howard and Frank Belknap Long, 2.0 stars
17). The Space-Eaters, by Frank Belknap Long, 2.5 stars
18). The Lair of the Star-Spawn, by August Derleth and Mark Schorer, 2.5 stars
19). The Walker on the Wind, by August Derleth, 3.0 stars
20). The Sealed Casket, by Richard F. Seawright, 2.0 stars
21). An Inhabitant of Carcosa, by Ambrose Bierce, 5.0 stars
22). Haita the Shepherd, by Ambrose Bierce, 4.0 stars
23). The Yellow Sign, by Robert W Chambers, 5.0 stars
24). A Shop in Go-By-Street, by Lord Dunsany, 3.5 stars
25). Of Skarl the Drummer, by Lord Dunsany, Unranked (Too Short)
26). The Kraken, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Unranked, too short and famous
27). The Moon Pool, by A. Merritt, 3.5 stars for short story (3.0 for five five chapters of novel)
28). The Shambler from the Stars, by Robert Bloch, 2.5 stars
29). The Shadow from the Steeple, by Robert Bloch, 2.5 stars
30). Fane of the Black Pharaoh, by Robert Bloch, 3.5 stars
31). Winged Death, by HP Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, 4.0 stars
32). The Outpost, by HP Lovecraft, Unranked (too short)
33). The Tree-Men of M'Bwa, by Donald Wandrei, 4.0 stars
34). The Fire Vampires, by Donald Wandrei, 2.5 stars
35). Ithaqua, by August Derleth, 3.5 stars
36). The Whisperer in Darkness, by HP Lovecraft, 3.0 stars
37). Bells of Horror, by Henry Kuttner, 3.0 stars
38). The Eater of Souls, by Henry Kuttner, 3.5 stars
39). The Jest of Droom-Avista, by Henry Kuttner, 3.0 stars
40). The Dreams in the Witch House, by HP Lovecraft, 2.0 stars
41). The Salem Horror, by Henry Kuttner, 2.0 stars
42). The Black Kiss, by Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch, 2.5 stars
43). A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman, 5 stars - Won Hugo Award
44). Only the End of the World Again, by Neil Gaiman, 3.5 stars
45). I, Cthulhu, by Neil Gaiman, 3 Stars
46). Pickman's Modem, by Lawrence Watt-Evans, 3 stars
47). 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai: by Roger Zelazny, 5 stars - Won Hugo Award
48). A Quarter to Three, by Kim Newman, 3.5 stars
49). The Big Fish, by Kim Newman, 4 stars
50). Jerusalm's Lot, by Stephen King, 3 Stars
51). Crouch End, by Stephen King, 3.5 Stars
52). The Church in High Street, by Ramsey Campbell 2.5 stars
53). Cold Print, by Ramsey Campbell, 3.5 stars
54). Some Notes Concerning a Green Box, by Alan Dean Foster, 3 stars
55). The Horror on the Beach, by Alan Dean Foster, 2 Stars
56). The Eye of Hlu-Hlu, by Donald Burleson, 2 Stars
57). Dark Awakening, by Frank Belknap Long, 3.5 stars
58). The Terrible Parchment, by Manly Wade Wellman, 3 stars
59). Than Curse the Darkness, by David Drake, 2.5 stars
60). The Courtyard, by Alan Moore, 4 stars
61). Neonomicon, by Alan Moore, Not Ranked, Won Stoker Award
62). Shaft Number 247, by Basil Copper, 4 Stars
63). Black Man with a Horn, by T.E.D. Klein, 4 Stars
64). The Fishers from Outside, by Lin Carter, 3.0 Stars
65). Dead of Night, by Lin Carter, 2.5 Stars
66). Out of the Ages, by Lin Carter, 2.0 Stars
67). The Horror in the Gallery, by Lin Carter, 2.0 Stars
68). Nameless City, by H.P. Lovecraft
69). The Hound, by H.p. Lovecraft


EDIT - I decided to edit in my ratings for these stories.

Okay, let's begin with a discussion of Lovecraft and the Mythos. Why should you care? Why is this stuff important? (Other than being good, of course)


HP Lovecraft was a pulp writer in the late teens, twenties through the mid thirties before he died. His early stories are written in a very Poe vein and his middle stories are written in a very Dunsany vein. It isn't until the above story, The Call of Cthulhu, that he finds his own voice. He'll only be writing short stories under his own voice for about 10 years before he dies.

Oh what ten years they are

Lovecraft is not a major writer of the time. He's not even a major pulp writer. Lovecraft was a minor pulp writer who was good enough to keep getting published and have respect and a living but not nearly enough to really skyrocket. His works were so visionary and different that manyr eaders simpyl did not like them At a time when people were turning to the pulps for cowboy stories dressed up as sci-fi stories, with simple plots, big breasts, and fights, Lovecraft wrote real literature.

It wasn't until years after his death that his writings generally became seen for the genius that they are. (There were visionaries. After publishing The Call of Cthulhu, Robert Howard wrote Weird Tales and said that this story would go down as one of the best weird short stories of all time. He was right.)

There were three major writers for Weird Tales. Clark Ashton Smith was the most prolific, Robert Howard the most popular, and Lovecraft, the most skilled. These three were great friends and exchanged letters and story ideas.

Lovecraft began using similar elements in his stories from one to the next. He would borrow a place, character, book or being from one of his previous stories in order to more fully flesh out his current story. This is the beginning of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Of course, this was just one writer sharing ideas among stories. That's nothing particularly unusual. What chanegd was the other half of Lovecraft's works.

Lovecraft is one of the most noted epistolareans of our age. He wrote letters that were pages long to correspondants, and he loved writers. He would write letter after letter to writers, asking them about their stories, complementing their style or a clever turn of phrase, and talkign with them about various ideas, stories, and so forth.

Lovecraft would counsel young writers like August Derleth and Robert Bloch while co-writing stories with tons of young writers, like Zeala Bishop and Adolphe DeCastro. This combination of writing with young writers while also counseling others and working with established writers created a cadre of writers that communicated back and forth.

Most people believe that it was Clark Ashton Smith who began the Mythos by adding an element to one of his stories. In one of his fantasy stories set in an old Earth, CAS wrote Kultulten as an evil deity. Someone wrote in and asked if this was an old form of Cthulhu. He hadn;t mean it to be so, be after considering it, he liked the idea, and responded that it was, in fact, Cthulhu.

That was the beginning.

Robert Howard grabbed the Necronomicon for one of his stories and Lovecraft responded by taking Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten and adding it to his own stories. Lovecraft grabbed the evil deity Tsathoggua from Clark Ashton Smith's writings and added it to his writings.

This give and take continued and increased with more authors and more material until Lovecraft died in early 1937. When he died, one of his proteges, August Derleth, really took over Lovecraft's works.

Derleth founded Arkham House Publishing and began compiling Lovecraft's works and publihsing them. He kept Lovecraft alive again and again through printing after printing, and Arkham House still owns the rights to Lovecraft to this day.

Derleth also wrote heavily in the Mythos. He coined the term, "The Cthulhu Mythos," and then wrote and inspired others to keep writing their horror stories in the Mythos. Derleth would also "co-write" books with Lovecraft by turning Lovecraft's outlines or short stories into novels.

The problem with Derleth, and this is why he is usually universally scorned by Lovecraft fans, is that he is not nearly the writer Lovecraft was. Where Lovecraft would spook you with mystery, mood and the unknown, Derleth would gleefully pull back the curtain. Whether or nor Lovecraft had envisioned his universe to be as Derleth painted it, one has to admit that Lovecraaft at least never revealed it, like a clever showman.

Lovecraft was a masterful magician and Derleth was the sufficient magician who made his living showing you how magicians did things.

Derleth also changed Lovecraft's visions significantly and in ways which we will likely get into later (I don't want to burden new readers with the language of the Mythos until later).

There were tons of writers that wrote short stories that incorporated one or more elements of this growing myth-cycle. In fact, writing a short story or three in the Cthulhu mileau is common for major writers. In my seven or eight Mythos antholgies, I have short stories in the Mythos by:

Neil Gaiman
Stephen King
Phillip Jose Farmer
Harlan Ellison
Robert Howard
Robert Bloch
Roger Zelazny
Brain Lumley
Ramsey Campbell
Lin Carter
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Fritz Leiber

and much more. In fact, I've read novels or works by all of these writers in other areas (King his novels, Leiber the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, Robert Howard's Conan, and so forth).

Many writers great and small have spun tales using one or mroe Mythos elements, and therefore, this world in unlike other shared worlds that are controlled by a company. This is all, for the most part, public domain. I could point you to websites that still accept public submissions from writers like me and you that are Mythos and will publish them if they are good enough.

It's a great area to read and explore, and therefore, I hope you at least read the reviews and such, even if you choose not to read the stories.

My fave Cthulu novel is "Nightmare's Disciple" by Pulver. I think it was published by Chaosium, but I really got into it!

Regards,
Chas

You've piqued my interest. I may be following and reading along.

Yay!

The Call of Cthulhu - Synopsis

All synopses are spoilers, so do not read this if you do not wish to know what happens.

Our story begins with the protagonist, who in this story is nothing more than a compiler of information. The protagonists uncle, a noted professor of archeology and ancient languages at Brown Univeristy has just passed away under mysterious circumstances. In his papers, the protagonist finds a locked case, and opens it with a key on his uncle's personal key ring.

In the box are some papers, newspaper clippings, a bas-relief that is only a year or two old, and a journal. The bas-relief has an odd figure at once part octopus, part anthropod and part dragon. There is an unknown language on the bas relief and it appears to be a scene on an isle.

The protagonist opens the papers and begins reading. He discovers that the bas-relief was made by a person, Wilcox, who claimed to have seen the scene and carvings in a dream. He then sculpted what he saw and appraoched the professor. Some of the words he remembers hearing include Cthulhu and R'lyeh. The professor began to keep notes on Wilcox's dreams, corresponded with others abroad, and began to research more intimitely.

Wilcox will then go into a long dark stupor that lasts for days until he pops out with no memory and no longer has the dreams.

As the protagonist continues exploring the contents of the box, the science shifts to the professor's own journal from 17 years prior at an archeologist convention where an Inspector Legrasse of the New Orleans police department arrives with an odd statue. Legrasse comes with a story of a black cult that they busted and confiscated the statue.

The assembled archeologists are amazed because none have any information on this statue. It's obviously old, of an unknown substance, high quality and of a octopus/dragon with an upright gait.

Then one distinguished colleague points out that he had heard of rumors of an obscure tribe of eskimo in West Greenland that supposedly worshipped an old demon god. He then ventured out to meet this dark tribe of eskimpo, and observes silently their worship and overhears them recite a chant over and over again.

At this point, Legrasse is asked to recount his story. 20 police officers responded to calls from a group of squaters out deep in the bayou of strange chants and lights in the night from a deep, black area of the swamp where no one supposedly goes. The officers investigate and discover a large number of cannibal worshippers, dancing naked aroudn a statue of an old figure int eh middle.

Legrasse and the one archeologist agree that they overhead the same chant. Legrasse asked the cannibals that they had captured what it meant and they inform him that it means "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

One older cannibal celebrant is named Castro, and Castro will give information to Legrasse about an ancient cult that worships the Old Ones who have died long ago but continue to await their reawakening at the hands of their servents, with whom they communicate via dreams.

After finishing these tales of his uncle's, the protagonist disocovers on his own a paper clipping from an Australian Newspaper of a ship that was captured with an idol the same size at Prof. Legrasse's. Our protagonist heads to Australia and finds that one person survived, but he has moved back to his home at Oslo. Our protagonist follows but arrives too late. His wife remains, dressed all in black, and informs that her husband died a few days ago to mysertoius circumstances. Johanson, the remaining sailor, left a journal, which our protagonist takers, and then reads.

The story goes like this:

The sailor was on a ship bound for New Zealand when a ship of fifty people tells them to turn back. The ship attacks and overcomes these apparent pirates, and then continues to sail to see why they required Johanson's ship to turn around. They arrive on an island that is where none exist and there they disocver gigantic ruins ("cyclopean" as the author describes them) with an odd, non-Euclidean geometry that does not correlate with the known laws of math and science.

After investiagting, the group stumble across a huge door in the floor/wall (hard to tell with the geology and architecture being unrelateable). The door slowly opens and a positive darkness spills out, darkening the sky and sun. They begin to hear the splash and movement of something gigantic.

Several begin to move away from the door, including Johanson, when out comes a giant clawed hand that sweeps away three of the men. The remaining men began running towarsd the steamer they left behind and out from this cyclopean doorway appears a gigantic figure, part octopoid, with great wings and an erect walking figure.

More will fall, die, or faint dead, but two make it to the steamer. One is struck mad and eventually dies gibbering. The other is Johanson. He begins the ships, but the gigantic figure of the creature folllowing enters the water, where the head only remains above the water.

Realizing that the creature is faster than him, he turns the boat around and sails full speed at the head, hitting it full force and the octopus head explodes like a balloon.

As he looks back, he sees the head reassembling. He continues to sail away. Several days later, a fierce storm hits, and when people go back to the spot, nothing is there.

Our protagonist puts it all together, however. Wilcox has his dream on the same night that an earthquake hit, causing R'lyeh to rise fromt the ocean floor, and Cthulhu to begin to send out dreams. When Johanson and his men landed on the island and opend the door, Wilcox started to go crazy, until the storm occurs, when R'lyeh sinks below the seas, and Wilcox goes back to normal suddenly, and the dreams cease.

The protagonist fears for his life, and that agents of Cthulhu might kill him as they did his uncle and Johanson. That is the last entry in his journal. The journal was found among his effects after his death which occured the following day after the last entry.

The Call of Cthulhu - Review

All reviews are spoiler free.

Why is The Call of Cthulhu so important to horror literature? You can see in the first paragraph. I want you to read this paragraph, the first one in the story:



Can you see what this story did? In one paragraph, in one story, he advanced horror past all previous stories. Lovecraft writes the first, what I call large scale horror story.

Previous horror stories involves a guy getting bricked behind a wall or a group of friends fighting a vampire in London, or a guy discovering that the woman he was engaged to was actually his sister or an evil plant actually being a harginger of a murdered corpse or a ghost haunting a army troop.

This story launches past that. This story creates the basic Cthulhu Mythos concept that we are insignificant little creatures who are beneath the notice of beings significantly more powerful than ourselves.

This story has a macro scale. It is concerened with things much bigger than a vampire, a ghost, a murderer, or a wierd death. This is concerned with the nature of existance. The term Lovecraft coined for this was cosmic horror.

This is cosmic horror on a major plane. This story not only advanced horror but it also was Lovecraft's wake up story. This allowed him to fully realize his own voice, his own world, and his own ideas. It's a very lonely place.

Lovecraft's philosophy has come to be known as Cosmic Indifference. Nobody cares about us, nothing. We aren't even worth noticing. In the scheme of existance, we are lower than ants.

This sense of loneliness goes beyond being hunted by a werewolf. We are alone in the cosmos. Throughout dimensions and space, nobody cares about us, unless they need something from us, just as we might occasionally need something from bacteria.

All we are is tools to powers greater than our entire race combined, and as soon as we've outlived our usefulness, we'll be discarded with no more though that you or I would give to discarding a used match.

That's why Lovecraft is so great. That's why writers are still emulating his concepts 80 years later. That's why writers great and tiny are still writing in his world. He is a genius that pushed a genre beyond the pervious boundaries, and scared people with what was discovered.



I'd give this a 4.5 stars out of 5. It can be a little uneven at times, but it is amazing for the most part, and well ahead of its time.

The next story to read is The Shadow Over Innmouth.

hxxp://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/theshadowoverinnsmouth.htm


This is the second most anthologized of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos fiction (the third most overall. One of his Poe-esque stories, The Rats in the Walls is actually his most anthologized because it is considered so technically proficient).

I believe this is his best work. It is considered by most fans to be the best of his stories after The Call of Cthulhu. It is interesting to note that this story was never published for five years after it was written, until just before his death. Yet most remember it very fondly.

This is a perfect second story to read, because it is a bit easier to read that The Coulour Out of Space or The Shadow Out of Time or The Whisperer in Darkness.

I'll try to get this review and synopsis up Monday.



One more thing - if you have played The Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners fo the Earth by Bethesda Softworks, then you will really identify with this story. That game was based on this one.

Some info on The Shadow Over Innsmouth:

It's Lovecraft's longest short story, although he wrote three novellas that are longer. That's why I'm giving an extra day :)

Its the story I've read the most. I read it last night again for the fourth time. Great, high quality stuff.


It's very easy to get into. That may be why it is the most used of his works. In just this century, there is:

2001 - Dagon, Horror Film based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth (TSOI)

2005 - The Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Video Game, based largely on TSOI

2006 - Cthulhu, horror film to be released later this year, based on TSOI

Click here to see trailer for Cthulhu:

hxxp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478126/trailers-screenplay-E27378-10-2


-Anxiety

The Shadow Over Innsmouth Synopsis

All synopses are spoilers. Please skip this if you want no spoilers.


We open with our protagonist in Newburysport, in a coming of age tour of the area of his ancestry in New England. He is wanting a train to Arkham but does not want to pay the fare, so he is directed to a bus to Innsmouth that will then lead to Akrham. The locals advise him away from Innsmouth, and curious, he does a little investigation into Innsmouth while in Newburysport.

He discovers that the town is an old fishing village that may have, once, been a decent port, but has since decayed, with naught but one gold refinery and a lot of fishing as its remaining economy. He swing sby the Newburysport Historical Register and takes a look at a piece of gold supposedly from the Innsmouth refinery. It's a gold diadem with an alloy of some metal he does not recognize. The archaic tiara is fully developed and fleshed out, like it has centuries of art behind it, but does not resemble any known human style of art. The angles look off and the tiara appears to be shaped for an unusually sized head.

Intrigued by this piece of gold and by the rumors, our protagonist, with a fierce curious streak, decides to save a few bucks and takes the bus to Innsmouth. The bus is driven by Joe Sargent and he looks...off. The author will describe Joe Sargent's looks and although no individual description is unusual on its own, the cumulative effect is a very disquieting feeling.

The bus heads to Innsmouth and our protagonist views the countryside, observing the dilapidation of Innsmouth close up. He does get a bit of fright when passing a church newly dedicated to the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Out of the door walks a priest wearing a similar tiara, and he gets a bit of a scare, but nothing serious.

Our protagonist arrives and exits the bus. He can occasionally sees a fellow Innsmouth person and notices that they have a similar look to Joe Sargent. The young ones look farily normal, but older ones show more pronounced features. The portagonist calls this the Innsmouth Look, and beleives it is due to inbreeding on a massive level. There are not any old people about.

He heads to a local gorcery store which is a chain, where there is a normal service person there, from out of town. He explains the town, its eccentricities, where visitors are allowed to go, and gives the protagonist a crudely drawn map of Innsmouth.

The protagonist, as a historian of architecture, sets out to explore Innsmouth and observe the buildings. He explores the town for several horus before he comes across Zadok Allen sitting by the fire station. The clerk at the gorcery store mentioned that Zadok Allen, a man of 95 years old, could tell stories of early Innsmouth if it was loosened by liquor.

Seizing the opportunity, the protagonist procures a bottle of homemade whiskey and leads Zadok to a quiet and secluded area by the shore. Out over a mile and half is the Devil's Reef, where mysterious things are said to take place. Out of the way of peering eyes, the protagonost plies Zadok with alcohol until his tongue is loosened.

Several pages are dedicated to the history of Innsmouth as told by Zadok. Here is his short story:

A sailor named Obed Marsh owned several vessels and sailed out of Innsmouth to all corners of the world. While in Indonesia, Obed came across a group of native on a secluded island that were rich with these gold artifacts and fish. None of the other islands had a bounty of fish. These natives claimed that those they worshipped gave them fish and occasionaly these gold trinkets. In return, they gave sacrifices to the sea.

