Month: November 2021

Hey everybody,
I quite enjoyed my November mythos dive last year, reading some of the weird fiction of Lovecraft’s circle and broadening my horizons accordingly! So much so, I thought I’d do it again! This is part two of a two-part series covering some of the wider mythos tales out there, you can read part one here. Much like last time, I’m once again going to cover one of Lovecraft’s collaborations to mix things up a bit, but first, let’s head to Lovecraft’s disciple, August Derleth. The man who, along with Donald Wandrei, almost single-handedly ensured the survival of Lovecraft’s work and name as an American author by collecting and publishing a volume of his work, founding a publishing house along the way specifically to do so, he is nevertheless divisive among Lovecraft scholars for his later development of the Cthulhu mythos into something that many see as far-removed from Lovecraft’s own vision.

So let’s take a look at The Dweller in Darkness. It’s one that I’ve read before, and one that I find really quite nicely evocative of the great white north. We have legends of Rick’s Lake, where people have gone missing in curious circumstances for a while – the reappearance of a frozen missionary, said to have disappeared 300 years ago but whose remains are determined to have only been dead five years, intrigues a local academic, who heads up there and promptly goes missing, too. His graduate students from the university follow his trail, and set up a Dictaphone to record the eerie nocturnal sounds. The story has got a lot to like about it, there is a lot of atmosphere here and a lot of local colour. Derleth was well-known for this aspect of his writing, of course, and it’s something that I recall from having previously read his tales. Where it falls down, for me, is how Derleth seems fond of using Lovecraft and his writings as a factual source, and not fiction. Here, the missing academic had asked for his students to send him a copy of The Outsider & Others, the first volume of Lovecraft published by Arkham House. It always wrenches me out of the story, but it seems to be a hallmark of his style – Lovecraft himself appeared as a character in The Return of Hastur that I read last year. The story also has a fairly substantial discussion of Derleth’s ideas for the Cthulhu mythos pantheon, where the Great Old Ones are set in opposition to each other as elemental deities. To some extent, it feels like name-dropping rather than anything more. The story ends with the students calling down Cthugha, the fire god, to destroy the area around Rick’s Lake, which it transpires is the earthly haven for Nyarlathotep – after having been advised to do so by the desperate voice of their professor on the Dictaphone. As I said, there is a lot to enjoy here, it somehow just falls a bit short because of the use of Lovecraft himself, as I said.

From Derleth to the man himself now, and one of Lovecraft’s collaborations. The Electric Executioner is one of those titles that has intrigued me since I came across is years ago. A collaboration with Adolphe de Castro, it tells the story of a mining investigator tasked with finding a missing mine worker, who has absconded to Mexico with a lot of the company paperwork. Hardly the most auspicious start to the tale, but on the narrator’s train ride in to Mexico City, things take a sinister turn when he is suddenly joined in his otherwise deserted compartment by a man with a large suitcase. The man overpowers him, and tells him that he has been selected as the first human test subject for his electrocution device, a device that has been shunned by the state of New York as a method of execution. The man is more than a little deranged, and seems to be trying to bring about the return of Quetzalcoatl to the world, determined to kill everybody before the feathered god returns. The narrator manages to stall enough before launching into some faux-Aztec patois, which causes the man to inadvertently kill himself with the device. But that’s not all – the man disappears from the carriage, and when the narrator is told that the mining thief has been found dead in the mountains. It turns out the mine thief is none other than the chap from the train, so how did his body get from the carriage floor to that cave system? It’s okay – a little creepy, but nothing really as exciting as I was perhaps hoping. The mine thief chap does make some ritual mumblings which sound like Aztec-inflected versions of the usual Lovecraftian cult chants, including a “Cthulhutl” and “Yog-Sototl” which made me smile. Ultimately, it does feel a little bit silly, the way the narrator is able to convince the madman to model his execution device.

