The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos [Hardcover]

The guy certainly knows his shoggoths from his elder things
i never disagreed with him on any particular point
he's always well researched and backs up every point with quotes from lovecraft or his associates.
Indeed it is hard not to share his unconcealed distain for derleth and his corruption of the mythos with his own
judeo christain interpretation of lovecrafts decidedly amoral universe.
The only problem is too much of the author's arrogance and general hate filled bile seep throught the pages
(less so than with his lovecraft biography)
I hear the same thing from people who have attempted to correspond with him
It is a shame as he is a astute man with a dry asberbic wit and his books deserve to be read far and wide.
Read for the analysis and the research
and pay no attention to the man behind the typewriter

I not only admire the works of HP Lovecraft, I'm also a writer who has been inspired to emulate (ok, I mean rip off, but in a deferential way...) Lovecraft's work.
The problem is, with so many people contributing wordage to the body of work we know as the Cthulhu Mythos, it's inevitable that things get changed, with individual writers altering (subtly or otherwise) Lovecraft's vision to better fit their own ideas, and equally inevitable is the variation in quality on offer.

ST Joshi is acknowledged as one of the leading authorities on Lovecraft, perhaps even the ultimate authority, short of the man himself, and this volume shows why.
Now it must be said, I'm not that big on scholarly texts (I'd be rubbish trying to make sense of the various "forbidden books" that crop up in Mythos literature), but this had me riveted.

Why?

Because it's a masterpiece, pure and simple! Joshi has a style that is accessible while presenting a vast wealth of information. He is clearly a serious scholar who knows his subject inside out, but he delivers his knowledge, not in the condescending manner you tend to expect from "experts", but in a way that makes you want to read further.

For example, Joshi has a very dry, cynical sense of humour that comes to the fore when he's lambasting woefully undertalented imitators of Lovecraft. He offers clinical, objective criticism, but then he laces it with language that leaves you in no doubt how he feels about it.

But this isn't just a list of would-be Lovecraftian copycats getting their comeuppance; on the contrary, Joshi is very thorough in picking out the good stuff too. He even differentiates between good and bad examples of work by the same author. Part of the fun is finding out what he makes of any given contributor.
In all, I have to rate this book very highly. It's educational and entertaining. On the down side, I now feel entirely inadequate to the task of adding my own work to the Mythos, but hey-ho...

A note of caution to end with: if you're a big fan of August Derleth, and all the hard work he put into "keeping Lovecraft's vision alive", this probably isn't the book for you. No, seriously, I wouldn't...

I first became a Lovecraft fan-boy back in the 1970s, after I ordered August Derleth's original edition of TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS from Arkham House, and then I got ye paperback of Lin Carter's LOVECRAFT: A LOOK BEHIND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS. Those two books instilled within me an ache to write my own Mythos fiction and join ye nefarious club. I am still trying to join that club, to a deep degree, and thus any book that explores the Mythos and its authors is always of intense interest. No book has so enthralled and informed me as this study by S. T. Joshi, who over the years, having moved to my home town, has become a dear chum and the editor of several of my books. (I point this out as some people seem to think that one can not write an objective review on books penned by friends--and honey that is false and absurd.)

I love this book for its subject matter. Writing Mythos fiction is now my full-time profession and I LOVE IT. I feel certain that, with serious intent and imagination, we can write tales that are inspired by the fiction and poetry of H. P. Lovecraft that does not simply rip-off his ideas and steal his plots. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS investigates many of the writers who have attempted to do just that.

The book is divided into the following chapters:
Introduction
I. Anticipation (1917-26)
II. The Lovecraft Mythos: Phase I (1926-30)
III. The Lovecraft Mythos: Phase II (1931-36)
IV. Contemporaries (I)
V. Contemporaries (II)
VI. The Derleth Mythos
VII. Interregnum
VIII. The Scholarly Revolution
IX. Recrudescence
X. Epilogue

That Joshi wrote this book at all is something of a surprise, as he has long been loud in voicing his contempt for current Mythos fiction and we who write it, feeling that Lovecraft's own achievements as an author are tainted by people who judge him from the works that others have written under his influence. The first part of the book discusses what Joshi feels are Lovecraft's own tales within his Mythos, discussing the stories, poems and revisions that into which Lovecraft inserts mention of the Great Old Ones, their lore, their grimoires, &c. Joshi explores what he feels Lovecraft was attempting to do with these tales, and which of his stories may be so termed. This has been a long debate--what stories by Lovecraft may be called "Mythos". Is "The Colour out of Space" a Cthulhu Mythos tale when it lacks all of the usual stuff that one finds in such fiction? In a discussion concerning the composition of "Colour," Joshi adds, "It was only a few months later that Lovecraft made his celebrated manifesto that 'common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large' (Selected Letters II, page 150), and 'The Colour out of Space' embodies this message as potently and skilfully as any story in the Lovecraft canon." S. T. then goes on to use that quote by Lovecraft to prove that "The Dunwich Horror" is a bad story, an artistic failure, because it is over-concerned with "common human laws and interests and emotions," and because it apes the good guy/bad guy trope. In this I feel that S. T. is much mistaken. The first two portions of "The Dunwich Horror" are outstanding in every way, evocatively written, strange and alluring in its ideas, and with distinctive characters. It shews that Lovecraft could create fascinating characters with just a few deft strokes, hinting at much without going into dull detail. The story's climax is, I find, less successful, at times laughable. To combat this amazing cosmic force with magick powder that is sprayed from an insecticide container -- sorry, it seems to be extremely silly.

Joshi then goes on to discuss the growth of the Mythos during Lovecraft's lifetime, when writers such as Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith added tales to it. In "The Derleth Mythos" S. T. says some very ungenerous things about Derleth's additions to Lovecraftian weird fiction. I have just reread THE SURVIVOR AND OTHERS so as to do a series of video commentaries on its tales on my YouTube channel, and I was surprised to find that I found the tales in that book far better than I remembered them being. I think I had, in earlier years, been tainted by the bad-mouthing of Derleth that went on it the 1970s and onward. He did write some rather awful tales that were collected as THE MASK OF CTHULHU and THE TRAIL OF CTHULHU--but Derleth admitted that they were poor stories written to pay bills. Still, Derleth was always a very competent, if unoriginal, writer, and his story "The Survivor" is one of the finest Lovecraftian stories of all time.

Even less generous than his comments on Derleth are the comments on Brian Lumley. I think it is a great mistake to compare any other writer's fiction to Lovecraft's and then judge it as inferior. Lovecraft's aim as an author was to be an artist, to write good fiction, the very best he could, to add to Literature. That he often failed to do so is another matter, and yet his efforts have succeeded in his having now been published by The Library of America and Penguin Classics. Brian Lumley, August Derleth and Robert Bloch had no such prerogatives as writers--they were entertainers, professionals who used their pen to pay the bills, something Lovecraft could but rarely accomplish.

One sometimes becomes frustrated and irritated with Joshi's opinions, but he is always interesting and sincere. This is a great book, as history of a genre; and it can serve admirably as a guide to those who want to further investigate these tales and those who wrote them. I love this book and have read it often. I return to it always.Highly recommended.