Obed traded for the gold trinkets and returned to Innsmouth. The depression of the early 1840s hit Innsmouth hard and the people were desparate. Then Obed sailed away again, and this time, he arrived with the natives and spoke with them at greater length. The chief gave him a lead stone with odd carvings and said that if Obed dropped the lead stone in the water anywhere near these Deep Ones, they would come up the surface. Supposedly, the Deep Ones would want to mate with humans and walk around outside, for they were amphibians and enjoyed such things. Their spawn would be immortal.

Obed left with a stone and a new bride from the tribe. When he rearrived at Innsmouth, he brought a group of desparate folk together and sailed out to Devil's Reef and called up the Deep Ones. Soon, a few people around town came up missing, and Zadok Allen, as a boy, realized that it was Obed who was taking them to Devli's Marsh, so he called up the town leaders.

This was several months after Obed had begun working with the Deep Ones. The village elders rose up and captured Obed and all of his crew in one fell swoop, over 30 men. Then, after a few days of not getting their tribute, the Deep Ones attacked Innsmouth en masse, butchered the town leaders, and installed Obed Marsh as the new leader of Innsmouth.

Obed took politicial power and used it against other nearby cities for a while, even tricking some poor Akrham bloke to marrying his hybrid daughter.

Obed created a bunch of new rules, such as don't tell strangers this story.


End Story:

As Zadok is pointing out some things on Devil's Reef, he cries out that they;ve been spotted from the water. He tells the protagonist to leave immeidately for it is no longer safe for him. Zadok flees from the water, but a sudden wave hits and when it relents, Zadok cannot be found anywhere.

The protagonist doesn't beleive old Zadok, and when he returns to Innsmouth to catch the outgoing Bus to Arkham, he is informed that the bus broke down and will not be able to make it that evening. He finds lodgings at the Gilman House in Innsmouth and lies down to sleep after repairing the broken bolt to his room and sliding the bolts to the north and south adjoining rooms.

After some time, he realizes that someone is using a key in his door's lock. They gently try to the lock but find that his repair to the deadbolt had kept it tight. They then try the two adjoinging doors quietly, testing them to see if they work. As they leave to go back downstairs, the protagonist can hear them talking to someone else. The protagonist realizes that his death is imminate and investigates the window. He sees that he will need to go north or south two rooms in either direction before tryign to jump on an adjacent building's roof.

He dares not go outside so he tries the south door, but finds it opens towards him, and it will be difficult to bash open. He slides a bookcase in front the door and then looks north. As he goes to that door, he hears someone knocking on his room door. He checks the north door and the knocking gets louder, hopefully covering his banging on the north door.

He blasts through the north door but the sound in tremendous. He sees that the door to the hallway is unbolted, so he slides the bolt just as someone reaches the door. He then dashes through the open adjoining door and closes the hallway door in this third room as the door is being opened. He pulls a bedcase against this door and he hears people slamming against the door in his first bedroom where the bookcase now is.

He slides furniture against all of the doors to the current room and moves to the window. The bashing against the doors and furniture is getting loud, and something heavy is being used as a ram against one door.

The protagonist sees that there is a large ledge on the opposite building and he goes over, then crawls up to an open skylight and runs down this new building, ultimitely hitting the street.

Consulting his map, our protagonist begins moving towards one of hte main roads, and as he does so, he will sometimes dash, sometimes hide, and sometime walk out in the open using the shambling Innsmouth gait. As the hue and cry level continues, he realizes that all of the main entries to city are guarded by Innsmouth folk, and he decides to head to the old railraod and use it as a way out (Innsmouth is surrouded by Salt Marshes and not really a place you just want to scurry around)

As he moves towards the station, he sees some lights on distant Devil's Reef and then turns around and sees those same lights coming from the Gilman House, like messages coming back and forth. Then, as the moon comes out from behind the cloud, he sees the ocean.

At first, he thinks the ocean is very choppy, but there is no wind. Then as he walks closer to the shore in order to get closer to the train station, he sees that the water is full of things swimming to shore from the Reef.

He ducks into a side alley and scurries to the train station. He begisn to follow the old train tracks and there is no pursuit. He jumps over a gap in the tracks at a covered bridge and comes to where the railroad crosses the main road in and aout of Innsmouth. As he gets closer, he observes that the people are on the road, out and looking for him.

He has a good hiding place, and can observe the people following him. His natural inclination is to close his eyeys and keep them shut from the terrors that he suspects as they people pass close by his hiding place in the brush. Ultiamtely, he looks and sees these fish/toad/human creatures moving about, and one is wearing the same type of tiara that he had seen twice before.

He passes out, only to awaken the following morn when he scurries to the nearest town and babbles all he saw to the local constabulary which calls in the feds. His information is verified and then acted upon. In one swift action, the feds torpedo Devil's Reef, kill and catpure most of Innsmouth and silence the ring leaders.


Several years later, our protagonist is continuing his genelogical investigations and there is a deadend with his grandmother. His grandmother was a ward of the court with a anonymous benefactor that paid her way through school. She married an Akrham man and they had a daughter, that was our protagonist's mother, and a son that was hs uncle.

The protagonist fears knowledge when he discovers that his grandmother was a Marsh, but there are many Marshes in the Essex County region of Massachusetts.

His grandmother had disappeared under strange circumstances, and his uncle committed suicide with a pistol (his mother died when he was very young to an accident). He had, as a chield, never liked the look of his grandmother and uncle, but it wasn't until he looked at their pictures that he noticed the similarty

Didn't Zadok mention that Obed had tricked an Arkham man into marrying his daughter?

Our protagonist has a cousin in the insane asylum in Canton spoting things about dreams and Deep Ones and many columned Y'ha-nthlei.

As our protagonist's investigations continue, his own dreams become more concrete. He dreams of swimming with his grandmother in great Y'ha-nthlei and of joining his brethern underneath the sea. As he looks in the mirror, he sees an increasingly familar and comfortable face staring back.




-Anxiety

Review of The Shadow Over Innsmouth

All reviews are spoiler free, except I allow myself to refer to the first page.

This is Lovecraft as his best. It is a great example of his sense of scale. Horror is developed by scale, as the reader becomes increasingly cognizant of the surrounding terror.

It's also a very rich story. Lovecraft will engulf you in details of Innsmouth, giving you an amazing and fleshed out backstory. This is more that you normally get from Lovecraft, and you can see what he could do when he was firing on all cylinders.

It also hits all fo the major Lovecraft sub-themes. Lovecraft loved exploring dreams in his stories, and here you have dreams. Lovecraft loved exploring the consequence of blood and ancestry, and here you have his best example of this sub-theme. Lovecraft had a thing about not liking oceans and seas, and here you get that disquieting sense of the brine.

My favorite scene in all of Lovecraft is the one I detailed signifciantly in the synopsis. It's marvelouslly done, with loads of tension with ever increasing revelations that continute to add to the sense of impending doom.

I think this is also one of the most flavorful of Lovecraft's stories. Can't you just taste Innsmouth? It's smell clogs your nostrils, you can feel it on your skin, you can hear and see the sights. It's a very sensational work.

Although this was published a few months before Lovecraft's death, only 150 copies were made before the printer went out of business. It would be printing in Wierd Tales 5 years later to great acclaim, and was instantly realized as one of the authors greatest works.

I think one of the reasons Lovecraft didn't like this story is that it was a bit different for him and it included elements that were very un-Lovecraft, like the (spoiler, but not really, since you learn this on the first page) feds getting involved. This was particularly outside the realm of Lovecraft since he prefers his characters to stand or fall (and usually fall) on their own.

I hope you either enjoyed reading the story or reading the synposis and review.


I'd give Shadow Over Innsmouth a 5 out of 5 stars. It is a pitch perfect story.

The next story is The Dunwich Horror. You can find it here:

hxxp://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thedunwichhorror.htm


The Dunwich Horror completes the Lovecraft Trilogy of Perfection, toerhwise known as his three greatest Mythos stories. It's not nearly as long as The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

I'll try to get the synopsis and review up on Wednesday.


I am going to start editing the post title with the title of the new work I am reading.

Great thread, but I'm behind. I am going to start on The Call of Cthulhu tonight.

Great!

I'm a little behind as well. I'm super busy with training, so it may be a day or two before I finish The Dunwich Horror and have time to post my thoughts on it.

Synopsis of The Dunwich Horror

The story begins in a rural village named Dunwich that is older than most New England towns, and dilapidated in both genepool and architecture. One decaying family, the Whateleys, live in a farmhouse away from Dunwich.

One night, Lavina Whateley, an albino, gives birth to Wilbur Whateley. No one knows the father, but the grandfather, Old Whateley, is quite proud. Over time, Wilbur ages quickly, and begins to exhibit odd features, like elongated ears and such.

His grandfather educates him in the black arts of various tomes and what, while also working on fixing up the house. The people of Dunwich shun the farm and its three inhabitatants.

Old Whateley boards up the top of the house and begins buying a lot of cattle. His herd often look diseased and it appears like his cattle must die quickly.

Lavina and Wilbur are spotted dancing on top of Sentinel Hill where some old stones lie. The spotter thinks they might be naked.

Wilbur always dresses more impeccably than the rest of his family. His room is on the bottom of the house. More carpentry is done, including putting an incline up to a top window and taking out some walls and what.

Lavina starts to be excluded by Old Whateley and Wilbur and is a bit frightful. The few guests never leave the ground floor of the old farmhouse.

Years pass. Eventually, Old Whateley dies, but before he does, he tells Wilbur that he needs to reference page 751 of the unabridged version. As he dies, the Whipporwhills chant ferociously.

Shortly thereafter, Lavina goes missing as well.

Wilbur moves out of the house into a shed and does more carpentry work to the Whateley house.

He arrrives at Misktonic University in Arkham to review their copy of the Necronomican. It seems that his copy is the abridged English copy and he needs to reference the Latin unabridged copy kept there. The librarian is Dr. Henry Armitage, who visited Wilbur Whateley a few years ago and remembers a nasty, unwholesome smell faintly.

Wilbur asks to take the Necronomican back with him. While he was researching it, Armitage references that passage and discovers that it is a reference to Yog-Sothoth as the gate to the Old Ones.

Henry elects not to allow Wilbur to take the Necronomicon, and Wilbur takes off for Harvard to see their copy. Meanwhile, Armitage contacts Harvard and Cambridge and lets them know that Wilbur should not be given any information about the Necronomicon, and they agree.

A while later, Henry Armitage awakens to the sound of the library guard dog howling and a shout like something unhuman. He crosses the street and enters the library where there is evidence that someone broke in. Lying on the floor is what is left of Wilbur Whateley. He was struck by the dog, and his body lies on the floor.

His body is not human, and was apparently a human hybrid with something else. It kept human form only through tight clothing. It had around 20 tentacles around the abdomen, eyes on its hips, a furry back, and this foul stench hangs over the body, the same smell Armitage rememebered from his visit to the Whateley farm.

Over time, the corpse dissolves, and Armitage begins to pack for Dunwich with Professor Rice and Doctor Morgan, two other experts from Miskatonic U with expertise in the area of the antiquarian.


Meanwhile, in Dunwich:

They arrive in Dunwich to find the village people are scared of sounds and odors that come from the Whateley Farm. On the evening of September Ninth, two boys came back to their mothers and claimed that they saw something nasty coming from the Whateley Farm. Most of Dunwich's men gathered and charged the place.

They arrive at the farm only to find that the farmhosue is in ruins and a trail of something large tears trhough the forest. They choose not to follow and return home.

That night, something that stank massively tore into a local farmhouse and evoured the cattle before leaving.

Two more nights pass, and no farms are threatened. The large swath of destruction left by whatever the Dunwich Horror is can be followed, but the people are not threatened. Some begin to feel that maybe the dark time has passed.

On the fourth night, the whipporwhills chanted all night, and when morning came, the entire Frye farm had been completely destroyed, and death and destruction were the only things harvested there.


Meanwhile, in Arkham:


The diary of Wilbur Whateley, discovered in the farmhouse by the people of Dunwich, is sent to Miskatonic University. The diary is in a language that is not easily deciphered.

The books found in the farmhouse ruins along with the diary are given to Armitage's care. Ultimately, armitage cracks the code of the diary. After reading the diary and a subsequent fever, he realizes what has been done in Dunwich by the Whateleys, and what they have let in.

Armitage, Rice and Morgan continue to ready themselves to go to Dunwich, but now with additional alchemical preparations. Unfortunately, their preparations are cut short by news out of Dunwich of the additionall horrors.

They arrive to find a state police car with five officer has arrived to investigate, and the officers have left to follow the trail of the Horror.

They decide to wait the night out, and in the morning, another attack begins, this time in the day, with a storm. A dozen Dunwich folk arrive where the three professors are waiting for the Horror and inform them that the Horror is trampling through some farms.

Armitage rallies the few townsfolk he has, and tells them that the Horror is invisible. He says that he has something that might work against it, and they might as well go after it now.

They arrive at the Bishop place where the Horror supposedly just struck, and the destruction is similar to the Frye incident. Death, and a noisome foetor linger.

Using a spy scope, they see the bushes moving on Sentinel Hill and it appears like the Horror is moving up the steep slope. The townsfolk became frightened and refused to go further, so the three professors trudged on toward Sentinal Hill alone.

The three professors are seen by the townsfolk, using the spyglass, to ascend the hill, and then Rice prepares to spray using a powerful bug spray container with a new formula in it where they believe the Horror to be. This will supposedly turn the Horror visible for a short time.

The townsperson with the spyglass, Curtis, sees the Horror become visible and drops the spyglass, shaking. His broken words:


He'll faint a few seconds later.

The townsfolk pick the spyglass back up to see the three professors running for the top of the Hill and nothing more. The Horror is invisible again. The figures reach the top and one is waving his arms ceremoniously.

The daylight darkens for no discernable reason, dogs begin baying, and a rushing deep tone can be felt from deep away. Lightning flashes with no clouds in the sky.

The sounds appear to be coming from an altar stone atop Sentinel Hill. Then a cry can be heard, montsrous, crying out to its father. Crying out to Yog-Sothoth.

A blast of fury tears from the Hill, ripping through trees, killing whipporwhills, and stripping vegetation of leaves. A short while later, the three professors can be seen marching towards the townsfolk.

They arrive and decide not to answer any questions. Then the person who had seen the Horror awoke and exclaimed that the face of the Horror resembled Old Whateley's.

Armitage decides to let them know what happened. The Horror had been growing inside the side, and it was Wilbur's twin brother. It just resembled its father more than Wilbur had.

I'll post the review later. I'm not sure where to go next with the dynasty, after the big three, but I have an idea.

Review of The Dunwich Horror

Like his two previous works that we've read, Lovecraft imbues this story with a sense of the immense. Even though it is a lower key intensity in terms of scale, its still bigger than a vampire or a ghost story.

I think I know why Lovecraft is so popular among horror writers and enthusiasts. Most horror writers write nameless things. Zombies shamble out from behind tombstones, ghouls attack at night, madmen wield power tools and the perverted torture and maim.

There's no rhyme or reason. Things happen for sensationalism. Lovecraft, on the other hand, understands that true horror goes beyond a scream or a disgusting zombie. He created a world where the very foundation was scary, and then tapped into the world in his stories, giving the reader a glimpse of the unthinkable.

Few horror writers create mythologies. Fantasy writers do, sci-fi writers do, but horror writers do not. Lovecraft created an enduring mythology, and that may be his greateest contribution to horror literature.

The Dunwich Horror, in my opinion, drags a bit. Lovecraft is at his best when he tells one story from one perspective all the way through, like The Shadow Over Innsmouth. When he starts a stary from the point of view of the Dunwich folk, then switches to a Whateley, then to Armitage, then to more townsfolk, then back to Armitage, I think he ruins the horror element.

I also think Lovecraft gives away too much in the early pages of his works. All horror writers use foreshadowing to build suspense, but I sometimes think Lovecraft uses it a bit too much. The Innsmouth foreshadowing let you know that something major happened, but you have no idea as to what. This one tells you the plot early.

As a result, the technical aspects are not nearly as good as Shadow. The Mythos elements are there in full force - Akrham, Dunwich, Miskatonic University, Yog-Sothoth, and the Necronomicon among others. You get a real sense of his world as he intended it, and you get a good sense of Lovecraft as his best. That sense is fleeting however.

Of the Lovecraft trilogy (The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror) that every horror fan should read, this is the weakest.

As such, four out of five stars.

What's next?

I want to give any readers out there a bit more of a Lovecraft foundation than you already have. I don;t think a Mythos reader needs to read all Lovecraft stories, or even start with all of his Mythos stories. Hoeever, I do think you need a bigger start than this.

Lovecraft has some horror Mythos stories that have significantly heavier sci-fi elements. These include The Colour Out of Space, The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness and such.

On the other had, more traditional horror stories also exist, like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness,

I should recommend At the Moutnains of Madness next. However, it's a novella, so I'll skip it for now. Instead, I'll recommend one of my favorites in the classic horror style that's left.

The Haunter of the Dark

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


This is one of Lovecraft's final works, and you can see the sum talent of his accumulated skill in it. I actually like it better than The Dunwich Horror. Enjoy!

At the Mountains of Madness was the first H.P. Lovecraft I read. I struggled through the first 20 pages or so as I really didn't like his style of writing, but soon enough the real horror began, and I quickly appreciated how perfectly his style of writing and his use of words complimented his stories.

It remains my favourite Lovecraft, though The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a close second. It's a shame he didn't write more stories of the same length as these.

If you can get past the length of the story, it is VERY good. At the Mountains of Madness is, frankly, better then The Dunwich Horror, and Lovecraft fans list it as their third fav story after Call and Innsmouth.

I think Haunter, Call, Innsmouth, Mountains, would be in my top five. I do not know what my other top five would be.



I finished Haunter just now (it was only 20 pages long), and I'll try to find time to post a synopsis and a review tomorrow. Here are Mythos elements in Haunter:

Necronomicon
Un. Kulten
Des Vermis Mysteriis
Les Cultes des Ghoules

Nephren-Ka

Nyarlathotep
Azazoth
Yog-Sothoth


All of these, except for Nephren-Ka are mentioned very briefly as window dressing. You could pick up Haunter Of the Dark and read it without any previous Mythos expereince and it would work for you, so I like that.


-Anxiety

I finished freshmen move in today and I have to go around to the floor meetings in a few minutes to introduce myself. I beleive that in the next day or two I'll have a chance to get my synopsis and review of Haunter up.

In teh meantime, I've decided to cave in and the next story WILL be At the Moutnains of Madness. It's that good, and its that important. It is, however, a novella, so it will take a few extra days and nights to get done. I won't have Mountains up until at least Wednesday.

You can find this story here:

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


-Anxiety

The Haunter of the Dark Synopsis

The Haunter of the Dark is a shorter tale than previous works that we've analyzed, therefore the synopsis is shorter as well.

The tale beings in Providence, Rhode Island, there the main character, Blake, has rented a room on College Hill which overlooks much of the city. Blake is an occultist in the sense that he is well read, and researches the occult in order to get inspiration for his writing. He has published several short stories as well as done paintings and sculptures.

One day, while gazing out his room at the Providence skyline, he notices an old church steeple that has been darkened with age and disuse. He finds it an interesting dichotomoty against the clean, white surrounding buildings.

He continues to study the church facade from a distabce, and soon finds himself staring at the steeple for a lot of time each day. Obsessed with this old church, he sets forth to find it.

He heads to the area of the city where th church is, and its a largely Italian section. He asks the people but they feign ignorance. He eventually crosses a street that allows him to glimpse the church and heads towards it.

The church is old and dilapidated. Some of the boards have come apart and the surrounding fence is disused. In a moment of impulse, Blake steals into the church and enters the basement.