Interestingly, though, this story is one where we can see the original, as it had been published previously by de Castro as The Automatic Executioner. It is quite an interesting read, to see what Lovecraft added to the original. Mainly, it seems to be the atmosphere and tension, although it also seems to be the case that the narrator is watered down a bit to emphasize the difference between himself and his would-be attacker. The odd cultist reference is just peppered in for effect, and the final act with the discovery of the body is increased for further horrific effect.

To Clark Ashton Smith next, and a couple of stories that have that curious early fantasy feel to them. Ubbo-Sathla is a short story that tells of a man who finds a strange, pulsating crystal in a curio shop in London, takes it home, and gazes into its depths. He is aware of the pre-human civilisations of Hyperborea, and has read of such times in the Book of Eibon, and so gradually finds himself being subsumed by the stone until he loses all sense of self, travelling back in time to the very birth of the world, when the god Ubbo-Sathla exists in yeasty splendour. Fairly interesting stuff, if a little bit gross when describing the big god guy. Notable for being a bit of a crossover with Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, the story starts in the best tradition of weird tales, but quickly turns into that kind of dark fantasy that is common with CAS.

And speaking of dark fantasy, The Dark Eidolon is a short story from Smith’s Zothique series, which are a kind of future-fantasy that imagines a continent emerging somewhere in the Indian ocean, taking in parts of India, Arabia and Australia/Indonesia. While it is couched as a future (“Dying Earth” is the term that I’ve seen on Wikipedia, a setting at the end of the Earth’s lifespan) there is that element of Arabian Nights-style fantasy that seems to be prevalent in the fantasy of this time. The story details the revenge of the sorcerer Namirrha, who was almost trampled to death by the horse of the Prince Zotulla. Namirrha throws in his lot with the archfiend Thasaidon and builds a palace right next to Zotulla, from whence he sends ghostly horses each night to terrorise his foe. Thasaidon refuses to outright destroy Zotulla however, as destruction of Zotulla and his realm will deprive the fiend of many subjects. Namirrha then sells his soul to Thamagorgos, Lord of the Abyss, and invites Zotulla to his palace for a feast. There, Namirrha is attended by all manner of zombies and half-rotten ghouls, before forcing Zotulla to drink a poisoned draught that places the emperor’s spirit in a statue of Thasaidon, while Namirrha himself takes over Zotulla’s body. Thasaidon, furious at this turn of events, gives Zotulla the power to kill his body, driving Namirrha back into his own skin with no memory of these events. Namirrha proceeds to attack himself in madness, while the demon horses of Thamagorgos destroy the entire land. The story is quite grisly, to say the least, and definitely tends towards the bombastic at the end! Borne out of a need for revenge, the lengths Namirrha goes to are quite extraordinary, if I’m honest – especially the morbid feast and the destruction of the entire land. It’s interesting, I suppose, because it’s probably the most pulp-y story that I’ve read so far! I tend not to think of Lovecraft’s stories as being the kind of adventure-serial pulp stories printed like Zorro and Flash Gordon back in the day, but they do all belong to this kind of genre!

Let’s talk about the older generation for the moment. Ambrose Bierce isn’t particularly remembered today, but he did come up with the names Carcosa, Hastur, Hyades and others that so captured the imagination of Lovecraft and later mythos writers. An Inhabitant of Carcosa is one of those stories that is often quoted as the inspiration of the name but doesn’t really develop any ideas in the way they were later used. The unnamed narrator finds himself in an unfamiliar wilderness and is worried about how he came to be there – as his last memory was of falling asleep with a fever. Further exploration shows an area with old tombstones, and while resting beneath a tree, notices a stone with his own name, date of birth and date of death. He realises that he must be amid the ruins of ancient Carcosa, and has clearly died from the fever. I liked this story quite a lot – it was interesting for seeing so many references to stuff like Carcosa and Hali, which were taken up in later works such as The King in Yellow and yet have been altered from their original setting here.

