Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos [Paperback]

Hardly the best collection from the early Lovecraft acolytes, but one that will certainly appeal to the fourteen-year-old in everyone who loves the Mythos. Editor Price is an admirable scholar of this particular niche in literature, here providing rarely anthologized stories tracing the early evolution of Lovecraft's ideas as practiced by his (generally) less famous pulp fiction contemporaries and fans.

The majority of these offerings are in the "freebooting adventurer meets his doom in forbidden archaeology" vein, a la Conan creator Robert E. Howard - two of whose stories (and only one really a Mythos tale) are duly reprinted, "The Thing on the Roof" and "The Fire of Assurbanipal." Robert Bloch's "Fane of the Black Pharaoh," not one of his best but still not bad, has a British explorer running afoul of an ancient Brotherhood protecting the secrets of a mad Egyptian prophet-king. Clark Ashton Smith's "The Seven Geases" concerns the hypnotic magic of a long-forgotten serpent race, who sacrifice men to their unspeakable dark god. August Derleth - you didn't expect he'd miss out on the act, did you? - collaborates with Mark Schorer on "Lair of the Star-Spawn," detailing a missing archaeologist's plan to stop those same serpent-people from releasing their demon-gods upon mankind. (Derleth is also represented by his own virtual plagiarism of Algernon Blackwood, in "Ithaqua" and "The Thing That Walked On the Wind.") E. Hoffman Price's "The Lord of Illusion" and Henry Hasse's "The Guardian of the Book" tell stories of extraterrestrial wayfarers through the gates of time and space, uncovering ancient and extra-dimensional secrets.

Other offerings include more straightforward horror stories, such as Henry Kuttner's "Bells of Horror" and "The Invaders," C. Hall Thompson's "Spawn of the Green Abyss," Carl Jacobi's "The Aquarium" and Duane W. Rimel's "Music of the Stars." Many of these, like Derleth's stories and Bertram Russell's "The Scourge of B'Moth," are essentially...rehashes of recognizable Lovecraft classics, though one or two are fairly original and worthwhile.

And for those who long for the occasional chuckle-break from all the melodramatically histrionic proceedings, Donald A. Wollheim's "The Horror Out of Lovecraft" and Fritz Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars" will fit the bill - the latter, especially, as it comically rapes virtually every famous story Lovecraft ever wrote (with love, of course).

These aren't all the stories included in this volume, but they are indicative of the rest - certainly sufficient for anyone to determine whether or not Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos will be worth the "Price."

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's something at my window. It seems to be - oh, my God! Words cannot describe the utter blasphemous horror of the nameless dread somehow made flesh incarnate! Someone save me, before I succumb to that unutterable -

A glance at the table of contents would make this book seem to be a mixed bag; while it contains plenty of little-known stories by Mythos greats, it also has soem commonly reprinted stories by equally great authors such as Howard, Kuttner, and Bloch. This is the risk any anthologist runs in the Cthulhu Mythos; some stories are going to overlap with the contents of other books the reader owns. Price makes up for this in part by including variants of stories: "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," for instance, is not the same as in most of its other print appearances. Ironically, this version is less a Cthulhu Mythos story here than in its more common version, but the story still has that Mythos atmosphere. All in all, considering the strength of the collection as a whole, few Mythos readers are going to mind rereading a few stories

I'd like to type up ye first two paragraph's of Bob's fascinating introduction to this wonderful collection:

"Many readers of the present volume will recognize a more than coincidental similarity between it and August Derleth's TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS anthology that appeared more than two decades ago, in 1969. Derleth had compiled a prime collection of tales written by various authors under the influence of H. P. Lovecraft and employing the props of his system of 'artificial mythology' which Derleth (but not Lovecraft) called 'the Cthulhu Mythos.' To this collection Derleth prefixed a brief exposition of the Mythos as he understood it, so as to provide a context to help the reader better understand the stories that were to follow. It seems appropriate, therefore, in the present case to provide an analogous exposition, especially since the scholarship of the last decades has seen a major reinterpretation of Lovecraft's Mythos.
"As the title of this volume implies, there has even been a shift in nomenclature in regards to the Mythos. Especially in reference to the body of fictitious lore as it appears in the stories of Lovecraft himself, it seems better to refer to it as 'the Lovecraft Mythos' after its creator, rather than 'the Cthulhu Mythos' after one of the dread entities mentioned in it. As with most things, we must understand the origin and development of the Mythos before we can venture to say we know what it is. The definition of a thing includes its history. Hence, the following sketch of the Lovecraft Mythos and its evolution into the Cthulhu Mythos."