He sees some odd things (the cross is odd, some glass stained windows are off, a few texts like The Necronomicon and whatnot, etc) and then goes upstairs to the steeple that he saw from his room. Instead of finding a bell, he discovered a podium in the center of the room with seven chairs arrayed around it.

On the podium is a box made of odd materials. He approaches the box and opens it, and inside is a Shining Trapezohedron, a oddly shaped stone of unknown origian that glistens and calls to one's soul teh longer one stares at it.

For a while, Blake stares at the stone until he feels soemthing staring back. Frightnened, he closes the box and takes it. He sees a skeleton in the corner underneath dust with a journal and reads the journal and finds it is the remains of a jounralist who was investigating the church thiry years prior. Something happened to the investigator and he was never heard from again.

Blake leaves and sensing another presence and heads back home. He does some research on the Shining Trapezohedron and discovers that it was unearthed in Nephren-Ka's pyramid. Nephren-Ka is the Black Pharaoh, one who investigated the dark side of man and such and therefore scoured the stars and skies for information about the Old Ones and how to contact them. His name was purged from all Egyptian records until his pyramid was discovered and his remains exhumed along with the Shining Trapezohedron.

This object supposedly began a cult called the Starry Wisdom. This church was supposedly their headquarters long ago. There were mysterious noises and such seen long ago.

Blake realizes that he called out a presence when he stared at the Shining Trapezohedron too long, so he searches for a way to fight it. Apparently, exposing it to light will kill it, and it moves in total darkness. He knows that it is still there, in the upper reaches of the steeple of the church, lurking and waiting.

Then, there is a short blackout. Deaths and noises are reported in the Italian section of the city and he night ends with dozens of Italians with candles and lanterns around the old chruch praying against the forces of evil.

Blake begins to panic, and research more and more. Then, another storm hits and another black out occurs. Blake is staidng at his window and he knows that the Haunter of the Dark will come for him to claim him. Lightning keeps flashing, which keeps the Haunter at bay. Then the lightning stops momentarialy.

The Italians and priest that are gathered outside the old church in another vigil see the steeple explode in the darkness (in the candles and lanterns), with shards flying everywhere. Then, a shreech is heard and the local fraternity in College Hill hears a loud sound and a massive Lightning Bolt rends the sky.

The following day Blake is found at his window, dead from, apparently, electrical shock but the window is unharmed. His notebook is found with his scrawlings after the power went out.

The Haunter of the Dark Review

As mentioned before, this tale is much shorter than the previous three that I read. I think it's actually a better tale that The Dunwich Horror. I love the imagery of this story, and the various elements really work together to create a very nice mood.

I think, at least in this case, shorter is definitely better. Many of Lovecraft's longers works are highly regarded (The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Moutnains of Madness). Still, this shows him a bit more elegant. His prose is tighter and well woven, creating a nice tapestry.

You can tell that he is at the height of his craft when he writes this story. This was near the end of his life and he had already been diagnosed with the stomach cancer that would kill him. He wrote several stories during this time, but this was the only story he wrote by himself. It was really his swan song, since only one other tale (co-written as many of his last tales were) would follow and its not even in the mythos (it is, however, really, really good (The Night Ocean)).

One problem is that the story does have more conventional horror elements at times. As such, it is an easy read from those getting into Lovecraft for the first time, but its a bit disappointing for those who enjoy the uniqueness of Lovecraft's vision.

As a result, I'd say the technical precision is Lovecraft at his best, but the occasionally mundane elements bring it back down.

Four out of Five Stars.

After "At the Mountains of Madness" I'm going to hit up one more Lovecraft story before moving on to another writer or two.

The last story is "The Colour Out of Space." It is a sci-fi oriented story, so you get a taste of what Lovecraft done the sci-fi way is like. Lovecraft, in his letters, called Mountains and Colour his two best stories, or alternatively, the two stories he wrote that he liked the most. It is appropriate, then, to read these now at the end of our first jounrey through Lovecraft.

You can find Colour at the same website as the other Lovecraft stories and just go to the archive and find Colour and read it.

We'll occasionally come back to Lovecraft after venturing out to other writers. It's not like we'll never see him again. However, we only have two more stops on the Lovecraft Express before moving on to the next line.

-Anxiety

I've finished Mountains last night, and I expect to have the synopsis and review up today sometime.

At the Moutains of Madness Synopsis

Since this is a huge novella sized story, I'm am going to eschew my nomral lenthy and detailed synopsis in lieu of a quick and dirty synopsis.

The narrator and a team of experts in various fields leave Mistonic University on a expedition to the Antarctic. They reach the continent and head inland. After several months of exploring and drilling, the majority of the contingent goes up ahead into the continent while a smaller group stays behind.

The leader of the contingent that goes ahead, Lake, discovers a huge mountain chain. Bigger than the Himalayas by a couple of miles. With odd cube rocks on the slopes. Lake lands the planes at the base of this huge unknown mountain chanin and starts drilling.

Some of the men discover a pocket under the ground where an old cave is. In this are bones of tons of animals with various degrees of scarring. There are also some corpses of this amazing creature, a star shaped (Radially, not vertically), tentacled thing.

Lake takes the 13 specimens of these Star Creatures back to his camp to begin scientific work on them. They are ancient, millions of years old each. He begins to dissect one and makes severl importnat discoveries before a major snow storm moves in.

The smaller group left behind does not hear from Lake's expedition. Again. They head to the camp and discover mutilated corpes, missing star bodies, a missing camp member, a missing dog, lots of missing equipment and more. The smaller expedition starts packing what is left and buries the remains of the bodies.

Two members, Danbury and the narrator take the plane over the Mountains to see what is there while the remaining men pack up the camp.

They see an ancient, worn city on a huge plateau four miles above sea level. The area has been glaciated. They land and explore and discover art that shows the history and culture of the star beings.

After investigating the star beings in the art, including their origins, their war with the servants of Cthulhu aeons ago, their arrival from space, their genetic manipulation of the Shoggoth and more, the two continue deeper into the heart of the city.

A underwater city supposedly existed at the bottom of an underground sea as the last vestige ofthe star beings. The two decide to descend to see what they can see.

After a while, they come across the equipment from camp including the slegdes packing with the stolen equipment and the carefully killed and stored bodies of the missing dog and person. The star beings that awakened and left the camp are nowhere to be found. The two delve deeper.

They notice that the art has changed serious as they get closeo the lake and then they come across four bodies of the star things, recently killed. A mist begisn to form from the lake and a creature changes them back up the inclines and they realize that it is a Shoggoth that is chasing them, and that the Shoggoth must have killed all of the star beings and taken over this last city.

They barely escape and Danbury looks back to see one last unknown horror as they fly away. They leave, never to return and swear that they shall keep others from coming back to Antartica.


Obviously the story is amazingly more detailed than that, but thats the basic gist.

At the Mountains of Madness Review


This story is famous because is represents Lovecraft demythologizing his own mythos. He takes various elements of his mythos and connects them together in a basic and understandable way. In a way, he pulls aside the curtain and allows readers to see behind the scenes.

The story still has horror elements in it, no doubt. However, Lovecraft loves to mix horror with wonder, and this story is his piece de resistance when it comes to mixing the two.

Mountains was amazingly well researched, from the geography to reading about previous journeys to the Antarctic and more. The science in it is incredible - like reading a Jules Verne novel.

The story includes or mentions a lot of mythos elements like Cthulhu, the Mi-Go, various tomes, and more. It is a core mythos story because it is the story that connects the dots, so to speak.


It can drag a bit at times when Lovecraft does what he really wants, which is to tell you about his universe. Otherwise, its a fine story.

4.0 out of 5.0 stars.


-Anxiety

Next up is the last Lovecraft story we'll do for now, The Colour Out of Space. You can find it in the same site as the others (Dagonbytes.com). This one has a different feel with a bit of sci-fi poking out around the edges.


-Anxiety

I'm considering picking this back up again for a while. Any interest?

Absolutely. Been a while since I read any Lovecraft, but reading through this has got me in the mood to pick some more up.

The Colour Out of Space Synopsis


If you don't want spoilers, move to the next post.


This story open with the narrator, employed by a company building a dam nearby, doing scouting of the area that will be underwater. The reservoir built by the dam will be used for drinking water for Arkham.

One area roughly five acres in size is called the blasted heath. Here nothing grows, everything is grey, and things feel odd. The area around the heath is also odd, but to smaller degrees. After passing through, the narrator stop in Arkham to inquire as to what happened. They tell him it happened in the 1880s, and don't listen to Ammi, a man who lived there and rambled about it. Of course, our narrator seeks out Ammi, the last person living in the wide valley, and gets the story.

In 1882, a meteorite falls to Earth at Nahum Gardener's estate. scientists from a local university arrive to take samples, and the meteorite is completely odd and unusual. It's shrinking, it remains hot, and most tests on it show it to be inert. However, when shining light into a fragment under study, scientists note that it gives off light of various colours, including some that are unreal.

they come back a few days later to get another sample, and while chipping it, find a globule of a plastic/glassy substance. It glows of the same strange unknown colour as was shown, and one cracks it with a hammer. It breaks, and loses its coloration. They try to find another globule to take with them, but fail, so they head back to do more research. After these samples shrink away, they return to the farm to find that after a night of thunderstorms in which lightning hit the meteorite six times, i has completely disappeared.

Over the next few months, more and more disturbing things occur on the farm. Animals are acting queerly, fruit is much bigger, but tastes awful, and so forth. Slowly, over time, more queer things occu.r

Eventually, trees sway at night, plants grow, turn grey, and die. But the most unusual thing is that many plants and animals turn a shade of the unnatural colour and then grey and are destroyed. People in Arkham won;t put stock into these "superstitions." Eventually, animals start dying, and the humans living on the farm are affect. They begin to go mad, and soon, one dies and then another.


At last, almost a year after the fall of the meteorite, Ammi heads back to the farm to check on the family. He finds Nahum in a crazy, mad mood, and his wife locked away and changed. Vapors of the colour brush past him, and the wife, dead, head downstairs to Nahum. Nahum begins to decay in front of Ammi.

Ammi leaves to tell those in Arkham of the death of the Gardeners. Officials arrive at the farm to investigate. They find Nahum and his wife as described by Ammi, greyed and decaying.

They begin to explore the farm for the lost tow children, scour the well. They find two skeletons there. That night, while still investigating, everything begins to coalesce. Glowing plants, trees, swaying, and more turn into bright lights exploding with a range of colours like that of the meteorite, and the farm begins to erupt in that light and miasmas form. Eventually, all fo the light combines and shoots off into the night sky, leaving earth.

A giant popping is heard, and the farm and trees collapse. Ammi notices another wave of the colour on the farm falling into the well, and believes another entity is sill down there.

We slide back to real time, and our narrator mentions he won;t drink any of the water from the new Arkham reservoir.

The Colour Out of Space Review


All reviews are spoiler free


This is a piece that's more about mood than plot. It's one of the first where Lovecraft combines science fiction and horror, rather than more traditional things with horror. This was an era of occult in horror, including goblins, witches, magic, ghost, vampires and werewolves. Lovecraft's horror is moving into distinctly non-occult and non-gothic areas.

It's not that long. Just 24 pages in my book. He only managed to sell it for $25 to Amazing Stories. The Editor, famous Hugo Gernsback (after whom The Hugo Awards are named) paid him late and he refused to publish with them again. It was the only story ever published for Amazing Stories to be in a famous annual anthology of short stories of various genres called the best of the year (The Best American Short Stories).

It's considered by many one of the best written stories, and again, Lovecraft felt is was his best short story. It's written and published in 1927, the year after The Call of Cthulhu was written but one year before it was published.

As a story at the front of the Mythos, elements in it are very light. If you have never read a Mythos story, then this won't look like it. However, a few famous Lovecraftian scholars point out that it's more important that a story have the Lovecraft tone and values than details like the Neronomicon or Cthulhu. Using that metric, this is a very important story (although Arkham is a Mythos elements, as a fictional town in Massachusetts where a lot of Mythos stuff happens).

I wanted this to be the sixth story and the last Lovecraft story for a while for several reasons. You can see a Mythos story light on elements, and how nice it is, you have a sci fi story, and you have an early mythos story that is before most of the later stuff. It's well written and well-received by critics ever since it saw print. The mood and tone are great!


I hope you enjoyed it if you read it!


I give it a solid four and a half stars out of five.

What's next?

I want to flesh out Generation 1 for a while before we go up or down the spectrum.


For purposes of this dynasty, we will be using my own language for discussing the Cthulhu Mythos. I am not a scholar, but just someone who loves reading this stuff!



Generation 0 - The foundational pre-Lovecraftian works that were later added to the Mythos, or which have mood, tone and details in common with the Mythos, and inspired Lovecraft and others. This is where you will find stories by Arthur Machen, Robert W Chambers and more.


Generation 1 - HP Lovecraft, and his immediate circle of friends and protegees. These are the first stories, coming out in the late 20s through roughly 1940 a few years after Lovecraft's death. Stories here are in all sorts of genres and feature writers we are about to explore.


Generation 2 - Robert Barlow was given Lovecraft's estate by his will, and was one of his protegees Lovecraft tutored in the craft of writing. August Derleth was another protegee who refused to allow Lovecraft's works to die out. Together, they pushed Lovecraft's works into the public. This gen ends around, roughly, the mid 1960s. It's a time of much change in the Mythos, as we will discus later

Generation 3 - Lin Carter and other writers appear on the scene in the mid 1960s. Too young to have read Lovecraft when he was alive, these new writers had been introduced to him via the collections published by Derleth and others, ans well as Gen 2 stories. Many of them move the Mythos forward in significant ways. Carter sort of takes over the Mythos from Derleth, editing many magazines and collections. He also uses his job s editor at Ballentine Books to bring back several Mythos writers such as Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith. This lasts until, roughly, the mid 80s.


Generation 4 - The modern era. The RPG based on the Mythos put the stories into many more hands. Printing of stories explodes as people demand stories old and new. Many writers set stories in the Mythos as a way of telling art or adding to the story. With greater exposure through publishers like DelRey Books and Chaosian, many writers push the Mythos into many new places, while keeping essential elements. Even as recently as 2004, the Hugo award was given to Neil Gaiman for a short story set in the Cthulhu Mythos (and the Sherlock Holmes one as well - it's just a perfect short story, btw.)


So, those are my views of the various generations and the Mythos.

The next story will be one of the major authors of the era, and in the Mythos. This story is a bit odd, and will take your Mythos reading to a completely different era.


Clark Ashton Smith wrote fantasy stories set in the future or past of Earth. He's known for the many worlds he created and wrote stories in. The story we are reading is The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.

This was an attempt to channel Lord Dunsany's stories - HP Lovecraft loved it, and praised CAS's story. He also takes an element from the story and adds it to his own - Tsathoggua.


Tsathoggua is introduced in this story, so this is an essential Gen 1 story. It's also the first of the stories set in Hyperborea, a long lost age of man thousands of years ago, before the last Ice Age. Look for CAS's trademark dark humor here.


You can find it, for free, online here:

The Tale of Satampra Zeiros by Clark Ashton Smith


A lot of Gen 1 writers are writing things in the past and bring those elements into their age. We'll see it with the next writer on our list, Robert E Howard. We'll check out another story or two of CAS before moving to REH, or as Lovecraft called him, Two Gun Bob.


It clocks in at a mighty 12 pages in my anthology, so it's not going to keep you up all night or anything.

ponders running a call of cthulhu game here someday

Well, I've now read The Call, and will be catching up in the near future. Kudos.

Cool cool!!!

The Tale of Satampra Zeiros Sypnosis




In this story, the great thief Satampra Zeiros opens by telling the story of how he lost his left hand. He begins by introducing a life-long friend and co-thief of majesty, Tirouv Ompallios. They pulled off some major heists, but it has been a while since they last scored ,and they are looking for the next thing.

They live in the city of Uzuldaroum, which is now the capital of Hyperborea. At one time, the capital was Commoriom, but it was deserted centuries ago. The people moved one day’s journey away to establish the city of Uzuldaroum. Perhaps Commoriom was deserted because of a prophecy against it by the White Sybil as is rumored, or for some other reason. The people of Uzuldaroum don’t go back. Tirouv and Satampra get the notion to head to Commoriom and explore, stealing the royal treasures that are still there.

They spend the day moving toward Commoriom and steal what they need from farmers and merchants along the way. They arrive at the ancient ruins of the city. It’s becoming dark. They decide to begin exploring immediately, an come across an old temple to Tsathoggua. They expect there might be some choice jewels or such left behind, so they head in to explore.

They push open the door and move in. There is a large basin of bronze with a liquid on it to the side, and in front is an altar with an idol of Tsathoggua on it. They find no precious stones or anything in the basin or idol. Seeing nothing by the altar/idol they moved toward the basin. An odor begins to ooze from it. The liquid agitates and swells. It moves out of the basin and solidifies into a creature.

Instantly ,they begin running from the shrine. They run for a long time, and have left Commoriom, but they see and hear the monster still chasing them, so they keep it up. They run for hours, and still hear pursuit. The moon sets, and their run is darker, and they hit trees, scratch themselves and stumble. Still they run Eventually they emerge from the forest to find themselves back where they left, and by the temple. Both Tirouv and Satampra move to hide behind the idol, but Satampra gets there first and there’s not room to hide too, so he has to hide in the basin. The creature enters and finds and slays Tirouv. Satampra creeps to the door while it is digesting Tirouv and makes it there but has to throw open the bolt, telling it where he is. As he does, a tentacle from the monster snakes out and bites off his left hand and he escapes.

The Tale of Satampra Zeiros Review

Well, we are definitely out of Lovecraft for a while! CAS has a much different style of writing. So let’s talk!

A few notes about Clark Ashton Smith – He had a memory that was almost eidetic. He read a dictionary from front to back while a child, and remembered most of the words. He also read the Encyclopedia through twice. As such, his works tend to be littered with words that I have to look up or skip over. I love it! I learned the word ignescent a few weeks ago and have used it twice since then.

This is a classic CAS story. CAS has a weakened reputation among fantasy enthusiasts because he was never published in the right way. Let me explain. Right now, if I want, I can buy a book of Robert E Howards Conan tales or horror tales. I can find a collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs Pelucidar stories or H Rider Haggard’s Allen Quartermain stories and so forth. You can’t do that with CAS. You have to buy a big, expensive hard cover book of all of his stuff. You just can’t spend 5 bucks for his Hyperborea cycle or his Zothique Cycle. The copyright is still owned, because he died a lot later than many other writes of his era. Anyway, his stuff is really good, with different language, different tones, and different moods that most other stories of his era or other Mythos tales.

While this is a fantasy story, it’s also clearly a horror story. There’s no question that this is different from both Lovecraft’s sci-fi horror or the eldritch horror of much of the Mythos. It’s nice to read it, because CAS is a nice blast of fresh air.

CAS has a different take on the eldritch characters such as Tsathoggua. He writes the character as virtually a malign deity not unlike many others in mythology. He might be a bit ugly, but Tsathoggua is not unlike Loki. Because CAS’s stuff was all written on Earth in various ages, he incorporates these elements such as Tsathoggua everywhere. That means most of his entire output of literature is essentially Mythos, but I’d say it’s Mythos-lite for the most part. Because of that, we’ll read more by CAS before REH moves in for a while.

Overall, this story is a hallmark of CAS’s style – dark humor, fast paced, not a lot of time on detailed discussions of the area (compare his one paragraph description of Commoriom vs Lovecrafts two and a half pages to begin The Colour Out of Space), and tight. It’s a great story that stands on its own.

(For historians, it is important to note that while this story is the one the creates Tsathoggua in 1929, it is not published until 1931. Lovecraft read the script and incorporated Tsathoggua into a story that was published in 1930, so by some accounts, this is not the introduction of Tsathoggua in print).