Haïta the Shepherd is a strange tale, notable for the introduction of Hastur, who is here a benevolent shepherd god. Haïta, who has hitherto been a pious worshipper at the shrine of Hastur, threatens to stop his devotions unless Hastur helps to save his flock from drowning. Haïta is visited by a mysterious maiden who disappears as soon as she questions him, but a hermit he cares for identifies her has happiness. There’s a classical feeling to this story, and it reminds me a little of some of Lovecraft’s more pastoral works. It is a bit curious, I think because of the name of Hastur looming in the background there – having all of the baggage of the Cthulhu mythos that has come along since, and seeing what that has made of the name, it lends an atmosphere to an otherwise fairly placid tale. I suppose it goes to show the imagination of some of the mythos writers, who could turn out so much from so little.

I’ll finish with Robert Bloch. Bloch was another of Lovecraft’s proteges, and of course later went on to have a successful career as a screenwriter, after gaining notoriety from his novel Psycho. Lovecraft used a fictionalised version of Bloch in The Haunter of the Dark, Robert Blake, after Bloch himself had used a fictionalised version of Lovecraft in The Shambler from the Stars. The story almost appears autobiographical, as the narrator is a young student who is also struggling to make it as a writer of weird fiction, despite several rejections. He determines to gain occult knowledge in order to perfect his craft, and obtains a copy of De Vermis Mysteriis, an occult tome introduced here by Bloch and analogous to the Necronomicon. Reaching out to a “mystic dreamer” from New England, the two meet and pore over the work, but unfortunately, said mystic dreamer reads a passage aloud and accidentally summons a vampiric daemon creature, which devours him. The narrator, in panic, burns the man’s house down and flees. The story has that element of Bloch’s sense of humour in how the horror comes through an accidental daemon summoning, and I feel there is something akin to Clark Ashton Smith’s humour there. The star vampire is of course familiar to any Arkham Files gamer as one of the stable of monsters. Lovecraft enthusiastically approved the idea of killing off this fictionalised version of himself, and his sequel The Haunter of the Dark was written shortly after this tale was published, almost as a direct sequel. Bloch then wrote a sequel to Haunter, closing out the trilogy with The Shadow from the Steeple. But I think I’ll save that one for another time…

Hey everybody,
Welcome to the first of a two-part blog series charting my wider reading within the Cthulhu mythos this year! After my first exposure to writers within the mythos last year – authors from Lovecraft’s circle such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E Howard and August Derleth – I thought it would be nice to do the same thing again this year, branching yet further, and have spent a couple of weeks almost immersed in these weird, weird tales! I’ve read so many that it would probably be too unwieldy to confine to a single blog post.

Without further ago, let’s dive in!

The Horror from the Hills is the novella by Frank Belknap Long that introduces Chaugnar Faugn to the mythos – the weird elephantine deity from the Far East. What is thought to be a statue or idol of the deity is brought to a museum in New York, under a cloud of some brutal killings. When the museum curator, Algernon Harris, notices the trunk has changed position after one such murder, we go into academic overdrive as he tries to dig deeper into the whole affair. Visiting the psychic Roger Little, he and the museum’s director learn of dark beasts in the Spanish Pyrenees, which seem to be linked with Chaugnar Faugn’s legend. All hell breaks loose when Harris receives a call to say the idol has disappeared; Little, learning of a killing spree around the city, unveils his ‘entropy machine’, a device that can send things back through time. The three chase Chaugnar Faugn down the eastern seaboard, attacking it with a green light that is eventually able to break down the god’s corporeal self to send it back through time to a point where it hadn’t existed, though Little fears that it is not the last that the Earth has seen of Chaugnar Faugn.

Somewhere in this story there is a really good mythos tale. I think part of me was put off by the fact that it runs a bit too long, unnecessary for some parts, and another part of me feels distinctly turned off by the sort of casual racism that’s even more rampant than in Lovecraft. It’s always interesting to read tales that have had a major impact on the mythos that are not by Lovecraft, of course, and I am glad to have read it to see what it’s all about. But I do feel as though some fat could have been trimmed – the story is almost famous for including verbatim a dream that Lovecraft told to Long, and while it’s interesting to have that in facsimile copy, I feel a bit like it was unnecessary. You almost end up reading this for the meta reason of reading the dream, and not because the story is actually good. That sounds a bit harsh, actually. Like I say, there is a good tale in there somewhere – I think I’d have preferred it to have been a bit leaner in the telling.