Price has thought long and hard about all of this, and his views are extremely interesting. Some of the introduction seems written to counter the hostility toward Derleth from they who have attacked and perhaps misunderstood him. "Interpreters from Richard L. Tierney and Dirk W. Mosig on have hotly repudiated this whole schema, derisively dubbing it 'the Derleth Mythos.' They saw Derleth's framework, especially in the Christian parallel, the imposition of a Good versus Evil schema foreign to Lovecraft's original, morally neutral conception. While such an understanding would indeed represent the grossest rendering of the Lovecraftian fabric, I am not convinced that critics have correctly understood Derleth at this point." Critics have derided Bob Price for his ideas as well, since the topic of the Mythos gets many people emotional, defensive and antagonistic.

Whatever one thinks of it, the Cthulhu Mythos is not going to go away. Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, it has expanded like shoggoth-tissue under the hands of other writers. Some of the best of them, and some of the less than best, are between the covers of this fun book. They are:

"The Thing on the Roof," by Robert E. Howard
"The Fire of Asshurbanipal," by Robert E. Howard
"The Seven Geases," by Clark Ashton Smith
"Fane of the Black Pharoah," by Robert Bloch
"The Invaders," by Henry Kuttner
"Bells of Horror," by Henry Kuttner
"The Thing That Walked on the Wind," by August Derleth
"Ithaqua," by August Derleth
"The Lair of the Star Spawn," by August Derleth and Mark Schorer
"The Lord of Illusion," by E. Hoffmann Price
"The Warder of Knowledge," by Richard F. Searight
"The Scourge of B.Moth," by Bertram Russell
"The House of the Worm," by Mearle Prout
"Spawn of the Green Abyss," by C. Hall Thompson
"The Guardian of the Book," by Henry Hasse
"The Abyss," by Robert A. W. Lowndes
"Music of the Stars," by Duane W. Rimel
"The Aquarium," by Carl Jacobi
"The Horror out of Lovecraft," by Donald A Wollheim
"To Arkham and the Stars," by Fritz Leiber

One of the finest features of a Robert M. Price Mythos anthology is that he often restores the text as it was originally written. When Derleth published "The Aquarium," he excised those portions of it that concerned the Cthulhu Mythos. In TALES OF THE LOVECRAFT MYTHOS, those Lovecraftian portions are restored.

Some of the stories are not so great, one must admit. I was surprised at how bad the Mythos fiction of Henry Kuttner seems to me. And I found it questionable to reprint both of Derleth's tales together in one book, they are so similar to each other. (It was these two tales by Derleth that inspired Brian Lumley to write one of his finest Mythos tales, "Born of the Winds," which is reprinted in his fine collection, THE TAINT AND OTHER NOVELLAS).

But many of the stories are extremely good, such as "The Abyss," by Doc Lowndes. Writes Bob Price in his introduction, "'The Abyss' by Robert A. W. Lowndes has appeared more than once since its first publication in the February, 1941, issue of STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES. But all the reprints have featured an updated, revised version. Though we may trust the author's judgment and respect his decision to improve his work, we are pleased to satisfy your antiquarian curiosity by presenting the original 1941 version, in keeping with the pulp era focus of this book." The story is amazingly good.

"The Lord of Illusion" is the E. Hoffmann Price draft of the Lovecraft-Price collaboration, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." Here we can see how much of the original text (not much!) was kept by Lovecraft when he wrote his version of the tale.

"The Horror out of Lovecraft" is little more than a piece of fan fiction, and it borders on parody. However, its author, Donald A. Wollheim, went on to create DAW Books, the paperback publisher who published lots and lots of Mythos novels &c. Both he and Doc Lowndes would probably have rescued H. P. Lovecraft's fiction from oblivion had Derleth and Wandrei not established Arkham House for that especial task. (But thank Yuggoth for Arkham House!!!!)

TALES OF THE LOVECRAFT MYTHOS stands as a wonderful tribute to H. P. Lovecraft and the way he inspired others to weave their works around his Mythos. It is a fun anthology that I have returned to again and again for the sheer pleasure of reading these amusing tales.