Tsathoggua is one of the big greats of the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft uses him a lot, and Howard uses him a ton more than any others.


I give it four stars out of five.

Next up!

Ubbo-Sathla, by Clark Ashton Smith

At a whopping six pages, this is hardly a major task to read. It’s very easy to read through in just a few short moments.

This is a very important work by CAS for the Mythos. It sets the tone for the introduction of many more entities on the level of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Tsathoggua, and more. Many other writers would add their own major powers to the list in Gen 1 and Gen 2. Once we had enough, most later writers would tell additional tales about these rather than getting involved in creating more. As each generation progressed, the number of stories being written increased significantly. Even if I created a creature in my story called Spjeuaoct in 1960, the likelihood that anyone would read it and consider it good enough to add to their stories was very low. We have what Gens 1 and 2 (and to some degree 0) gave us. This is a direct addition to the Mythos, and as such, is very interesting.

It was published in 1933. Due to its short length, I will not be taking long to give you a chance to read it before moving on. I'll likely finish it up tomorrow

You can find it here:

Ubbo-Sathla by Clark Ashton Smith

Ubbo-Sathla Synopsis





We open with Paul Tregardis discovering a crystal. He picks it up in a local shop and takes it home. He is an arcanist and cultist expert who recalls a line in the Book of Eibon about it. It was supposedly found in Greenland, which matches the location of Hyperborea in old times, when the Book of Eibon was written

In the Book of Eibon, it mentions a wizard named Zon Mezzamelech who owned a crystal with a description that matches the one he has found. He pulls down his copy of the Book and finds the reference. It said that he could use the stone to observe the ancient past of Earth and creation, all the way back to the source and Ubbo-Sathla, the demiurge. The crystal and mage were lost.

Paul sets down the book and peers deep into the crystal. He stares deep into it for minutes and longer, until he notices changes. He becomes, in a sense, a dream like someone else. He realizes that he is Zon Mezzamelech while still connected to Paul Tregardis in London. He sees and knows what Zon knows. Zon wants to recover the secrets of the gods, and believes the crystal is his tool to do so.

Zon is about to use the crystal for the first time. The vision of the crystal becomes more distinct and Paul forgets his connection and is fully Zon. Zon begins to use the crystal and his mind is racing backwards into the past, witnessing various scenes. The scene is too much, and Zon breaks off connection, and Paul returns to consciousness in London.

Something is wrong. Paul does not fully feel himself. He still considers himself Zon and the real world is more like a dream. He feels a bit disconnected. Details off his life seem like another’s. On three separate occasions, Paul peers into the crystal again, and as Zon in the past, again tries to tear into the past. He goes farther each time, but he wants to see past everything.

Then he vows not to turn back, and one final time Paul peers into the glass and becomes Zon in Hyperborea. Zon uses the crystal and peers into the past. Scenes begin to flow past him, and they see and become other users of the crystal before Zon. He lives many lives and learns many things as time speeds past in reverse. Not all of these lives are human. Then he speeds past life itself and moves to the source and finds Ubbo-Sathla there at the beginning.

Paul is never seen from again and the crystal is not found among his belongings.

Ubbo-Sathla Review


It’s a 6 page story, how much can you write about it? Ubbo-Sathla is a minor character among the family. It’s not Nyarlathotep or Azathoth or any of the others, but you’ll see it here and there. Maybe even in the next story!

This is CAS writing in a more Lovecratian venue. Modern day occultist expert comes across item from ye olde days (or ye olde beyond) and that items and occultist interact in such a way as to reveal a part of reality that the person is not ready for. He connects the story with his own fantasy tales, and enables both to combine. This is also proof that Hyperborea and Cthulhu-earth are the same place. The Book of Eibon becomes one of the more important elements of the Mythos as well.

I wish we would have had more on Ubbo-Sathla, but like all of these stories, the less said the better. I’d rather a writer erred on the side of less than more, you know?

Anyway, I give it three and an half out of five stars, but next is CAS magnum opus.

Alright, one more CAS story for now, and we’ll move on to Howard for a few stories. This is longer than the previous ones. Say hello to The Seven Geases, by CAS.

In my opinion, The Seven Geases is the single most important short story by Smith to read, even if you don’t like this stuff. There’s not a lot of horror here, and Smith keeps things moving at a brisk pace. This one is three and a half times as long as Ubbo-Sathla (21 pages) but still on the shorter side for a Lovecraft story.

Why is this such an important story? Not only does it impact the Mythos in many ways, but it also was a huge influence on Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons.

In OD&D, there’s no guarantee that things are fair. One of Gary’s and Rob Kuntz’s favorite stories, says Mornard, was Clark Ashton Smith’s The Seven Geases, in which (spoilers removed) That was one of the seminal texts of D&D, said Mornard, and one of the stories it was designed to model. “The story that D&D tells,” said Mike, “is the story of the world. (spoiler removed).

I’ll give you the full quote in the review.

Now, having read that, are you interested in reading Seven Geases? Here we go!



The Seven Geases by Clark Ashton Smith

H.P. Lovecraft Answers Your Relationship Questions « The Bygone Bureau

Thought this was a fitting add to this thread. :D

Synopsis of The Seven Geases


Ralibar Vooz, lord and magistrate of Commoriom, is hunting. They camp at Mount Voormithadreth, and hear locals killing a saber tooth tiger and alpine catoblepas. Vooz is here to hunt the locals, called Voormis after the mountain. They head up the Mount but find no sport. The Voormis cannot be found.

They eventually arrive near some caves. They climb up above them to get down to them, but the opening down is not appearing, and his men and himself keep spiraling up the mountain. He is leading them up the mountain and spies smoke before hearing voices in front. He yells to his men to join him and bellows an announcement of his arrival to the people he hears and heads around the rocks. He spies a cabin in the mountain and approaches.

He finds an old man by an oddly colored fire in front of the hut. The old man and his archaeopteryx familiar curse Vooz and his arrival for ruining his evocation. Vooz doesn’t understand all that the sage is telling him, but he’s pissed that the guy is talking to one such as him rudely. Of course, he threatens the old man with violence, and the man announces that he is Ezdagor, a mighty wizard. In response to Ralibar Vooz’s interruption of his magic, and subsequent threatening, Ezdagor places him under a geas.

Vooz must cast aside all weapons and armor and head into the den of the Voormis. He is to fight against the whole tribe and then deeper into the cave until he finds Tsathoggua. Once there, he is to announce that he is the sacrifice to Tsathoggua from Ezdagor. The familiar archaeopteryx will go with him to guide him to the right place. Ultimately, Vooz is allowed to keep his basic armor to help him reach Tsathoggua.

Due to the leadings of the familiar, he is able to find the cave of the Voormis and enters. He slays the shaggy Voormis, and their females and children. Then he breaks through their camp and moves in deeper. He arrives at a foul-smelling cave wherein Tsathoggua lies. He announces that he is to be the sacrifice. The creature announces that he just feasted on a sacrifice and is sated for the moment, so he is given a second geas – to find Atlach-Nacha, and to announce that he is the sacrifice sent by Tsathoggua.

Down caves and caverns the familiar and Ralibar Vooz head. Finally he arrives at a giant chasm with many webs woven across it from one side to the other. In the middle of the webs, hovering over the abyss, is a dark creature. Seeing it, Ralibar announces has sacrificial status. It moves across the webs with lightning speed. It is a gigantic mix of human and spider. Atlach-Nacha says that he has not the time to extract Vooz from his metal shards, because he has to always guard the abyss. He sends Ralibar on to the Ante-Human sorcerer Haon-Dor with a third geas.

Vooz moves over the webs to the other side and across a ledge. They find stairs, and at the stairs is a giant snake. Seeing the familiar, it moved aside and allowed access to the stairs. They entered the palace of Haon-Dor. They penetrate various rooms and corridors, due to the knowledge the archaeopteryx has. They find the throne room on which sits a patch of darkness, in the shape of a being. He announces that he was sent by Atlach-Nacha. Silence ruled for some time, but ultimately sound radiated from the figure. He considered feeding him to his familiars, but they are too many and Vooz to little food. Instead, he will send him to his allies, and gives him another geas. He is to find the serpent people and present himself to them.

Deep into this underworld went Vooz led by the archaeopteryx. He finally found the serpent-men. He announces his appearance, but it takes a while and more announcing before the serpent-men acknowledge he is even there. They inspect Vooz and then go and find two specimens of people – one a Voormis and another a man. They give a lecture on anatomy to other lizard men in some other language. Eventually one speaks to him and thanks Huon-Dor for sending him to them, but they already have a sample of his species and they have dissected many others and have all of the knowledge they need. They don’t even eat meat anymore and his body has no pharmaceutical value. They give him another geas, to find and submit himself to the Archetypes.

They continue down, and discover a T Rex among spongy ground. It chases him and eats him, but with a body that’s astral, he manages to fall out and is fine. It moves way to find something digestible. They pass many other dinosaurs. He eventually arrives at two vaguely humanoid people. They claim to be the originals of mankind and are upset at how coarse a copy mankind now is of them. They disown Ralibar Vooz. He is given yet another geas, to depart without delay and to find Abhoth.

He is tiring but cannot stop. He finds a cavern with disgusting creatures all over. Giant worms with many tails and oddly shaped lizards. A thick steam hung about the cavern he has entered and stained his armor. Here he finds a pool and the familiar stops. From it spawned the creatures that filled the cavern. Many mouths appeared across it to eat those that spawned but moved not fast enough. He proclaimed to Abhoth his arrival as per the geas. A part of the pool rose, like a tentacle and created a rough hand, who moved and explored Vooz’s body.

Abhoth communicates with Vooz telepathically and is upset that the Archetpyes bothered him. It doesn’t appear that Vooz is anything Abhoth can devour, since he is not one of his progeny or progeny’s progeny. Therefore, he banishes Raliber Vooz to the Outer Realm and gives him a geas to leave here at once and go outside.

The familiar allows Vooz to rest for a bit before continuing. The archaeopteryx found a fish’ish thing and Vooz eats it raw due to his hunger, weariness, and lack of anything else available. They begin to leave the underworld. The route they are taking is a short cut. They skip past The Archetypes, serpent people and temple of Huon-Dor, using a different exit. Eventually, the arrive at the Abyss guarded by Atlach-Nacha. All along the way he was chased by the progeny of Abhoth that grew as they left his side. One creature moves onto the webbing and he is chased by the progeny to the webs. He moves in after the wake of the first creature and tries to escape the progeny. However, the webbing has weakened, and it falls. He plunges into the Abyss.

The final line is:







Full quote:

In OD&D, there’s no guarantee that things are fair. One of Gary’s and Rob Kuntz’s favorite stories, says Mornard, was Clark Ashton Smith’s The Seven Geases, in which the hero survives a horrible death at the hands of seven different monsters only to die meaninglessly slipping from a ledge. That was one of the seminal texts of D&D, said Mornard, and one of the stories it was designed to model. “The story that D&D tells,” said Mike, “is the story of the world. Heroes aren’t invincible”

Review of The Seven Geases



I love this story so much. First of all, you won’t find a better example of CAS’s dark humor. My favorite example is when the He deconstructs his own story IN the story, and that’s crazy funny. He shows you such a large and sprawling world under the mountain.

This was published in 1933 and was a great story in the Hyperborea cycle, and it also demonstrates Smith’s different view on Tsathoggua in specific and all of the entities in general. All he is in a powerful, bloated deity that happens to be powerful and therefore gets sacrifices feeding to it.

There are some who believe that Abhoth and Ubbo-Sathla are the same creature, viewed at different epochs with different names. The Mythos does play games like that, and you will read of an era in which Cthulthu is spelled and pronounced Kultult or something. But these are radically different names. They have similar appearances, and my guess is that they are related – parent and child or aunt and niece or whatever.

Anyway, you can see the influence on early D&D as mentioned above, the influence on the Mythos, and the fact that it’s simply a great story.


I honestly believe this is a five outta five, and it is to Clark Ashton Smith what The Call of Cthulhu is to Lovecraft. We still feel it’s impact to this day.

A lot of people are turned by the ending, which they see as lazy, but I think it was the only ending possible. As I look back on the story, I can’t think of a ending that would have better fit the story. So if you don’t like it, you are not alone. Many others agree, and we can discuss it away!

I expect that we will come back to Smith later.

Alright, next up, we move to Robert E. Howard for a few stories. Are you ready?



The first Howard story we’ll be reading is The Black Stone.


This story is published in 1931, and introduces Mythos elements such as Justin Geoffrey and Von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten. It also probably features some of Clark Ashton Smith’s works.

You can find it here on Project Gutenberg Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601711.txt


It takes 16 pages in my anthology, so you won’t see a lot before we move in.

We will be reading four stories by Howard, before we move onto other writers. Read The Black Stone, and then we’ll see a synopsis and review.

On Howard

If you have never read a story by REH, such as Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, or other characters, then you need to read this post. We need to discuss Howard, and what he cares about.

Some people have accused HP Lovecraft of being racist. Consider, for example, in the Call. The way he describes the savage tribe of people in Greenland is hardly complementary. His depiction of the people of New Orleans are similarly unflattering. A good word for these folk is degenerate. Lovecraft depicts many non-white people as degenerate worshippers of the dark ones. To be fair, he doesn’t generalize. He never states that all of the people of Greenland are at the same level of savagery and evil as that one tribe. He also happily has lost enclaves of white people that have inbred and become degenerate as well. New England is rife with old towns centuries old that time and morality have past by. He’s equal opportunity.

There are some stories that appear to have latent tones of discriminatory outlook such as Horror at Red Hook. For the most part, it’s not there (and remember, this is a guy who married a Jew.) I believe that Lovecraft was likely a person who shared the believes of his day in white superiority, but it really doesn’t impact his work. For example, if you read Winged Death, set in Africa, most Africans are depicted as normal people, or even brave.

Howard, on the other hand, completely changes this. Howard really cares about race. His stories are rife with ideas of race. Take a look at man Conan/Kull stories that you will see the white Aryan fighting against evil races of others. Whether it’s the serpent men of Valusia or the little people of Wales, his people really are cognizant of race and bound to battles between them. There is a lot of racism in Howard’s works, but not in the traditional sense of black vs white (Although he does have some yellow peril stories). Howard embraced the underdog, and shared a real affinity for natives. His entire ethos embraces noble savagery. He doesn’t find evil in savages, unlike most white writers of the time. Instead, he finds it in other races. A modern reader may be uncomfortable reading some of his stories. For example, we will not read The Children of the Night, which is blatantly racist and whose pro-Aryan lines could be read in a very poor context post-Hitler. Do you really want to read lines like this:

For I come of a royal race, and such as he is a continual insult and a threat, like a serpent underfoot. Mine is a regal race, though now it is become degraded and falls into decay by continual admixture with conquered races. The waves of alien blood have washed my hair black and my skin dark, but I still have the lordly stature and the blue eyes of a royal Aryan.


We’ll skip past most of this stuff, but one story slides into it.

On other news, the works of Howard were brought into the Mythos. Both his own works brought them in, and Lovecraft did as well. He mentions long lost Valusia and its serpent men in many stories. Other references appear. If you pick up a collection of Conan stories, you are reading Mythos works. But they aren’t adding anything to the Mythos, or using elements of the Mythos. We won’ be picking up a Kull story or a Conan story. I just want to point out that they all occur on the same world.

Okay, let’s Black Stone it up!

Synopsis of The Black Stone



This story opens with our narrator coming across a reference to a Black Stone while reading Nameless Cults or Unaussprechlichen Kulten in its original German. In that book, there is a reference to a Black Stone high in the mountains of Hungary. He mentions it much in passing, since it’s use in ancient cultic ceremonies is long since dead, and he wasn’t much interested in it. However, the appearance of age speaks to the narrator. He digs further.

He finds a quick mention in a historical book and says that it is right outside of the town of Stregoicavar – which means something like witch-town. It’s such a small town it’s not even on maps or in travel books. Then he realizes a connection between Justin Geoffrey, the mad poet and this stone. In one of his poems, he discusses the People of the Monolith. He finds the whole thing extraordinary and plans a trip to investigate.

This is nearby the battle site where Count Boris Vladinoff tried to hold off the Turks, but ultimately failed in 1526. His train meanders through the hills, and he discovers a passage on the battle. It describes Vladinoff having originally won the first battle, and then an aide brings to him a small lacquered case confiscated from a famous Turk historian. He reads the case’s contents, but gets very pale. Then cannon reinforcements from the Turks arrive and blast the ruins of a castle in which he had made his headquarters. He was buried underneath the rubble and to this day that is his tomb. They pass the rubble on the train, where it is believed that he still rests.

The town of Stregoicavar is a sleepy little town. They mention that they had a visitor about ten years before named Justin Geoffrey, confirming that the mad poet had come through here. He gets some people to talk about the Black Stone. There are rumors about staring into it too long and about what happens on Midsummer’s Night. The inhabitants of Stregoicavar are from other Hungarian towns. The Turks killed everyone here and they moved in after the Turks left. They have no resentment towards the Turks, because their ancestors didn’t like the people here any more than the Turks did.

The following day, our narrator sets out to find the Black Stone. After a bit of hiking, he encounters it. There are unusual markings present that speak of lost languages from far off. He discovers no connection with it and anything else. He returns and finds someone who has dreams about the Stone and talks with him. He finds the schoolmaster is not as reserved when discussing the stone as the rest of the village and discusses it at length with him. The schoolmaster believes the stone was not built by those who worshipped it but simply used by them. He believed that the legends around the stone were just myth.

As that night was Midsummer Night, the narrator takes a trip to the Black Stone, and sits right where he believed Justin Geoffrey must have sat. He observes the setting of the sun, and the ebbing of day. Soon midnight strikes, and he begins to witness a scene. Many people are coming to the Stone, but they are not the people he has met. A Priest in a deer skin and a naked woman arrived. The Priest whips the woman, who frantically dances in a pagan ritual. An evil ritual results, which the killing of people, at the end of which, a toad like figure appears over the stone and the priest brings it a struggling girl, but then the narrator falls unconscious.

He awakes and it is dawn. He believes that what he saw was the vision of something from the past, but maybe it was just a vivid dream, heightened by the nighttime. He realizes, that he can find proof! He moves to the place where Count Vladinoff supposedly fell and begins to excavate the ruins. He finds the bones of a man and a small damaged, case. Inside is a scroll written in Turkish and an object wrapped in silk. It describes a scene very similar to what he saw, and the item is a toad like medallion that matches a place on the priest where one was missing. The Turks tortured the people in Stregoicavar to find out what was happening, and then they hunted down and killed a toad like creature that resulted in the death of many Turks.

Our narrator realizes that the stone is not a stone at all, but the spire of a castle built long ago but covered by earth over the years.

Key Quote at the end:

Review of The Black Stone


I think there is a lot to like in this story. Howard knows where he is going and gets you there. He introduces a lot of elements to the story, and yet, there is no obvious Mythos element here. He doesn’t use the Necronomicon or The Book of Eibon. Gone is the dank corridors and oppression of many tales. We aren’t investigating long lost caves and caverns or finding deep mysteries under things. All we have is a rock that defies explanation with a past.

Many of the Mythos stories of Howard take place in other eras, but not this one. As such, it’s easy to slide in alongside the others. Many consider it his best written horror story, including Robert Price. I think it’s great except for one thing.

There are many great things to recommend this story, and many a reader wishes we would stay in Stregoicavar for longer. Getting outside of New England and England, and breaking into these places is something very nice indeed.

Howard’s description of the story lacks the focus of the scientist that Lovecraft has. It has, instead, the focus of a researcher. Compare, for example, Lovecraft’s depiction of the analysis of the meteorite in Colour with Howard’s of the narrator’s initial research. Each focuses on what they know best.