I’ve also read The Hounds of Tindalos, also by Long, which has the distinction of being the first mythos tale to be published by someone other than Lovecraft. It’s a bit barmy, if I’m honest, and deals with Halpin Chalmers and his efforts to time travel through the use of an exotic drug from the East. Chalmers goes back, but is spotted by some supernatural beasts, the Hounds, who can attack people by entering our dimension through angles (as opposed to the curves of time that, apparently, Einstein propounded). As such, Chalmers softens all of the angles of his room with plaster of Paris, but he delves too deep and the plaster crumbles, and the Hounds get him.

While being slightly bonkers, not least for all the scientific theory put forward in the story, it’s nevertheless kinda fascinating to read. I know of the Hounds from their many, many appearances in the Arkham Files series of games, and indeed they’re later mentioned by Lovecraft himself in The Whisperer in Darkness. The story is told alongside some newspaper snippets, giving it a sort of documentary feel, which I really enjoyed. However, I’m not a big fan of Long’s style here – not many people simply “say” things; instead, we have far too many “murmurs” and the like, which gives the impression that the protagonists are all muttering to each other. I’m all for literary variety, but why can’t people just have their speech reported, and be done with?

There are common elements between both Long stories that tie themselves strongly to the Cthulhu mythos, such as the weird science and the horror of creatures from other times and dimensions. That Long and Lovecraft were friends probably accounts a lot for this (it was apparently Long who persuaded Lovecraft’s aunts to take him back in after his marriage ended). I wouldn’t say that Long simply reproduces Lovecraft, though – I think there is a definite sense that this is a different author, if only because Long can’t seem to sustain the baroque, florid language that is so often Lovecraft’s hallmark.

Henry Kuttner is a new discovery for me this mythos season. Another of Lovecraft’s circle, Kuttner wrote quite a few short stories for the mythos. The Secret of Kralitz is a story somewhat in the mould of Lovecraft’s genealogy-type stories, where a family secret is passed down the generations. It’s short, and has some tangential links to the mythos as the protagonist learns of his family’s unholy alliance with Cthulhu etc. It was Kuttner’s first story that has links to the mythos, though he had been selling stories and poems to pulp magazines for years by this point. The Salem Horror is by far my favourite of his stories that I’ve read so far. It’s got strong overtones of The Dreams in the Witch House, though being set in Salem gives it a lot of atmosphere with very little work. The author Carson is renting the so-called Witch House in which he hopes to finish his current novel – though it proves difficult because of the noisy street outside. Following a rat into the cellar, he finds an underground room that is promptly dubbed The Witch Room, having stone mosaics in the floor, and also a curious metal disk. The Room attracts several mystics, including Michael Leigh, who takes a particular interest. When the grave of Abigail Prinn, the former occupant of the house, is robbed and her body disappears, Carson is overcome with a nervous exhaustion and retreats to the solitude of the Room, only to witness the mummified cadaver of Prinn attempting to bring forth the gelatinous mass of Nyogtha – to be thwarted by the timely return of Leigh.

While perhaps a little derivative of Dreams in the Witch-House, I still found this to be a really enjoyable tale, and very atmospheric. There are letters from Lovecraft to Kuttner where the former gives him notes, including geographical, and helps with the tone. We’re basically reading pulp stories from their 1930s heyday, so we can’t really expect high art! It was good, I thought, and I’m definitely intrigued to read more of his work.

Let’s mix it up a bit next, and move to Lovecraft himself!