Anyway, I think this is a very good story by Howard, and arguably his most important Mythos work. I give it a 4 out of five stars.

The next story on our list will be the eight page story The Thing on the Roof. Find it here:


http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608011.txt


It’s another easy read, and one you can blow through in a few minutes.

It’s one of many stories that shows the severe impact The Dunwich Horror had, not only on Howard, but on the Mythos generally. There are several elements of the Horror in this story, and you’ll see its impact in many other places. Look for it as you read it.

Synopsis of The Thing on the Roof


This story opens with a narrator telling us about being contacted by a gentleman named Tussmann. Both were in the same field of search and a bit of arcanology, and they had batted heads professionally. Tussmann needed an original version of Nameless Cults for his researches. He had read an edited version and saw hints that he needed to fully explore.

The narrator agrees to get Tussmann the original work if possible, although few copies remain after the mysterious death of Von Junzt. Eventually a colleague in Virginia with a copy sends it to the narrator. Tussmann arrives and searches, finding a passage about Honduras jungle where a strange god is worshipped in an ancient temple. It speaks about a mummy from old times with a jewel around its neck, which was a key.

At this, Tussmann mentions that was in Honduras and saw the temple. The native Indians say that the temple was built long before them. He didn’t have the time or the tool to break into the temple and he left. Now, after confirming what is there in Von Junzt’s book, he intends to return, penetrate the temple/pyramid, and find that key and whatever treasure it unlocks.

Tussmann leaves the next day, and the narrator reads Nameless Cults more. It is referred to as the Temple of the Toad. He finds additional things that are disquieting, but he is unable to get in touch with Tussmann to let him know.

A few months pass and Tussmann has returned. His place is unkempt as our narrator arrives. Tussmann claimed that the treasure was a hoax, but the key jewel was true. He pulls it out to show the narrator. It’s a red crystal in the shape of a toad-like thing with characters on it no one can decipher. They resemble ones on a Black Stone in Hungary.

He describes the temple in detail, it’s rock, columns and more. The mummy was exactly as stated in the book, with the chain about it. He gathered the gem and touched it to an altar and a panel opened. His mercenaries refused to follow him down into the temple. He was annoyed by the sound and movements of a strange toad that hopped ahead of him, outside the light of his flashlight. In there were no gold or gems. When he returned, the mummy and his men were gone. He suspected they took it and fled.

Then a noise is heard from upstairs on the roof. The narrator wonders what it is and Tussmann is obviously disturbed. He refuses to give up the Key and in a few moments he pushes the narrator out of the room, as the noise grows. They realize that the treasure of the Temple of the Toad was the god itself. Loud crashing noises are heard, and a few minutes later, the narrator returns, and the room has been cracked into, the Key is gone, Tussmann is smashed in but not by tinder or the roof, and marks of a creature are seen.

Review of The Thing on the Roof



I personally wish this story would’ve followed the journey to Central America. I think it would have been interesting to read what happened, rather than to read about afterwards. Putting you in the moment would have increased the pace and danger of it.

Again, getting out of the past and New England is welcome.

While REH thought this was his best horror story, August Derleth told Lovecraft that it was weak. Lovecraft responds to the criticism by saying that.


So there you have it, a trite kicky story!

Here’ s Howard on the story:


It’s it as high as Howard thinks? No not really. It is as low as August Derleth thought? No, not really. I agree with Lovecraft, in that it feels too short, too simple and too obvious, but there is something in it that sticks with you. I went back and reread my Howard anthology of Horror stories a month ago, and I only remembered the bajilion ones on the dark race vaguely, the others we’ll read, and this. It has something to it. I think it’s the weakest of the four Howard stories we’ll be reading about now, and I put it at three out of five stars. It’s worth reading and exploring, but no one would call it a major story.

The next story is my favorite Mythos story by Howard, and one of the most anthologized. There are two versions of it. We will be reading the one with the Mythos elements.

Say hello to The Fire of Asshurbanipal

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601741.txt



It appears to be influenced by The Haunter in the Dark. It was also published posthumously six months after Howard killed himself. You can find Mythos references to several creatures. When telling the story of the past, you will be introduced to Xuthltan, which is also the ancient name of the village in The Black Stone.

Synopsis of The Fire of Asshurbanipal




Our story opens as Yar Ali and Steve Clarney fight off a group of Arabian raiders that are attacking them as they plunge deeper into the desert. They have few bullets left, and little supplies.

Then we wind things back and learn who our players are. Yar Ali and Steve are mercenaries and friends. Yar is an Afghan Muslim and Steve an American Christian. They heard tales of a Black City in the Persian desert north of Shiraz, and in it, the Fire of Asshurbanipal. An ancient valuable jewel that is still held in the hand of the ancient king that once ruled the city in the sands. A Persian trader heard of it and saw the city that only the Bedouins have seen in centuries.

Following the legend, Yar Ali and Steve Clarney prepared as best they could, and moved into the desert of Turkistan in central Asia. They have been in the desert for weeks, having lost or used their supplies. They plunge on, because the oases they have left are too far away, so all they have is what may lay ahead.

After resting for the night, they awaken and notice an oddly shaped ridge on the horizon. They move towards it and discover the city of stone in the midst of sand. Yar Ali hesitates a bit, because he I uncomfortable with this City of the Djinn, as he calls it. They move in to investigate and find that it is Assyrian in design and architecture. They see the creatures of Assyrian places. It appears this was built under the control of Ninevah.

The find a temple which Steve says might be a Temple of Baal, and it’s one of the few free standing structures. Wanting water, he moves in ,but again, Yar Ali hesitates. They believe that the Arabs would never come here with their superstitions, and lower their guard to explore.

They explore and look around. Steve makes much speculation about what happened. They find the altar to Baal in the temple, and Steve has them plunge past it, through a doorway, and then up stairs. Ali advises against going up them, for only Djinn would be there, but Steve wants to go, and Yar Ali won’t leave his friend to face them alone, so he grabs his knife and they move up.

The stairs are massive, and at the top is a royal chamber. There was a dais with several steps up to a throne-like seat. Sitting on it was the skeleton of an old king, and in his hand is the Fire of Asshurbanipal. Steve moves in to grab it, but Yar Ali runs in and knocks his hand away. They argue for a bit, but Yar Ali tells Steve that he sense great danger around it and reminds him of the previous times his sense of danger kept them alive. Steve relinquishes his attempt to grab it.

Then they realize that many Arabs are mounting the stairs and moving to them. They grab guns and shoot and kill a few, and then engage in hand to hand combat. They kill a few of the Arabs, but then are overwhelmed. A voice tells the Arabs not to kill them not yet. They are tied up, and the lord of the Arabs is revealed as an old acquaintance of the mercenaries named Nureddin El Mekru, a former Yemeni slave trader they injured and scarred.

Nureddin became the leader of this group of Arabs, and the ones that Steve and Yar drove off returned and he followed them. He was after The Fire of Asshurbanipal as well, and now it’s his. At this, the Arabs protest, and an argument ensues. They tell the history of the city to Nureddin. They say that the ancient sorcerer and king cursed the stone and no man should take it. Eventually, Nureddin fights off the Arab arguments and grabs the Fire.

A great wailing noise goes up, and the Fire slips from his hand and rolls down to the back wall, where he Nureddin chases it. The Arabs run screaming from the area and down the stairs. The wall by Nureddin begins to slide open, and Steve can sense that witnessing what is about to occur will drive him mad. Both Yar Ali and himself turn away and squeeze their eyes tight. They hear something emerge from the passage and grab Nureddin and pull him back. Then the spell passes, and the creature leaves, but before he does, Steve steals a glance of it as it’s leaving, and is haunted by that memory. The Fire of Asshurbanipal was back in the hand of the King.


They free themselves from their bonds and run away, where they find the horses and provisions of those they had slain. In their haste to leave quickly, the Arabs had left them. They take the horses and flee. As they do, Steve confesses that he saw the risen Xuthltan himself replace the gem on the hands.

Review of The Fire of Asshurbanipal




At first, this appears to be a story wherein many typical elements occur. In fact, it bears some similarities to The Thing on the Roof. However, I appreciate how some details make sense, rather than appearing to be dues ex machinas. For example,

Having a story with some traditional elements such as a city in ruins in a desert and Arabs being fought by and around it (not really spoilers since its first page stuff) is okay when surrounded by a writer who gives you obvious reasons to believe the story. I appreciate little details like that. This is a very traditional Howard story in a lot of ways. Despite the presence of Arabs and guns, you can just feel that this is a Conan story or a Kull story. It has a lot of similarities between them. The next story will have even more similarities.


I like the location and the story. Again, it’s a story light on Mythos elements, and it just pushes you into the story and the world. A lot of later stories by authors that come by will push the Mythos too much in their story, and every single person has a copy of the Necronomicon and knows of Cthulhu and names are dropped all over. Consider how light some of the stories we’ve read, such as The Colour out of Space, this, and a few others have been. This is a masterful understanding of showing the world, but not getting wrapped up in the details.


Anyway, I give it a 4 stars out of 5. It’s not Howard at his best, but he’s on his game.

The next story is the final Howard one for a while. In fact, I’m not sure if we will ever come back to Howard. It’s the longest story we’ve had in a while, clocking in at 24 pages. That’s short for the first stories, but long for the ones we’ve been reading. The story is called Worms of the Earth. It can be found here:


http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607861.txt


It’s published in 1932, and the only story told from Bran Mak Morn;s point of view. This is a character Howard created and has in several stories. It was adapted as a two issue Conan story in Savage Sword of Conan #16 and 17. It’s a very good story on its own. There are mentions of places such as R’lyeh. He edited a reference to Cthulhu to just the Nameless Gods. Anyway, let’s read Words of the Earth!

Synopsis of Worms of the Earth



The story opens with a Roman crucifixion of one of the Picts under the power of the King of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn. Bran has disguised himself as an ambassador to spy on the Romans, and they are a decadent people. Bran spends a lot of time being disgusted by Roman justice, Roman military, Roman luxury and Roman ethics.

Eventually, Bran needs to find a way to kill the Roman Governor of the area. He decides on using a method that his ancestors knew of. A dream of a mentor attempts to dissuade him, but he ignores it. He sends his aide to the local towns, to begin to Raid and Pillage to Roman controlled countryside. He knows the Romans well enough to know that the Governor will be at a large fortress while one of his generals takes much of the army out to the field. Bran Mak Morn slips into the jail and slays the commander who killed the Pict on the cross, and then escapes from the Roman compound.

He flees into the Welsh wilderness and plunges into a swamp. He runs across the abode of a witch woman who is half human and half something else. Something serpentine. He tries to negotiate her aid, and she knows he intends to summon the Worms of the Earth. Ultimately, the only thing that she will take in barter for her assistance is sex. He sleeps with her, and she aids him.

Afterwards, Bran Mak Morn penetrates a place called Dagon’s Barrow. Inside in a place of darkness down which he explores, until he finds an altar in the darkness with a black stone on it. He takes the stone and emerges as he hears things behind him. He moves to a place nearby, Dagon’s Mere, and casts the stone into it and then returns to the witch woman.

We find out that she had gone to give his instructions to the Worms, and they will meet with him. His people subdued the Worms long ago, and banished them to their caves. They arrive in hundreds, and they want their holy relic, the stone, back. He refuses and angers himself, and they back off. He trades the stone back to them for a service. He wants them to penetrate the walls of the great fortress that the Governor is in to bring him back to Bran. The Worms are an old humanoid race with bestial reptile features that have apparently gone more barbaric and degenerate since his people conquered them and spread the centuries ago.

They go to get him, and he goes to get back the stone. He dives into the Mere and discovers a deep creature here guarding it he barely manages to escape with the stone. He rides to the large fortress to watch the Worms get the Governor, and when he arrives, the entire structure has been destroyed. One of the Romans is still alive and confide in him that it fell down after big tremors hit it, and then they took the Governor. He follows their path and finds them at the agreed up meeting place he takes their stone and returns it to them, and they give him the Governor, but he’s gone mad with what he saw, so Bran kills him in mercy, not vengeance. At the end, the woman tells him that the Worms are not done with him, and the story ends.

Review of Worms of the Earth

I waited until the end of the Howard stories to have this, since in timeline, it resembles a bit the Clark Ashton Smith ones. We’ll head back to modern time again, and the Mythos won’t normally head back to the ancient sword and sorcery past for most of its stories.

Lovecraft refers to Bran Mak Morn in one of his own Mythos stories, further bringing this story into the Mythos., Not only does Howard refer to R’lyeh, but Lovecraft brings in it. Theirs is no question about its canonicity. Lovecraft wrote that:


Few readers will ever forget the hideous and compelling power of that macabre masterpiece “Worms of the Earth.

Howard’s writing style suits these sorts of stories much more than stories like The Thing on the Roof. This is where he is made immortal via Conan and others. This is why Fire is so good, because it has that sort of feel and character. Bran Mak Morn is another Howard hero in the typical mold – the noble savage against the decadent civilizations of his day – in this case, the Roman Empire. Howard loved rooting for the underdog, so he creates one.

Race is again at the forefront of this tale – you can’t get away from it in Howard’s works.

We see race in the Worms, and in the history of Bran’s Picts. We witness it with the Romans as well. It’s not just culture, or heritage, but blood that distinguishes people.




I give it 4 stars outta 5

(I reserve 5 for true masterpieces and 4.5 for near ones.)

This may be the last Howard story we ever do, and it certainly will be the last one for a good, long while. Therefore, I want to give you some reading advice if you really like Howard’s horror works and want to read more. Here are the ones I would recommend and in their order.


The House in the Oaks – If we come back for any story, this will be the one. It’s modern day, and quite good. It was a fragment of Howards which was finished by August Derleth.

Dig Me No Grave – It’s a bit obvious what happened, but it is a nicely written and short story.

The Little People/People of the Dark/The Children of the Night – I’d recommend holding off on these until after we hit Machen on Gen 0. They follow his stories. I’m not a super fan, but this is where the rest of the Mythos lies.

The Black Bear Bites – A bit of a yellow peril story (yuck) and pretty good, but with virtually no elements at all.


Skull-Face – A blatant yellow peril story with a Fu Manchu rip off. Among those who like reading the yellow peril stories of the era for historical purposes, this is considered one of the best. It also features characters that are, after being written, edited into Cthulhu.


Anyway, I like Howard enough to read him, but I also recognize his limitations. No one will ever call A Princess of Mars a great piece of literature, but everyone knows Edgar Rice Burroughs. No one will ever call a story by Howard a great piece of art, but everyone will know Conan and Robert E Howard.

For our next story, we are leaving behind the Big Three of Weird Tales, and moving on to other writers using and adding elements to the Mythos at its beginning. There is just one place to start after you leave behind the three. You start with The Hounds of Tindalos.


The Hounds of Tindalos


Frank Belknap Long was one of the many young writers whom Lovecraft tutored. They began writing each other in 1920 before Long had even published fiction, and Lovecraft assisted Long throughout his career. They were good friends, and unlike many of Lovecraft’s associates, they actually were friends in real life. During his three years in New York City, they ran in the same circle.

The Hounds was published in 1929. It is by some accounts the very first story written in the Mythos by anyone other than Lovecraft himself. (This is true only if you don’t consider some of the stories we read set in the past by Smith as a true Mythos story. I do, so I don’t buy it. CAS is the first one to my mind)

Twelve pages await, so let’s go!

About Long –

You may not recognize Long’s name but don’t let the patina of time dim you to his contributions. Among other things, he wrote comics during the heyday of the 1940s and wrote Superman, Captain Marvel, and Green Lantern. He passed away in 94 and had written hundreds of short stories during the pulp era, and then dozens of novels after it died. He moved as the currents took him, and he was a chameleon. He wrote sci fi when it was popular, spy stories in the 60s, comics in the 40s, and so forth. To this day, he is still best remembered for his Mythos stories, and his greatest contribution to the Mythos is this story. You must read it first when you move outside of the big names, and you’ll see why.

Long mentions that Lovecraft and him exchanged more than 1000 letters some of which are more than 80 handwritten pages long. He was one of Lovecraft’s greatest correspondences, but not his only one. As a reminder, Lovecraft developed relationships with tons of new writers during his era. He ghost-wrote, edited, revised them, wrote to them, and tutored them. This was often voluntary on his part, but some contend that he got more money from his revisions of other authors than he did from his own work.

Frank Belknap Long was a distinguished enough author in the mid-30s to be invited onto The Challenge from Beyond project. This was a project by a pulp magazine to write a story in five chapters, with an author writing each chapter. The five authors writing the story were C.L. Moore, A Merritt, HP Lovecraft, Robert Howard, and Frank Belknap Long. A Merritt is a huge name as well. (We’ll read a very popular story of his in Gen 0).

Anyway, Long is not some random name I am pulling out a hat ,but one with a very strong connection to the Mythos.

Synopsis of The Hounds of Tindalos


The story opens with Halpin Chalmers contacting his friend ,the narrator, named Frank . Chalmers wants Frank’s assistance with a project he has been working on. He intends to combine this esoteric Chinese drug with his modern understanding of science and math (the parts that work) and use them to break the veil of time and space. He believes that time is in space, so the past is in a space we are not in, as is the future. By changing his perception to see another space, he should be able to see time. The drugs and math should help him do that.

He takes the drugs ,and Frank is to write down everything Halpin says. The drugs begin to work, and Halpin begins to see the past. He sees every person that ever lived, and pushes through them to before life began. He notices that we live in curved time, but there is also angled time in which others live, and they cannot pass into curved time. His journeys back find dark creatures and a dark deed at the beginning of time. These creatures, the Hounds of Tindalos, chase him back through time to his apartment and begin to hunt him. They can materialize unto curved space by using an angle of severity.

In order to protect himself, Chalmers and Frank use plaster to round the corners of his apartment and to smooth edges. The idea is to protect himself long enough to discourage the Hounds, who will retreat back to their haunt. However, a while later, an Earthquake happens. The plaster in the apartment cracks and breaks, and the Hounds get through. His body is found decapitated with no blood but a blue ichor all over.

Review of The Hounds of Tindalos


The very first Cthulhu Anthology of various writers was published in the late 60s by August Derleth. It was called Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. It was highly influential, because many would follow down through the years. It would become the major way of finding and reading Mythos fiction. Derleth wanted to include the best stories he could find, and among those, was The Hounds of Tindalos.

This was a story that heavily influence the Mythos, because the Hounds are used again and again in later stories. The idea that something could was both unnerving and new. It’s not an idea you can put your finger on. There will come a time when the Mythos will become more about pastiche than new and refreshing, but is not that time. It’s fresh, and exciting, and it inspires writers big and small. Long gets to be at heart of that.

Due to the cleverness of the concept, this is a major Mythos piece because so many that follow will use them. While many call it the first non-Lovecraft Mythos story, it does not include a single Mythos element. The books on the shelves are normal ones from real life, and no mention is made in the past seeing scene of anything Mythos-ish. That’s one reason why it’s interesting.

While Hounds is a fine story, it is a bit derivative. One of the Gen 0 stories we will read later has a similar plot element. (“The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen). We also see Lovecraft’s influence all over the techno-talk at the beginning. Anyway, this is a classic of the Mythos, in part because of the ideas. The writing is sufficient, but never superlative. You can also see how this story inspires, in part, Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla. In both cases a

I give it 3 out of 5 stars, in part because I feel the end meanders a bit and should have stuck with just the main story. Which would have improved it to 3.5.

There are so many places to go next. I wish some of the stories that I like were available online. I wish some of the stories that I want to read but were not anthologized were available online. For example, Donald Wandrei, another of the Lovecraft Circle, published two works in the early 30s in the Mythos, The Fire Vampires and The Tree-Men of M'Bwa. Neither has ever been printed in a Mythos anthology. You can only find them in a book of all of Wandrei’s horror and fantasy writings that costs roughly 60 dollars on Amazon.

Where to go, hmm? At first, I thought we would read stories that are not online, but now that we’ve read so many stories online in a row, I’m not sure anymore. So I found a story for next that is online. It’s right around this era – 1935, and I’ve actually mentioned in earlier in the dynasty. However, before we read it, we need to read a certain Lovecraft story. We are heading back to Lovecraft for one story, before we move to some more of this era. I mentioned we would weave back in and out of Lovecraft’s Mythos stories.

Next up is the Shadow out of Time.


It was written in late 34 and early 35, and published in Astounding Stories in June 1936.

While it was published a year after the story I want to read after this, it really seems like it was written first, and one clearly follows the other.

You can find it here:

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


In my anthology, this is a 54 page short story, so we’ll give you a bit longer to read it. This is a real love it or hate it sort of story. It’s my least favorite Lovecraft Mythos story, and yet, for many it’s their favorite Lovecraft tale. People such as Lin Carter called it Lovecraft at his finest. I think it’s Lovecraft at his most bizarre, and that’s not necessarily the same thing. It’s vitally important to the Mythos, so we are reading it here before we move to stories based off it, like we read stories such as Dunwich Horror and Call before we moved to stories based on them.



Let’s get our read on!

Synopsis of The Shadow Out of Time


This story begins with Nathaniel Peaslee, an academic in New England. He has found something terrible and is writing this to his son, a Professor of Psychology at Miskatonic University. We begin to head back and look at Peaslee’s past.

For five years from 1908-1913, Peaslee was stuck with a powerful psychological change. He gained amnesia about the details of his life, but also gained many skills such as multiple languages and odd knowledge about the past. It appeared that Peaslee has developed a second personality. He tells us about this time from newspaper articles and research he did, because he can’t recall it. He pursued occult research and explored many areas.

Once Peaslee came out of it in 1913, he could not remember that five year period. Soon, he began to have dreams. He dreamed he was in a faraway place in some distant room. He was in a room with odd furniture, tools, and more. Eventually, his dreams became more detailed, and he dreamed he was moving about and interacting with people and learning the language. He dreamed he was in the form of a Conical Alien.

He began doing research into what he had been investigating during his blank five years. He realizes that he had been looking at some secret tomes ,such as the Necronomicon and Pnakotic Manuscript. He looks up the same places he did previously, and finds legends of an ancient race on Earth that travelled b switching minds into their new host and their old body. The details of this ancient race are found in many places

Peaslee studies psychology and believes that his powerful dreams are as a result of sub-conscious memories from the research he did back in 1908-1913. He discovers a small number of cases in the histories where people have had identical symptoms ,and publishes in psychology journals. He believes that these legends of an ancient race have created dreams in a small number of people over the centuries.

A few years later he gets a letter from a foreman in Australia. They have found these giant bricks that appear to be older than any known construction in the desert. He had a psychologist friend who remembered Peaslee’s articles and these bricks and their markings appear identical to what he wrote about and dreamed.

Peaslee gets Miskatonic U to fund an expedition to Australia. They arrive and explore the ruins. They begin charting them, and Peaslee encounters some bricks at night that aren’t of this race, but represent another race they were fighting against. Eventually, he discovers a hill and moves into a tunnel.

The tunnel follows along an ancient corridor in the old city,it exactly matches the dreams he has. He heads towards the library and moves around a lot of obstacles and keeps exploring. Eventually he finds the old library. As he moves in, he notices that the old guard doors which kept out this race’s enemies are open and unguarded. He wonders if what slew the race is still here.

He moves to a place and finds an unusual book, which proves that his dreams were not dreams, and that everything was real. He begins to move back, but he makes too much noise falling, and suddenly something begin to emerge from behind him.

He rushes back out of the tunnels/city/ruins but more of the creatures are chasing him. He barely manages t make it out, but the book is lost. The tunnels have moved back to a hill formation and the sands swallow it up. He remembers that the book had English writing ,and that he had written the language for them when he was back in time.

Oh, here is a picture of the race that he swapped with:






And here is the race they fought against. It's known as the flying polyps, for lack of a better word:

Review of The Shadow Out of Time


This was the second to last story Lovecraft wrote fully. Some other stories from his last years were The Haunter of the Dark and some stories with other people. There are a lot of people who feel this is a classic of Lovecraft and horror/sci-fi writing. Many critics love it. I’m not sold, and let me tell you why.

First of all, it’s very redundant. The story spends pages going over the dreams, then spends pages going over the legends, which are very similar, then pages going over reality. How many times do I need to read this stuff? This very long story could have easily been cut down to half the length, at least.

Anyway, this is clearly the next step in Lovecraft’s world after Mountains of Madness. He is continuing to reintroduce his mythos in scientific terms. It’s not about monsters, deities and magic, but science. This is a note to the mythos that many writers don’t pick up on. Compare Howard’s The Black Stone, wherein people are summoning a dark creature by a classic cultish rite straight out of the 1800’s gothic literature. Lovecraft has advanced to the next level. It’s impact on later Mythos works cannot be overstated.

We are about to read a story where this one is used heavily but was actually published earlier. Again, due to the length of the writing process, editing process, reviewing, and publishing, a story can be published one, two or three years after writing.


Anyway, I think this is important to read, in case you are one of the many people who love this story.

I personally give it 2 stars out of 5.

The next story is The Challenge from Beyond


This story was written in the mid-30s as part of a anniversary issue for Fantasy magazine in late 1935. The five writers they lined up were pretty special, and I talked about this before. Each writer writes a section of the story and then passes it to the next.



The first writer is CL Moore, one of the first female writers in the Pulp Era for sci fi, horror and fantasy. Her impact in the genre is significant, both as a pioneer and in her writing. You’ll find her bit, which begins it, to be one of the clearest writing styles of the group. She was married to writer Henry Kuttner for years, and the two wrote together a lot. They met as people corresponding with Lovcraft’s circle

The next writer is A Merritt. Abraham wrote many major pulps and stories, and was one of the bigger names of the era. His Gen 0 story, The Moon Pool, will be one of the first we’ll read when we hit that Gen. His most famous work is likely The Ship of Ishtar. Here is a quote by Gygax from a DM’s Guide:

The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt

Merrit is a major player, no question.

The third section is Lovecraft’s. This dynasty needs no introduction to his work.

The fourth chapter is Robert E Howard, and he needs no introduction either.

And finally, chapter 5 is Frank Belknap Long’s, who we’ve already looked at


This story is a project that attempts to do something different. Here’s the story!



"The Challenge from Beyond" by H. P. Lovecraft

Synopsis of The Challenge from Beyond


Geologist George Campbell is spending time investigating in isolation in Canada. One night, while out there, he reaches to grab a rock to throw at something, but he notices that the rock has a singular appearance. He bends down to study the rock.

It appears to be quartz but in an unusual shape. Inside is something…odd. How did that get in there? Campbell notices that light from his flashlight energizes the thing in the crystal, and he begins to look over it. It grows, and he feels himself being pulled in. The scene develops and it appears to be a world. Campbell is sucked in and his tent and surroundings disappear

He begins to remember where he had seen a reference to that object before – in the Eltdown Shards. It’s supposedly an artifact sent by a civilization far away to communicate and explore. They switch bodies and become spies with other worlds. An ancient race on Earth discovered this because they used a similar method, and that knowledge was passed down in eldritch texts.

It appears that this race is a race of giant centipede like beings that sometimes just infiltrate a race but sometimes dominate it if their world has the valuable minerals they need. Campbell has realized that he is in a centipede body, and faints!

Campbell awakens and realizes that his body is just a body, but his soul, that’s something different. He decides to take advantage of the situation. He grabs a medical instrument and slays one of the centipedes. Campbell then moves through the complex and tries to grab the stone which is worshipped by the centipedes. He reasons that if he can get the stone, they will crown him king.

Due to a failure of ethics, the creature in Campbell’s body dies, and Campbell remains in his body. He has grabbed the stone, and becomes the emperor of these beings.

Review of The Challenge From Beyond


Unlike normal reviews, this one is spoiler heavy. It has to be.


This is definitely an odd piece. I love how we have a normal story and then Lovecraft just can’t help it. He has to Lovecraft the story all up! Not only does he take a lot more pages than the other writers, but he adds Mythos elements to it and makes it completely different.

I also adore how Howard changes Lovecraft. Lovecraft wrote his section in horror! Look what’s happened! Then hoard turns the hero into a very Howard hero. Grab a weapon, and start using it! Move and act! Come up with a plan later.

Eventually, this is not a horror story, although Lovecraft’s section certainly is.

I do not like Long or Merritt here much. All each does is spin the wheels they already have. Merritt spends all of his time on the crystal, and leaves us with Campbell going into it. That’s his entire contribution to the story – Campbell goes into it. Ho hum. Long also takes Howard’s spin on a traditional Lovecraft story and does little with it. Lovecraft wrote heavily about Campbell not having the same feelings and hang-ups as a human. So Long ties into that at the end, and wraps everything up neatly. It’s a bit meh with a last few lines that almost read like a fairy tale ending. Howard and Lovecraft stories don’t end like that.

Moore certainly started well. I hope you saw her craft in the story. She built the character and setting in a nice way. Then she introduced the object and bowed out. All of this took little verbiage, and ye you got a real sense of Campbell and the object from the little she wrote. I respect that a lot.

Because the story changes in tone and some writers sort of take the story in wild directions from the previous ones, it’s not a finely wrought yarn. It’s nice to read as the project that it is though. I’d like to see some stories that don’t involve ancient hand held items of unspeakable power – The Haunter of the Dark, Ubbo-Sathla, this, etcetera.




2 out of 5 stars compared to other tales.

Alright, now that we have done a lot of exploring of the Gen 1 stories, let’s look at some Gen 1 stories that modify Lovecraft’s initial vision.


Our first story in the Gen 1 mods is The Space-Eaters, by Frank Belknap Long.

I searched long and hard for an online copy and eventually found it!


The Space-Eaters

I have mapped out the stories for the next bit. I've actually gone ahead and read or re-read many of them and went ahead and wrote up synopses and reviews and other important notes on people.

In my opinion, the most important stuff in this dynasty is the notes on the authors, like Henry Kuttner, A Merritt, Fritz Lieber and many more. Check out some of these folks, and enjoy reading again.


Anyway, here's the list of the next set of stories, in case you want to get ahead (although because I've bumped this dynasty many times, I suspect that anybody still reading would be playing catch up - feel free to make comments any time)


The Space Eaters, Frank Belknap Long
The Lair of the Star-Spawn, by August Derleth and Mark Schorer
The Walker on the Wind, by August Derleth
The Sealed Casket, by Richard F. Searight


Then we'll move to Gen 0

An Inhabitant of Carcosa, by Ambrose Bierce
Haita the Shepherd, by Ambrose Bierce
The Yellow Sign, Robert W Chambers
A Shop in Go-By-Street, by Lord Dunsany
Of Skarl the Drummer, by Lord Dunsany
The Kraken, by Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Moon Pool, by A. Merritt

Back to Gen 1

The Shambler from the Stars, Robert Bloch
The Shadow from the Steeple, Robert Bloch
Fane of the Black Pharaoh, Robert Bloch
Winged Death, by HP Lovecraft and Hazel Heald
The Tree-Men of M'Bwa, by Donald Wandrei
The Outpost, by HP Lovecraft
Fire Vampires, by Donald Wandrei
Ithaqua, by August Derleth
The Whisperer in Darkness, by HP Lovecraft


And then we'll move to some Henry Knutter.

That's where I am right now. I've read and written up all of those. Some are just quick references posted in the thread, like Kraken and Skarl the Drummer and The Outpost. Others we do full reviews for.

Would you like to know which anthologies I own?

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

Both have lots of Gen 1 stories we are reading.


Cthulhu 2000
Shadows over Innsmouth
The Cthulhu Cycle
Miskatonic University
The New Lovecraft Circle



Shadows over Baker Street - stories that combine Sherlock Holmes with the Mythos.


And I have on order:

The Book of Iod, collections of works about that book, including many Henry Kuttner stories
The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich a novella by Fritz Leiber
Don't Dream, a collection by Donald Wandrei




I also have some single-author collections:

Cold Print by Ramsey Campbell
Several low quality out of print Chlark Ashton Smith stuff
The King in Yellow by Chambers
Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood
Nameless Cults, the Mythos fiction of Howard
The Three Imposters, by Arthur Machen
Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce


And I have six Lovecraft collections that have all of his work

Synopsis of The Space-Eaters


This story opens as Frank and his friend, a horror writer named Howard who clearly resembles a certain Lovecraft are discussing the relative value of horror stories. They are discussing the nature of horror, and Howard speculates on what creatures from beyond would be like, and the true horror that would naturally descend from them.

Then a neighbor named Wells arrives and tells a horrific tale of the evening. He was riding in a nearby wood when he discovered something soft and warm hit his face, which he thought was a liver. He looked up and saw nothing at first , and then describes an encounter with an unknown otherly thing. It appeared to be looking for something, a hand perhaps? Then he feels shrieking powerful painful icy grip in his head. There is now a hole in his head which reveals his brain, but does not bleed or slay him.

Howard is at first upset that Wells has so expertly summed up the horror he was trying to write, but upon realizing the seriousness of the situation, Frank and Howard begin thinking, and wells leaves. Eventually they hear cries from the woods and head out, suspecting something of attacking Wells.

They arrive and Wells is badly beaten, spiritually. They sense a massive grinding sound from beyond and manage to get Wells back to the farm but he has changed into a beast and attacks Howard before he knocks Wells out. Howard knows that the creatures must be from beyond and pieces things together. They call for a doctor to help Wells.

The doctor arrives, and tries surgery on Wells after putting Howard to sleep upon hearing his ravings. However, he sees the mark of them in Wells brain and gets frightful. He just sews Wells back up and lets him die naturally. He tells Frank that Wells is marked and they will come for him and leaves.

Frank and Howard manage to leave in a boat, and the get away for a bit. However, they pass by that wood and notice it’s on fire and a giant something that can just be sensed is about. Suddenly Frank hits upon an answer seeing somehow just how old they are. Frank suggests they light brands, and they make the sign of the cross, which drives off the creatures.

A few weeks later, they are in Manhattan, and discussing events. No more appearances have been seen by the creatures. They suspect that the sign has kept them away. Instead, Howard has written a powerful story that exactly reenacts the horror of the creatures, and Frank leaves after reading it. He gets a call a few hours later and hears the buzzing sound again in the background. Howard claims that they’ve arrived again, and that the sign isn’t working for him. It’s as if he’s become their priest, and now they can claim him.

Frank speeds over, but only to find Howard dead in his room, and sees the creature above him, but he sign drives him off.

Review of The Space-Eaters

This story is another of the first by another person in the Mythos. One of the things FBL got right about the Mythos was this sense of wrongness with creatures such as the Space-Eaters and the Hounds of Tindalos. He gets that to you, and what else is the job of a horror writer, but to convey horror?

A lot of people celebrate this story as nice, and yet others as too trite. One of the traditional attacks against the story is that by including a character similar to Lovecraft, it’s too hard to keep your sense of the real world. For all of that, Lovecraft himself did it several times. Klarkash-Ton is his name for Clark Ashton Smith and the main character in The Haunter in the Dark is designed and named after Robert Bloch.

Now I do have a lot of issues with this story, so don’t get me wrong. I don’t like the

In addition to that, I find the incident with the

Finally, a common complaint is the Christianization of the Mythos, which I agree with completely. In fact, I find the whole thing a bit hypocritical. In one paragraph, a character is


Anyway, Long has a great potential about him, but he’s young and misses some stuff too. The story’s fine and a bit energetic. It’s not a bad read, but it’s not exactly a major classic, you know?


2.5 stars out of 5

Alright, now a bad thing is about to happen. We have to move to stories that I can’t find on the Internet. Well, not for free. Some stories are not on the ‘Net because no one bothered to put them there, and others have active and hard fought copyrights against them. Derleth was very pro-copyright when he was alive, and I have no doubt that his estate has been scouring the net for any copies that may have slipped through the cracks of his major stories.

I’ve avoided having stories that you can’t read for free as long as possible. I wanted to read a late 20’s tale directly inspired by Call but it wasn;t anywhere to be found. Several other stories reared their collective heads and could not be found, so I skipped over them. These cannot be skipped.

I would recommend

1). Hitting up a library - In fact, I just researched the DPL and found out that Donald Wandrei’s collection is there, so I may pick it up and read his three mythos stories, finally.

2). Buy some of the anthologies. The next two stories are both in an Anthology called Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos.

3). Borrow it from a friend! (I am not your friend… )

Anyway, the next story is….

The Lair of the Star-Spawn, by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

Here comes the Derleth-mobile.

What I'd kind of like to see is finish up the Gen 1 stuff on the list, hit a few Hunry Kuttner tales, maybe head back to Lovecraft for one story (The Curse of Yig probably), and then flash forward to the many high quality stories in Gens 2 and 3.

Frankly, the later stuff has some of the worst Mythos fiction of all time - spewed all over fanzines and such.m It also has some of the best Mythos fiction, and the best of Gen 2 and 3 is better than the best non-Lovecraft stuff from Gen 1.

So let's hit up great writers like Neil Gaiman and Roger Zelazny and Kim Newman and Ramsey Campbell. And some lesser known names with great stories to tell. It will be a lot of fun!

Synopsis of The Lair of the Star-Spawn

We begin with the narrator, Eric Marsh, telling us about the disastrous Hawks Expedition to upper Burma, of which he was the only surviving member. He was disconnected from the group by chance when a group of small humanoids named Tcho-Tcho attacked and slew all of the people in the expedition and left.

Eric gathers their belongings and moves forward into the Plateau of Sung they were exploring. Civilization is on the other side of the hills, and it should be closer than going back. He notices a far off ancient city called Alaozar on the Plateau, in the Lake of Dread. He encamps for the night nearby. As he does, he notices a line that fires up from the city into space, and then falls asleep. He awakens to noises by his horse and he is clubbed unconscious

He wakes up in Alaozar, imprisoned by the Tcho-Tcho. One Dr. Lo-Fan accompanies them, and the Chinese doctor has bandaged his wounds and explains what is happening. This place is called The Isle of the Stars in China, because they believe that a long time ago, people from stars like Rigel and Betelgeuse arrived. These were the Elder Ones that included people like Cthulhu, Hastur, Lloigor and Zhar. The Old Ones were here as well, and they fought a powerful war for Earth. At the end, the Old Ones won, and they imprisoned Cthulhu in R’lyeh, while Lloigor and Zhar were imprisoned here, underneath the Plateau of Sung. The Tcho-Tcho people are the servants of Lloigor and Zhar and are trying to release them so that they can conquer Earth once more.

Both Dr. Lo-Fan and Eric are expected to help in this endeavor. Eric doesn’t believe Lo’Fan., so he takes Eric down below the city and they see hundreds of Tcho-Tcho worshipping a great tentacled thing that is Lloigor. The Dr. has a plan. He has been trying to send his consciousness via telepathy to Rigel to appeal to the Old Ones there to assist in taking out the Tcho-Tcho and their twin masters. Eric’s task is to guard his body while he is gone.

Dr. Lo-Fan leaves to beseech the Old Ones, and Eric begins watch. Nothing happens for hours and Lo-Fan returns. They must leave the City and open the gates for the Old Ones’ Star-Warriors to ascend. They meet with the leader of the Tcho-Tcho, and Dr. Lo-Fan convinces him that Zhar has contacted him telepathically and wants to be released this day. The gates are opened, and they are escorted out of the city by four of the people, so they can prepare. Instead, they slay the four accompanying them and win their freedom.