Out of the Aeons is one of Lovecraft’s collaborations with Hazel Heald, which bears something of a familiar sense to the earlier Horror in the Museum, both stories being concerned with mummies as museum exhibits. The story was published in 1935, and is quite notable for its long central discussion of the Nameless Cults of Von Junzt, which details the prehistoric cult of Ghatanothoa, a Medusa-like ancient one whose gaze turns a person’s body to stone, yet preserves their mind intact. Creepy! It’s all brought about when a mummy is discovered on a heretofore undiscovered Pacific island in the 1870s. The mummy is installed at a small museum in Boston, and is largely unnoticed until the 1920s sees a sensational account of it published in the newspapers. A swarm of visitors ensues, many of which are described in Lovecraft’s less-than-charming manner, and it seems like these cultists (for want of a better term) are trying to revive the mummy. See, Von Junzt relates the story of an ancient civilisation of Mu, dating roughly 200,000 years prior, that worshipped Ghatanothoa. A priest of Shub-Niggurath attempts to destroy Ghatanothoa’s power over the people with a magical warding scroll, which is replaced by the High Priests shortly before he goes off to confront the deity. The popular press naturally speculates that the mummy is this priest, and that the so-called true scroll still exists, and will bring him back to life. A series of disturbing events takes place in the museum, culminating in the death of two intruders, one of whom seems to have been petrified when the mummy’s eyes suddenly open. See, the mummy is indeed the priest, and upon his retinas can be faintly seen the outline of Ghatanothoa, caught in that moment before his own mummification. As the mummy is examined in the museum laboratory, it is discovered to have a perfectly-preserved brain, after all these millennia.

What a wild ride! This story is replete with references to the mythos, including the Mi-Go of Yuggoth, who of course remove the brains of their test subjects. Coincidence? I get the impression, at times, that Lovecraft is almost more free and easy with his references when revising other peoples’ works than when writing his own. Nameless Cults is the creation of Robert E Howard, so it’s nice to see it explored in this one a bit more fully.

Speaking of Robert E Howard, I’ve been reading more of his weird tales – and man, they are weird! The Children of the Night is one of these early mentions of the Nameless Cults tome, although mentioned in passing as a vehicle for a story that is much more racially motivated than even Lovecraft often wrote! The story begins with a circle of scientist-philosopher types discussing the possibility of surviving ancient cults in the world, with the narrator paying particular attention to the physical attributes to one of these chaps in the circle. When they start passing round a flint axe head, the narrator is attacked and seems to hallucinate a past life, where he was a warrior tribesman who tried to purge the forest of a sub-human culture referred to as the Children of the Night. Coming to, he struggles with the present reality and attempts to kill the guy who hit him. It’s all overlain with racial commentary that was quite prevalent at the time, though as we look back through the lens of where such talk took us, it can make for some very uncomfortable reading.

The Black Stone, also by Howard, is the second of these early mentions of the Nameless Cults. More of a Lovecraftian story than others I’ve read by Howard, it deals with the narrator’s trip into a small village in Hungary to study a fabled black stone, mentioned in several accounts with teasing, tantalising references to archaic rituals and subsequent madnesses. On hearing some of the history of the village and the surrounding valley, the narrator spends the night in front of the stone and witnesses an obscene ritual that culminates with the sacrifice of a baby and a young girl to a horrific toad-like monstrosity. Thinking it just a dream, further investigation shows that, in actual fact, such rituals were a regular occurrence before the Turks invaded. While the narrator himself manages to cling to his sanity, it otherwise has many of the hallmarks of the classic weird tale, and has much in common with the work of Lovecraft.

The third Howard story that I’ve read this time around is The Thing on the Roof. It’s a short tale of two scholars, one of whom (Tussmann) goes searching for a temple in Honduras after reading about it in the Nameless Cults. Within the temple is the mummy of the last high priest, around whose neck is a carved toad amulet which is talked of as “the key”. The reports of hidden treasure are, it seems, exaggerated, but he has brought something back home with him – a hideous commotion sounds from the roof, and Tussmann’s body is found with the head caved in, and the jewel stolen. The room is wrecked, and a strange gelatinous secretion is found around the window. Very atmospheric. Very nice! I did quite enjoy this one, there are a lot of classic mythos bits and pieces in here. It also ties in with the Black Stone, and the toad-like god. Very nice, indeed!