They witness the Star-Warriors riding down to Earth and destroying the Tcho-Tcho, before moving down into the depths. Then one light snakes out and teleports Eric and Dr. Lo-Fan miles away for safety. Later, a pilot flies over the area and spies giant rotting corpses in the plateau that were decaying, and newspapers reports lights that evening from the Plateau of Sung.

Review of The Lair of the Star-Spawn



This review will consider only this story. Check out more on Derleth next.

This story was published in 1932. In it, Derleth’s contributions to the Mythos cannot be over-empathized. However, the story itself is no Call of Cthulhu. It has the same basic premise. Zhar and Lloigor are imprisoned, and there are people seeking to free them. But compare. Cthulhu was so powerful, that despite being imprisoned, could still impact the dreams of an entire world when his island rose. He was able to influence people across the world, and had cults everywhere. Zhar and Lloigor only have the Tcho-Tcho and that’s it. There’s no sense of scale – it’s just a local tribe of small denigrate folk that are directly descended from the seeds of evil planted by the twin entities themselves. Derleth misses the scales of horror as a result.

This is another story to suffer from “way too many unexplained/crazy things happened” syndrome. A few examples include


With this lack of scale, some questionable decisions regarding details, and more, I can’t give this story to many props. It’s not Derleth’s best, and lacks the skill of Lovecraft. Therefore, on the merits of the story alone, I give it 2.5 outta 5 stars.

Now, let’s talk heavily about August Derleth. No writer in the Mythos is as controversial, and we will be discussing these at length. They involve spoilers of the Mythos in general and the preceding story in detail.

Derleth modifies the Mythos in two major ways, and we just read the first. Derleth turned the Mythos into a battle of Good vs. Evil. A ton of later Lovecraft enthusiasts really disliked this Derlethization of the Mythos, and a lot of bad things were spoken of him.

In the early Lovecraft stories, the concept of evil doesn’t apply to these beings. They are beyond such concepts. Even Frank Belknap Long recognizes this. In The Hounds of Tindalos, when describing the entities in the earliest time, they are before the creation of good and evil. This aspect of g v e just wasn’t running around.

Or was it? I had you read The Dunwich Horror 3rd for very important reasons. In some ways, it is the single most influential Mythos story of all time. Why? Because in it, Lovecraft does not shy away from casting the conflict as one of good versus evil, and good wins.

Lovecraft also writes of battles between eldritch forces. In both At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, there are battles in the past between various forces. Derleth’s battles between the Old Ones and Elder Ones is not that dissimilar between the Great Race of Yith and their foes in The Shadow Out of Time. Additionally, people who accuse Derleth of going too far off the course of Lovecraft fail to point out that Lovecraft re-incorporated Derleth’s stories into his own, verifying their canonicity.

How to detractors of Derleth respond to these counter points? They say Lovecraft was just being nice to Derleth and that Dunwich Horror was satire and not intentional. You’ve read The Dunwish Horror. Do you recall it being Satire? (I don’t).

Personally, I don’t like it that much. But I can’t make a cogent argument that it is out of place. I can’t even argue that the Old Ones are just good from our perspective, but really are a-moral because they intentionally save our two heroes at he end of the story! There is no room for interpretation.

Now, there are two more things Derleth does, and the second is, by far, the worst.

I mentioned long ago that he is an adequate magician who gets his living by showing how magicians do their tricks. He exposes all of the secrets of the Mythos. A good story stands on its own, and incorporates little. Compare stories like The Colour out of Space or The Haunter of the Dark to this. A good horror story leaves things hidden, and out of view. Even if Lovecraft and Derleth and others knew all along that the Elder Ones and Old Ones were in battle and one was good and the other evil, you don’t show your hand. You keep things hidden, and by doing so, you keep the mystery of the world fresh which makes your horror better. If any time a hero is oppressed by some otherworldly being he can just concentrate and summon the Old Ones, where is the horror? When you know that good will win out in the end, how am I terrified? There is a reason that most horror stories end ambiguously or poorly. The Call of Cthulhu still has that nasty creature out there. The Shadow Over Innsmouth proves that evil survived the torpedoing by the US government. Etc, etc. The nasties win or survive, while the goodies die, go crazy, or convert to evil.

At some point, this story stops being a horror story, and instead just becomes a sci-fi story. We don’t want that. Derleth, you are a bad writer, because you pull off the covers and expose the inner workings.

There is a third change that Derleth makes, but he doesn’t make it in this story. For now, we will skip it as a result. We’ll be looking at change #3 very soon, I promise.




Our next story is “The Walker on the Wind” published in 1933 by August Derleth. It’s just a dozen pages in my anthology. It introduces a major player to the Mythos, and it’s based on a Gen 0 story which is based on a myth. Here we go!

Review of The Walker on the Wind


In this story, virtually no action happens at all. Therefore, the plot can be summed up in a few sentences.

1). Constable Robert Norris is found dead months after his strange disappearance
2). We read his documentation, Stillwater,a town a year prior had all of the people go missing
3). One night, while looking up in the sky, three are witnessed by Norris falling to the Earth from that town, one dead, two alive
4). One whispers and cries strange stories before dying, and the other dies without awakening
5). A local Doctor confirms much of the story that he overhears from the one that wakes
6). Constable Norris disappears after believing that he was being chased by this being that swept up the people of Stillwater
7). By his dead body are the footprints of something huge, which were also by the disappearance of the three people found just outside of Stillwater more than a year prior; with a few tokens of antiquity on his body

And that’s it. Most of the story is dedicated to what the one person, Wentworth, told Constable Norris and Dr. Jamison, and it’s framed by the minor plot points.

Wentworth and Dr. Jamison claim that Stillwater worshipped an air elemental named The Wind-Walker. There were supposedly large altars in the nearby woods from which they would make human sacrifices. Wentworth and his friend arrives in Stillwater on the night of such a sacrifices, and Irene was to be it. She asks them to flee with her, and they do. The Wind-Walker comes and collects them, and also takes all of the people of Stillwater – either because they failed to sacrifice Irene or because lately they had been lax in their worship. They have been caught in the Wind-Walker’s wake for a year before dropped to Earth again.

They have been to strange places, like the Plateau of Leng, with the Tcho-Tcho people, and others. They were fed water and food from them and have driven made by these strange sights. Irene was slain as the sacrifice, but him and his companion were changed by their long-term exposure to the Wind-Walker. They are hurt by the warm, as if it were extreme cold. Indeed, both of them will die from being warmed up and cared for.

Because he saw the Wind-Walker in the sky before he dropped the three into town, Constable Norris believes he is being hunted. He finds one of the footprints on either side of Jamison’s house. Then he disappears a few days later and reappears months later with strange items in his pockets, dead, in a snow pile.

Synopsis of The Walker on the Wind


This is the first story of several to incorporate Mythos fiction into the world. Many others will play this trick. Just like Robert Howard will refer to Machen’s writings in his Mythos fiction, in this case, the writings of Algernon Blackwood are referred to. But we go a step further, and Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu is referenced


Introducing the Wind-Walker as an entity that is an air elemental is a bit blatant. I have no qualms with a creature having an elemental overtone, and being called Wind-Walker certainly suggests it. But, perhaps you can dial back the rational objective conversation of it. Keep the descriptions and nature a bit more hidden. Derleth strikes again!

As a matter of fact, I think this whole story is made better by removing one paragraph where he babbles on about everywhere he’s visited, and the short research by Norris into Blackwood and Lovecraft. Pull that out, and your story is much better. Still, I like that this doesn’t reveal nearly as much of the world as the previous story, and the creature introduced here is a major one, used fairly regularly by writers later (and named in a later story we’ll read).

Derleth’s approach is better here than in the previous story, and it’s a bit stronger writing because he doesn’t make some of the same consistency errors in the previous one. Even the one coincidence, (not a spoiler, since it’s on the second page) where he looks up and spies the creature above just as it is depositing the bodies is explained because a bitter cold wind had suddenly struck and he naturally looked up to see what it was from. You’re learning August, you’re learning.

As a story, it’s better than the previous one, and I give it 3 outta 5 stars.

The next story is a real treat, because I don’t have it in any of my anthologies! Therefore, I will be reading it alongside you. It’s by another young writer in Lovecraft’s circle – Richard F Searight. The name of the story is The Sealed Casket


It can be found here

Sealed Casket

In it, the Eltdown Shards are introduced, which was referred to later by Lovecraft in The Challenge from Beyond, which we’ve already read.


Richard Searight first published in 1924 at the age of 21 with the story, The Brain in the Jar. It won first place in a survey of the readers of the magazine Weird Tales. It wasn’t until 1933 that Seawright began to pick up the writing pen again. He wrote to Lovecraft at the suggestion of the editor of Weird Tales, who warmly embraced him, remembering the great story he had written in the mid 20’s.

He sold a few stories, but he was regularly rejected by magazines, because he wasn’t a big name. He was still trying to find a regular magazine to publish through, and he was the sort of writer frequently discouraged by rejections. As someone who has poured a lot into a story and gotten rejections myself, I sympathize. While Lovecraft was still alive encouraging him, he kept it up, and published poems and stories. After his mentor passed, however, he would file away a story after one rejection, and gave up writing altogether a few years later.

Due to his collaboration with Lovecraft, and some stories in the Mythos, some of his works have been anthologized, and many unpublished works saw print. I have an anthology with five of his short stories and his poetry in it, and four of them were never published.



So let’s read The Sealed Casket and see if we can discover whether it’s an unknown awesome, or a typical story.

I just finished it, and it took 11 minutes and 36 seconds to read, according to my stopwatch. Here we go


Synopsis of The Sealed Casket



The story opens with a quote from The Eltdown Shards telling the story of a demon captured by a wizard. Then we move to our main character, Wesson Clark. He is studying an ancient casket on his desk. The small casket is described, with a large lead seal with ancient writing on it.

We learn that Clark seduced the wife of an antiquarian named Martucci. It is implied that Clark may have had something to do with Martucci’s death. Martucci left the item to him and bid him to not open the seal, but to keep it safe as he had done for 30 years. Clark thinks this is rather silly, since there could be something valuable in there.

After some difficulty, he manages to get the seal off intact. He suspects that the writing could have some value as well. The casket is older than locks and has no such device, so Clark opens it up but sees nothing inside. While he’s trying to digest this info, there is a breeze in his locked office, and the beginning of a powerful odor. He moves to leave, but hears a sound as something moves between him and the door. He realizes that this must have been a trap set by Martucci. The invisible snake thing moves up and wrestles with him, constraining hum and he feels himself being pulled into out.

His house has burned down and Clark is dead. Neighbors say they heard a whistling and something breaking out of the house before the fire began, but are dismissed. Clarks body is found, with all bones crushed and drained of all blood.

Review of The Sealed Casket

Huh. That felt very underwhelming. I was hoping this Mythos tale would feel a little more, Mythos-ish, you know? The Shards are only mentioned in the preface, and nothing suggests the Mythos or its feel in the short story. The fact that was broadcast from the very beginning, and not that surprising.

It’s salvation is that it’s a short work. Just for fun, I cut and pasted it into a Word doc. It’s just 2600 words. My average weekly Magic article is longer! Even in the era of hand writing and typewriting, it would take roughly a day to write and edit it. I’m not surprised it has been anthologized about…seven or eight times. Editors often look for these stories to bulk up the number of stories in their book.

Anyway, the plot is pencil thin, due to length, and virtually nothing happens. It’s interesting as a bit of flash fiction and of historical note as the first Eltdown Shards story. It’s nothing more than that, however. I do like the more interesting evil main character and would have loved to have seen a story maybe double this length fully fleshed out from the beginning with him at the helm.

2 out of 5 stars

Alright, It’s time to move. I had initially planned this Dynasty to begin with Gen 1, move to Gen 2 and back and forth a few times to get a good sense of things, drop back to Gen 0 as appropriate, and then move forward to 3 and 4.

However, the ability of most of these stories to actually be read has been a big help, so for now, I am going to change the direction. Let’s move backwards and start reading the foundational stories of Lovecraft and his fellow writers. These are some of the most critically acclaimed horror stories of their era, from the mid1800’s all the way through the 1910’s. We’ll read these, and now that we have a sense of the Mythos, you can see their massive impact.


This has been my favorite place to read stories over the last five years or so. I have collections by many of the greats and have been reading them with fervor. There’s a lot of untapped majesty in these stories. It’s also to see the influences on Lovecraft. Mike many, he took bits and pieces of works and styles he liked, and combined them to craft his own writings and world. We are about to read a bunch of great stories, and I can’t wait.

Generation Zero, here we come!

Our first two stories are both lightning short, by Ambrose Bierce. The first is regularly anthologized, and in some literature texts. The second is much less well known. Both are extremely important, not because of themselves, but because of what we will be reading next. Because they are short, we’ll read and review them both at once.


An Inhabitant of Carcosa - http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/l_carcos.htm - read by me in 7 minutes and 33 seconds (although I’ve read it like 5 times before)

Haita the Shepherd - Haita The Shepherd by Ambrose Bierce @ Classic Reader - 7 minutes 50 seconds


Ambrose Bierce is a name you probably know. Many of his best short stories have been updated through the years, in movies, episodes of the Twilight Zone, and other places. For example, an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is in many literature texts.

He got his living mostly from scathing criticisms of other’s writings, but he was an amazing pensmith and I stand in awe at some of his passages. Every story of his has at least one or two moments of sheer brilliance. Let’s read some Bierce!

Actually, I'll just go ahead and post them in thread to help out:


An Inhabitant of Carcosa, by Ambrose Bierce

For there be divers sorts of death -- some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey -- which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.



Pondering these words of Hali (whom God rest) and questioning their full meaning, as one who, having an intimation, yet doubts if there be not something behind, other than that which he has discerned, I noted not whither I had strayed until a sudden chill wind striking my face revived in me a sense of my surroundings. I observed with astonishment that everything seemed unfamiliar. On every side of me stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion. Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and somber- colored rocks, which seemed to have an understanding with one another and to exchange looks of uncomfortable significance, as if they had reared their heads to watch the issue of some foreseen event. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.

The day, I thought, must be far advanced, though the sun was invisible; and although sensible that the air was raw and chill my consciousness of that fact was rather mental than physical -- I had no feeling of discomfort. Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse. In all this there were a menace and a portent -- a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place.

I observed in the herbage a number of weather-worn stones, evidently shaped with tools. They were broken, covered with moss and half-sunken in the earth. Some lay prostrate, some leaned at various angles, none was vertical. They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion. So old seemed these relics, these vestiges of vanity and memorials of affection and piety, so battered and worn and stained -- so neglected, deserted, forgotten the place, that I could not help thinking myself the discoverer of the burial-ground of a prehistoric race of men whose very name was long extinct.

Filled with these reflections, I was for some time heedless of the sequence of my own experiences, but soon I thought, "How came I hither?" A moment's reflection seemed to make this all clear and explain at the same time, though in a disquieting way, the singular character with which my fancy had invested all that I saw or heard. I was ill. I remembered now that I had been prostrated by a sudden fever, and that my family had told me that in my periods of delirium I had constantly cried out for liberty and air, and had been held in bed to prevent my escape out-of-doors. Now I had eluded the vigilance of my attendants and had wandered hither to -- to where? I could not conjecture. Clearly I was at a considerable distance from the city where I dwelt -- the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

No signs of human life were anywhere visible or audible; no rising smoke, no watchdog's bark, no lowing cattle, no shouts of children at play -- nothing but that dismal burial-place with its air of mystery and dread, due to my own disordered brain. Was I not becoming again delirious, there beyond human aid? Was it not indeed all an illusion of my madness? I called aloud the names of my wives and sons, reaching out my hands in search of theirs, even as I walked among the crumbling stones and in the withered grass.

A noise behind me caused me to turn about. A wild animal -- a lynx -- was approaching. The thought came to me: If I break down here in the desert -- if the fever return and I fail, this beast will be at my throat. I sprang toward it, shouting. It trotted tranquilly within a hand's breadth of me and disappeared behind a rock.

A moment later a man's head appeared to rise out of the the ground a short distance away. He was ascending the farther slope of a low hill whose crest was hardly to be distinguished from the general level. His whole figure soon came into view against the background of gray cloud. He was half naked, half clad in skins. His hair was unkempt, his beard long and ragged. In one hand he carried a bow and arrow; the other held a blazing torch with a long trail of black smoke. He walked slowly and with caution, as if he feared falling into some open grave concealed by the tall grass. This strange apparition surprised but did not alarm, and taking course to intercept him I met him almost face to face, accosting him with the familiar salutation, "God keep you."

He gave no heed, nor did he arrest his pace.

"Good stranger," I continued, "I am ill and lost. Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa."

The man broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue, passing on and away.

An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was answered by another in the distance. Looking upward, I saw through a sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades! In all this there was a hint of night -- the lynx, the man with the torch, the owl. Yet I saw -- I saw even the stars in absence of darkness. I saw, but was apparently not seen nor heard. Under what awful spell did I exist?

I seated myself at the root of a great tree, seriously to consider what it were best to do. That I was mad I could no longer doubt, yet recognized a ground of doubt in the conviction. Of fever I had no trace. I had, withal, a sense of exhilaration and vigor altogether unknown to me -- a feeling of mental and physical exaltation. My senses seemed all alert; I could feel the air as a ponderous substance; I could hear the silence.

A great root of the giant tree against whose trunk I leaned as I sat held inclosed in its grasp a slab of stone, a part of which protruded into a recess formed by another root. The stone was thus partly protected from the weather, though greatly decomposed. Its edges were worn round, its corners eaten away, its surface deeply furrowed and scaled. Glittering particles of mica were visible in the earth about it -- vestiges of its decomposition. This stone had apparently marked the grave out of which the tree had sprung ages ago. The tree's exacting roots had robbed the grave and made the stone a prisoner.

A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and bent to read it. God in Heaven! my name in full! -- the date of my birth! -- the date of my death!

A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree as I sprang to my feet in terror. The sun was rising in the rosy east. I stood between the tree and his broad red disk -- no shadow darkened the trunk!

A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn. I saw them sitting on their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of irregular mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending to the horizon. And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

Haita the Shepherd, by Ambrose Bierce


In the heart of Haita the illusions of youth had not been supplanted by those of age and experience. His thoughts were pure and pleasant, for his life was simple and his soul devoid of ambition. He rose with the sun and went forth to pray at the shrine of Hastur, the god of shepherds, who heard and was pleased. After performance of this pious rite Haita unbarred the gate of the fold and with a cheerful mind drove his flock afield, eating his morning meal of curds and oat cake as he went, occasionally pausing to add a few berries, cold with dew, or to drink of the waters that came away from the hills to join the stream in the middle of the valley and be borne along with it, he knew not whither.

During the long summer day, as his sheep cropped the good grass which the gods had made to grow for them, or lay with their forelegs doubled under their breasts and chewed the cud, Haita, reclining in the shadow of a tree, or sitting upon a rock, played so sweet music upon his reed pipe that sometimes from the corner of his eye he got accidental glimpses of the minor sylvan deities, leaning forward out of the copse to hear; but if he looked at them directly they vanished. From this -- for he must be thinking if he would not turn into one of his own sheep -- he drew the solemn inference that happiness may come if not sought, but if looked for will never be seen; for next to the favour of Hastur, who never disclosed himself, Haita most valued the friendly interest of his neighbours, the shy immortals of the wood and stream. At nightfall he drove his flock back to the fold, saw that the gate was secure and retired to his cave for refreshment and for dreams.

So passed his life, one day like another, save when the storms uttered the wrath of an offended god. Then Haita cowered in his cave, his face hidden in his hands, and prayed that he alone might be punished for his sins and the world saved from destruction. Sometimes when there was a great rain, and the stream came out of its banks, compelling him to urge his terrified flock to the uplands, he interceded for the people in the cities which he had been told lay in the plain beyond the two blue hills forming the gateway of his valley.

'It is kind of thee, O Hastur,' so he prayed, 'to give me mountains so near to my dwelling and my fold that I and my sheep can escape the angry torrents; but the rest of the world thou must thyself deliver in some way that I know not of, or I will no longer worship thee.'

And Hastur, knowing that Haita was a youth who kept his word, spared the cities and turned the waters into the sea.

So he had lived since he could remember. He could not rightly conceive any other mode of existence. The holy hermit who dwelt at the head of the valley, a full hour's journey away, from whom he had heard the tale of the great cities where dwelt people -- poor souls! -- who had no sheep, gave him no knowledge of that early time, when, so he reasoned, he must have been small and helpless like a lamb.

It was through thinking on these mysteries and marvels, and on that horrible change to silence and decay which he felt sure must sometime come to him, as he had seen it come to so many of his flock -- as it came to all living things except the birds -- that Haita first became conscious how miserable and hopeless was his lot.

'It is necessary,' he said, 'that I know whence and how I came; for how can one perform his duties unless able to judge what they are by the way in which he was entrusted with them? And what contentment can I have when I know not how long it is going to last? Perhaps before another sun I may be changed, and then what will become of the sheep? What, indeed, will have become of me?'

Pondering these things Haita became melancholy and morose. He no longer spoke cheerfully to his flock, nor ran with alacrity to the shrine of Hastur. In every breeze he heard whispers of malign deities whose existence he now first observed. Every cloud was a portent signifying disaster, and the darkness was full of terrors. His reed pipe when applied to his lips gave out no melody, but a dismal wail; the sylvan and riparian intelligences no longer thronged the thicket-side to listen, but fled from the sound, as he knew by the stirred leaves and bent flowers. He relaxed his vigilance and many of his sheep strayed away into the hills and were lost. Those that remained became lean and ill for lack of good pasturage, for he would not seek it for them, but conducted them day after day to the same spot, through mere abstraction, while puzzling about life and death -- of immortality he knew not.

One day while indulging in the gloomiest reflections he suddenly sprang from the rock upon which he sat, and with a determined gesture of the right hand exclaimed: 'I will no longer be a suppliant for knowledge which the gods withhold. Let them look to it that they do me no wrong. I will do my duty as best I can and if I err upon their own heads be it!'

Suddenly, as he spoke, a great brightness fell about him, causing him to look upward, thinking the sun had burst through a rift in the clouds; but there were no clouds. No more than an arm's length away stood a beautiful maiden. So beautiful she was that the flowers about her feet folded their petals in despair and bent their heads in token of submission; so sweet her look that the humming-birds thronged her eyes, thrusting their thirsty bills almost into them, and the wild bees were about her lips. And such was her brightness that the shadows of all objects lay divergent from her feet, turning as she moved.

Haita was entranced. Rising, he knelt before her in adoration, and she laid her hand upon his head.

'Come,' she said in a voice that had the music of all the bells of his flock -- 'come, thou art not to worship me, who am no goddess, but if thou art truthful and dutiful I will abide with thee.'

Haita seized her hand, and stammering his joy and gratitude arose, and hand in hand they stood and smiled into each other's eyes. He gazed on her with reverence and rapture. He said: 'I pray thee, lovely maid, tell me thy name and whence and why thou comest.'

At this she laid a warning finger on her lip and began to withdraw. Her beauty underwent a visible alteration that made him shudder, he knew not why, for still she was beautiful. The landscape was darkened by a giant shadow sweeping across the valley with the speed of a vulture. In the obscurity the maiden's figure grew dim and indistinct and her voice seemed to come from a distance, as she said, in a tone of sorrowful reproach: 'Presumptuous and ungrateful youth! must I then so soon leave thee? Would nothing do but thou must at once break the eternal compact?'

Inexpressibly grieved, Haita fell upon his knees and implored her to remain -- rose and sought her in the deepening darkness -- ran in circles, calling to her aloud, but all in vain. She was no longer visible, but out of the gloom he heard her voice saying: 'Nay, thou shalt not have me by seeking. Go to thy duty, faithless shepherd, or we shall never meet again.'

Night had fallen; the wolves were howling in the hills and the terrified sheep crowding about Haita's feet. In the demands of the hour he forgot his disappointment, drove his sheep to the fold and repairing to the place of worship poured out his heart in gratitude to Hastur for permitting him to save his flock, then retired to his cave and slept.

When Haita awoke the sun was high and shone in at the cave, illuminating it with a great glory. And there, beside him, sat the maiden. She smiled upon him with a smile that seemed the visible music of his pipe of reeds. He dared not speak, fearing to offend her as before, for he knew not what he could venture to say.

'Because,' she said, 'thou didst thy duty by the flock, and didst not forget to thank Hastur for staying the wolves of the night, I am come to thee again. Wilt thou have me for a companion?'

'Who would not have thee for ever?' replied Haita. 'Oh! never again leave me until -- until I-change and become silent and motionless.'

Haita had no word for death.

'I wish, indeed,' he continued, 'that thou wert of my own sex, that we might wrestle and run races and so never tire of being together.'

At these words the maiden arose and passed out of the cave, and Haita, springing from his couch of fragrant boughs to overtake and detain her, observed to his astonishment that the rain was falling and the stream in the middle of the valley had come out of its banks. The sheep were bleating in terror, for the rising waters had invaded their fold. And there was danger for the unknown cities of the distant plain.

It was many days before Haita saw the maiden again. One day he was returning from the head of the valley, where he had gone with ewe's milk and oat cake and berries for the holy hermit, who was too old and feeble to provide himself with food.

'Poor old man!' he said aloud, as he trudged along homeward. 'I will return to-morrow and bear him on my back to my own dwelling, where I can care for him. Doubtless it is for this that Hastur has reared me all these many years, and gives me health and strength.'

As he spoke, the maiden, clad in glittering garments, met him in the path with a smile that took away his breath.

'I am come again,' she said, 'to dwell with thee if thou wilt now have me, for none else will. Thou mayest have learned wisdom, and art willing to take me as I am, nor care to know.'

Haita threw himself at her feet. 'Beautiful being,' he cried, 'if thou wilt but deign to accept all the devotion of my heart and soul -- after Hastur be served -- it is thine for ever. But, alas! thou art capricious and wayward. Before to-morrow's sun I may lose thee again. Promise, I beseech thee, that however in my ignorance I may offend, thou wilt forgive and remain always with me.'

Scarcely had he finished speaking when a troop of bears came out of the hills, racing toward him with crimson mouths and fiery eyes. The maiden again vanished, and he turned and fled for his life. Nor did he stop until he was in the cot of the holy hermit, whence he had set out. Hastily barring the door against the bears he cast himself upon the ground and wept.

'My son,' said the hermit from his couch of straw, freshly gathered that morning by Haita's hands, 'it is not like thee to weep for bears -- tell me what sorrow hath befallen thee, that age may minister to the hurts of youth with such balms as it hath of its wisdom.'

Haita told him all: how thrice he had met the radiant maid and thrice she had left him forlorn. He related minutely all that had passed between them, omitting no word of what had been said.

When he had ended, the holy hermit was a moment silent, then said: 'My son, I have attended to thy story, and I know the maiden. I have myself seen her, as have many. Know, then, that her name, which she would not even permit thee to inquire, is Happiness. Thou saidst the truth to her, that she is capricious, for she imposeth conditions that man cannot fulfil, and delinquency is punished by desertion. She cometh only when unsought, and will not be questioned. One manifestation of curiosity, one sign of doubt, one expression of misgiving, and she is away! How long didst thou have her at any time before she fled?'

'Only a single instant,' answered Haita, blushing with shame at the confession. 'Each time I drove her away in one moment.'

'Unfortunate youth!' said the holy hermit, 'but for thine indiscretion thou mightst have had her for two.'

Synopsis of An Inhabitant of Carcosa and Haita the Shepherd


Carcosa:

This story has a preface attributed to Hali. Our main character is pondering Hali’s words when he feels a cold breeze on his face and looks around him. Where is he? He is by an ancient graveyard whose stones are so old that most are beyond recognition.

He is a resident of Carcosa, that great and ancient city. He now remembers. He was ill and wanted to go outside for fresh air, but he family wouldn’t let him. He must’ve gotten out and away. But where? There’s no smoke on the horizon nor major signs of civilization.

He notices a lynx and tries to scare it away but it doesn’t notice him. Then he spies a half clad man with a hairy face and carrying a torch that came by. He tries to speak to him, but all that happens is the man spouts some unintelligible language and keeps moving. He wonders what is going on, and sits down under a tree. He notices a gravestone in the tree that has been protected by the weather. On it is his name, birth day, and death date. He stands up, and notices that the sun is peering over the horizon and casts no shadow of his body.


Haita:

Haita is a shepherd who lives and works in the valley beyond some cities. His entire life seems to be in this grove. He worships Hastur, the god of shepherds, and communicates with an old hermit on a hill. During the day, he plays music, and the beings of the forest listen. During a flood, he prays to Hastur to save the people of the city beyond, and knowing Haita is a youth who keeps his promises, Hastur turns the water into a sea.

Eventually, Haita ages and begins to question his place in the world. His sheep are less well tended and he wonders what is beyond. After a period of self-questioning, he finally decides to just be the best shepherd he can be, and he is truly content. Then a beautiful woman appears and asks to stay with Haita a while, but he begins to question her. She disappears.

That night he brings in the wolves and thanks Hastur for keeping the wolves away. She appears in the morning as he begins a new day. He agrees to keep her, but then, after a moment, he says that he wishes she were a man, so he could wrestle with her and run races. Then she leaves again.

Another storm has arrived, and he decides to go get the old man and bring him back to Haita’s home so he can care for him. As he decides this, the woman appears a third time. She says that everyone else has rejected her and once more wants to stay with him. He begs for her to stay, promising his ,love and devotion, if only she won’t run each time he says something inappropriate. At this she again leaves.

He arrives at the hermit’s house and relates this story of the thrice appeared woman. The hermit knows her, and names her. She is Happiness.



Lines I am enamored with include:

Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.


So beautiful she was that the flowers about her feet folded their petals in despair and bent their heads in token of submission

Review of An Inhabitant of Carcosa and Haita the Shepherd


Carcosa is a perfect short tale. The first time I read it, I wasn’t sure where it was going. Then it got there, and boom smacked me in the face. I think if it had lasted another two or five pages, I would have had enough time to question everything, but I didn’t because of how short it was – brilliant.

It’s a well-written tale, as the words used perfectly describe the story. You can tell that each word does the work of ten. His precision of language is breathtaking. I wish he had written more and critiqued less. As it is, he is my favorite worker of words. Some authors may be more imaginative, but when it comes to sheer craft, he is at the top. This was published in 1886 in a newspaper and in book form in 1891.


5 outta 5 for Carcosa


Haita is not a horror story, it’s a tale written like a legend. It appears to come right out of a textbook on Greek Mythology or something. It has the didactic story-telling of the great epics, and its peopled with characters and a world which breathes the old style of story. It’s almost like an Aesopian Fable, but without the moral at the bottom.

Haita does have some horror conventions in it, particularly the surprise ending that reshapes what you thought happened in the story. It’s not a horror tale, and it’s not Bierce’s best. I think Bierce is best at stories that surprise you – An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Carcosa, and many others. Published in 1893, this story is another solid entry by Bierce, but nothing outrageous or anything.

4 stars out of 5

Now that you’ve read these two Bierce works, we are moving to the work that I feel is the most like Lovecraft’s Mythos. We will be reading Robert W. Chambers’ The Yellow Sign.


http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-st...YellSign.shtml

It has many parallels to Lovecraft’s writings, both in terms of details and looking at the big picture. See if you can find them as you read it!

In my copy of The King in Yellow, this is a 19 page story.




Robert W Chambers was a very popular writer in his day. He published a ton of books that were on the level of a Danielle Steele or Robert Grisham. It wasn’t literature, and it didn’t stand the test of time. He turned to romantic fiction and was a best seller. However, what has stood out was a publication from 1895 called The King in Yellow. It was a group of stories built around a common theme. That publication was massively influential to the horror genre generically, and the Cthulhu mythos specifically.

The King in Yellow has been so influential, you can feel it in lots of places. There are references to it or things in it all over the place – video games, novels, short stories, movies, tv shows, and more. Chambers just brilliantly captures the imagination and some nasty scary things in this book.

Here’s what Lovecraft said of the man in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith:

Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans – equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them.


So, let’s read the story that, in my opinion, is the closest to reading like a Mythos story, and is one of my favorites of the Gen 0 stories. Ready?

Synopsis of The Yellow Sign


The story opens with one main character, Mr. Scott a painter, and his favorite nude model, Tessie Reardon painting. He is relaxing by the window and taking a break when he spies the watchman for the adjacent church, and he is struck by the worm-ish look that the man has. Struck by this singular expression, he finds that he uses too much mustard in the skin of the arm he was painting, and it looks like corpse flesh. He feels the entire work is spoiled, as the corpse look is reading across the paining. In anger, he destroys the canvas.

While talking, Tessie tells Scott of a dream she has had a few times, where she is watching from a window down on a funeral procession. The watchman from the church Is driving the hearse, and inside the coffin she knows that its Scott. Scott tries to reassure her that it’s nothing, and suggests a week in the countryside to feel better

The next day, the bellboy for his property arrives in Scott’s apartment and they begin talking about the church next door , which was sold the owner of the apartment building thy are in. They discuss the watchman there and the bellboy tells a story where the watchman looked at him and his family queerly, and the bellboy confronted him, but the watchman sad nothing. The bellboy hit him, and he was soft. He grabbed the bellboy’s hand, and the bellboy had to pull to get away, and he pulled off the middle finger of one of the hands! Scott can see the nine fingers on his hands and a chill goes down.

Tessie arrives for work and Scott tells her of a similar dream he had the previous night where he was in a coffin and saw her in a window and the driver was the watchman. He tells her in order to demonstrate the power of suggestion, but she is worried more, and she tells him that she has feelings for him. He kisses her and their relationship changes.

The night arrives and Scott heads out for a dinner with a work colleague. Afterwards, while heading back to his apartment, he passes by the watchman, and he is asking, Have you found the yellow sign over and over again.

The following day, Tessie has arrived. She will model clothed now, due to the changes in their relationship. He gives her an outfit and a necklace, and she gives him a pin, with an onyx back and curious yellow letter on it. She says that she found it months ago, and put out an ad in the papers, but no one answered. She pins it to him.

While moving a frame, Scott falls and badly sprains his wrists and he can’t work. Tessie is sewing, and trolling to find something to do, he swings by his bookcases, and spies a tome he has never seen before. He asks Tessie if she put it up there, and she comes over, but she hasn’t; he discovers it’s the Yellow Sign, a play with a sinister reputation. He tells Tessie not to read it or touch it, so playfully, she grabs the book and runs off and hides while she read sit. He yells at her not so, but she doesn’t listen.

He finds her a half hour later having read the play. She is struck with horror, so he takes her to a couch and reads it as well. They have full knowledge of it now. She asks him to take off the Yellow Sign, but he can’t or won’t. In a few moments, the watchman arrives at the door. As he comes for Scott, Tessie faints dead. The doctor and priest are there, and they see three bodies, two dead and one dying. Scott sees the end, and overhears the doctor telling the priest that the dead man, the watchman, has been dead for months.

Review of The Yellow Sign

Unlike some other reviews, by its nature , this is spoiler heavy, and uses no spoiler tags.


Ah me. I love this story. Chambers builds a very believable world, with a bit of horror to it for the entire time, and then bends you right into the bizarre for just two pages and ends it. I respect that.


I hope you can see how Lovecraftian this story appears to be. If I were to tell you that it was written in 1945 by a Generation 2 author, you’d buy it. It was so ahead of its time in 1895. What elements do you see from it in the Mythos?

Consider – the mystic tome that has unhallowed information that taints the reader. Compare the King in Yellow to the Necronomicon. Another thing he did was to take things he liked from other writers and put them in his story. You’ll note that The King in Yellow is set in Carcosa, which has two suns and many moons. There is a character named Hastur, which they discuss, and the city is against Lake Hali, which was the name of the sage who was quoted in the Carcosa story.

Sure, Chambers creates a feeling of dark horror in the story, and it has many great horror elements. It also shows a writer borrowing elements from another writer and adding to it. This is very Lovecraft. In fact, he was so impressed that he adds Lake Hali to his stories, and August Derleth adds Hastur. In fact, we’ve already read a story where Hastur was mentioned as one of the ancient ones - The Lair of the Star-Spawn. Therefore, if you want to consider The Yellow Sign as a Gen 0 story that was absorbed into the Mythos, you would not be wrong.


With great writing, a knowledge of the genre belying his lack of experience writing in it, and great story, this is a classic of horror literature.


5 outta 5 stars

The next place we are going to go is Lord Dunsany, and along with Arthur Machen and Poe, is the greatest influence on Lovecraft. We’ve discussed him already. Lovecraft wrote many stories in a Dunsany style, and Smith’s Tale ….. Zeiros was very Dunsany in feel. Well, let’s read a Dunsany work.

A Shop in Go-By-Street

Lord Dunsany's Short Story: A Shop In Go-By Street



It’s just 7 pages long, so read up, me hearties!

Who and what is Lord Dunsany?

After Poe, Dunsany is by far the biggest influence on Lovecraft. For years, he will write stories in a pseudo-Dunsany style. Lord Dunsany was the 18th lord of Dunsany, and your typical Victorian era dilettante aristocrat. He spent time safari’ing in Africa and n the Boer war. He also penned a large amount of correspondence and writings.

But in 1905, he published The Gods of Pegana, and everything changed. The Gods of Pegana married his writing style to the right subject matter – in this case, he created the myths and mythos for a group of people in far off Pegana. Each myth is in The Gods of Pegana, and the impact of this book cannot be overemphasized. (Some myths are longer than others).

Just to illustrate, allow me to give you the second myth in Gods of Pegana:

OF SKARL THE DRUMMER


When MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI had made the gods and Skarl, Skarl made a drum, and began to beat upon it that he might drum for ever. Then because he was weary after the making of the gods, and because of the drumming of Skarl, did MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI grow drowsy and fall asleep.

And there fell a hush upon the gods when they saw that MANA rested, and there was silence on Pegana save for the drumming of Skarl. Skarl sitteth upon the mist before the feet of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, above the gods of Pegana, and there he beateth his drum. Some say that the Worlds and the Suns are but the echoes of the drumming of Skarl, and others say that they be dreams that arise in the mind of MANA because of the drumming of Skarl, as one may dream whose rest is troubled by sound of song, but none knoweth, for who hath heard the voice of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, or who hath seen his drummer?

Whether the season be winter or whether it be summer, whether it be morning among the worlds or whether it be night, Skarl still beateth his drum, for the purposes of the gods are not yet fulfilled. Sometimes the arm of Skarl grows weary; but still he beateth his drum, that the gods may do the work of the gods, and the worlds go on, for if he cease for an instant then MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI will start awake, and there will be worlds nor gods no more.

But, when at the last the arm of Skarl shall cease to beat his drum, silence shall startle Pegana like thunder in a cave, and MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI shall cease to rest.

Then shall Skarl put his drum upon his back and walk forth into the void beyond the worlds, because it is THE END, and the work of Skarl is over.
There may arise some other god whom Skarl may serve, or it may be that he shall perish; but to Skarl it shall matter not, for he shall have done the work of Skarl.

Anyway, I hope you can see just how good Dunsany was at marrying his classic/epic style of writing and these works. Dunsany would go on to pen a lot of fantasy works, including a sequel to Gods. But you can see the strains of the beginning of Lovecraft here. In fact, Mana-Yood-Sushai may be a bit of Azathoth.

We have some anecdotal evidence to suggest that A Shop in Go-By-Street was reread by Lovecraft just before penning Call of Cthulhu. We’ll take a look at just how in the Review.