Robert E. Howard’s Cthulhu Mythos and Horror Fiction

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

Del Ray – 2008

I have long wanted to read Robert E. Howard’s Cthulhu fiction. On April 15th, 2015, I added Nameless Cults: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard to my goodreads to-read list. I knew Howard had created Conan The Barbarian, and while I hadn’t read any of Howard’s stories, I had seen and loved the 1982 Conan movie. I assumed the rest of Howard’s fiction would be similar. Unfortunately, the Nameless Cults collection has been out of print for a long time, and copies are fairly expensive. Also, I have read a few books put out by Chaosium, and while the contents are usually pretty good, the presentation is quite bad. I didn’t want to spend lots of money on a book that would probably be crap. Fortunately, Del Ray books also published an extensive collection called The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.

This book is 523 pages long, and it includes 40 stories and 20 poems. As far as I understand, it is not a best of collection. These are all (or at least most) of Howard’s horror stories. I haven’t read his other stuff, but I would be surprised if at least some of his other stories didn’t have elements of horror. The 40 stories in here were enough for me though. I don’t have any desire to read more Robert E. Howard. This collection does not include all of the stories in Nameless Cults, but the ones it leaves out are mostly “collaborations” that were published long after Howard’s death. The prospect of reading a story that Robert E. Howard left for somebody else to finish does not seem at all appealing to me.

Honestly, a lot of this book is absolute crap. Howard was a hack. He wrote whatever would sell, pumping out horror, fantasy, adventure, sword and sorcery and westerns. There’s some good stuff in here, but at least half of this book was a chore to read. Anyone writing as much as Howard did was bound to get lucky now and then. A 200 page Robert E. Howard’s Best Horror Fiction collection would have been far, far more enjoyable.

I read this book because it seemed to contain Howard’s Cthulhu mythos fiction. The stories in here that are considered part of the Cthulhu canon are of mixed quality. The Fire of Asshurbanipal and The Black Stone were pretty good. Howard’s main contribution to the mythos seems to have been De Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Unspeakable Cults), a book of heinous black magic. Howard references this book in several of his stories, and Lovecraft went on to borrow it for a few of his.

Aside from the Cthulhu stuff, I quite liked Pigeons from Hell, Casonetto’s Last Song and Old Garfield’s Heart. The Dwellers under the Tomb was probably my favourite story in the collection:

“Spawn of the black pits of madness and eternal night! Crawling obscenities seething in the slime of the earth’s unguessed deeps–the ultimate horror of retrogression–the nadir of human degeneration–good God, their ancestors were men!”
The Dwellers under the Tomb

Robert E. Howard’s writing seems fairly notorious for the unfortunate way with which it deals with race. I’ve come across similar approaches with Lovecraft, Wheatley and others, but the tale in this collection called Black Canaan may well have the highest n-word count of any story I’ve read. I don’t know if Howard was a truly hateful person, but some of these tales are very likely to offend the modern reader.

There was definitely some decent stuff in here, but a lot of it felt like uninspired, poorly written garbage that was only put on paper so the author could pay his rent. After reading 40 of his stories, I have absolutely no interest in reading anything else by Robert E. Howard. I skimmed through his poems, and I had even less interest in them. I’m not a poetry kind of guy.

As I read the stories in this collection, I kept a spreadsheet with my thoughts or a brief synopsis on each one. I am including that spreadsheet here for my own reference, but it may be of mild interest to some of my readers:

Title	Synopsis/Thoughts
In the Forest of Villefère	traveler meets werewolf in forest. cuts off head
A Song of the Werewolf Folk	poem
Wolfshead	sequel to forest of villefere, man who fought w.wolf ends up in africa at a party in a castle. Is now a werewolf.
Up, John Kane!	poem
Remembrance	poem
The Dream Snake	mad old man dreams of being trapped inside a house on a hill because there is a mean snake outside.
Sea Curse	a pair of scoundrels rape and kill a young girl. Her witch aunt curses them, and they die at sea.
The Moor Ghost	poem
Moon Mockery	poem
The Little People	an unruly sister goes walking on the moors at night to be attacked by a group of elfish fairies. She is saved by a mystery disappearing druid.
Dead Man’s Hate	poem
The Tavern	poem
Rattle of Bones	solomon kane story. Goes to an inn, but his accomplice turns on him then innkeep turns on accomplice, then magician’s skeleton turns on innkeep.
The Fear That Follows	poem
The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux	boxing story. Coach shows boxer picture of his fave boxer and helps him come back and in fight. Bad story.
Casonetto’s Last Song	a devil worshipping singer sends a cursed record to the man who gave evidence at the court case that got him executed.
The Touch of Death	man sleeps in room with corpse. When candle goes out, he touches a pair of rubber gloves hanging from shelf and dies of shock.
Out of the Deep	an evil mermaid pretends to be a sailor’s corpse and starts killing a bunch of people. Same place as in Sea Curse
A Legend of Faring Town	poem
Restless Waters	pirate sells his niece to an older gent, kills her fiancee so he can make the sale. The dead lad shows up in a window and gives him a heart attack
The Shadow of the Beast	fairly racist. A black lad shoots a white man and promises to kill his sister. He hides in an abandonded house that is haunted by a gorilla. He dies. Wtf.
The Dead Slaver’s Tale	poem
Dermod’s Bane	awful ghost story set in ireland. A bad ghost pretends to be a good ghost to kill a guy, but the good ghost saves the guy.
The Hills of the Dead	solomon kane story. Solomon goes to the jungle and kills an entire tribe of vampires with a witchdoctor. Awful.
Dig Me No Grave	Cthulhu cultist sells his soul for 250 of life. Time is up. A weirdo appears in his death parlour. Ok.
The Song of a Mad Minstrel	poem
The Children of the Night	man hanging out with mates briefly discuss horror fiction. Then one takes an axe off the wall and accidentally hits another lad in head. This causes him to go back in time to a time where the picts, small little goblin people had attacked his warrior clan. He is pure blooded, so he kills them violently. He awakes and tries to kill his mate who has slanted eyes. violent, racist and bad. Not really cthulu mythos.
Musings	poem
The Black Stone	thing in hungary. Pretty Good
The Thing on the Roof	Lad wants copy of de junzt to find about mummy’s jewel. He takes jewel so monster kills him.
The Dweller in Dark Valley	poem
The Horror from the Mound	a man digs into an indian burial ground despite his neighbours warnings. A black vampire comes out and tries to kill him.
A Dull Sound as of Knocking	poem
People of the Dark	man follows his rival into a cave to kill him but gets hit on the head and remembers a past life in which he did the same thing but he was conan. A race of goblins inherit the cave and him and his rival fight them. Then he comes back to modern day and shoots the degenerate ancestor of the goblins before they kill his rival and his girlfriend.
Delenda Est	Hannibal the historic figure, comes back in ghost form to tell a pirate of a mutinous shipmate. Shit.
The Cairn on the Headland	Awful story set in ireland. A FOOL uncovers the grave where odin was buried after fighting irish army
Worms of the Earth	bran mak morn witnesses a pict die, so he summons the worms of the earth, gross mutants, to kidnap the Roman soldier who killed him. P. good.
The Symbol	poem
The Valley of the Lost	Deadly story. Cowboy gets stuck in pet cemetary cave with enemies corpse. Finds snake peoples’ lair underneath. sees their history. Comes out and dynamites entrance, then shoots himself in head. Harsh story. Cool
The Hoofed Thing	CREEPY OLD NEIGHBOUR BREEDS WEIRD BLOOD THIRSTY LIFEFORM IN HIS BEDROOM. Eats him and then man kills it with a sword.
The Noseless Horror	two lads visit their friend who has found a mummy. He also has an indian servant with no nose. The mummy is actually a lad the master killed. It comes back to life and kills him. The indian is blamed until they figure out what happened.
The Dwellers Under the Tomb	Enjoyable story about lads who go into a tomb that leads to series of caves inhabited by degenerate murderous dog people. Last few paragraphs are delish.
An Open Window	poem
The House of Arabu	a warrior goes to land of dead to find out who cursed him. Lots of babylonian mythology – absu and tiamat. Kinda interesting.
The Man on the Ground	Biercish western about a cowboy realising he’s a ghost
Old Garfield’s Heart	Listened to audiobook version while going to sleep. Old man doesn’t age. Has a heart from a native american witch doctor. They cut it out of his body and it still beats. Not bad story. Weird
Kelly the Conjure-Man	really just a character sketch
Black Canaan	story about a black guy who tries to start a rebellion of blacks against whites by voodoo. Turns men into frog creatures in a swamp. Half of the text is just the n-word. No audiobook version of this one on youtube, LOL
To a Woman	poem
One Who Comes at Eventide	poem
The Haunter of the Ring	a vampire’s dodgy ring turns a wife into a murderer
Pigeons from Hell	2 wanderers go to sleep in abandon house. One dies. Second looks guilty of murder. Sheriff comes and believes him. P. good.
The Dead Remember	Cowboy murders black couple. Woman curses him. Ghost shows up and hidden gun explodes killing him.
The Fire of Asshurbanipal	Lads break into a tomb in middle east in search of a jewel. they find it but its guarded by a demon, kin of cthulhu and yog sothoth. Pretty good.
Fragment	poem
Which Will Scarcely Be Understood	poem
Golnor the Ape	incomplete fragment about an really stupid, ugly freak
Spectres in the Dark	couldn’t be bothered reading this properly. 2 crimes, ghosts?
The House	a genius poet lived in a weird house. Mystery unsolved by the end.
Untitled Fragment	very briefly mentions von junzt’s book. Not interesting. 2 explorers about to dig up egyptian site. Nothing happens.

Well, there we go. I think I have got around to all of the main members of the “Lovecraft circle” now. I have written posts on the Cthulhu mythos fiction of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei, Frank Belknap Long, and Henry Kuttner. I know that Lovecraft corresponded with lots of other people (Fritz Leiber, James Blish…), but the guys listed above were the main ones, right? I was fairly thorough with most of them, but I think I may take another look at Clark Ashton Smith. I’m sure I’ll get around to the second generation of mythos writers at some stage in the future too.

Robert Bloch’s Contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos

A few years ago, I decided to read all of the Cthulhu Mythos fiction written by the Lovecraft Circle. I did posts on August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Donald Wandrei, Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith. The plan was to move on to Robert Bloch and then to finish with Robert E. Howard.

Before starting on Robert Bloch’s mythos tales, I decided that I should first read his best known work and its sequels. I enjoyed the first Psycho book, but I hated its sequels so much that I decided to hold off on reading Bloch again. I waited about a year and then started on Mysteries of the Worm, a collection of Bloch’s Cthulhu Mythos stories.

The Mysteries of the Worm

Chaosium – 2000 (First, shorter, version published in 1981)

The first two stories were run of the mill Lovecraftian pastiches, nothing special. The next story, The Shambler from the Stars was deadly. This is the story in which Bloch bases the protagonist on Lovecraft and then kills him off, a favour Lovecraft repaid in his The Haunter of the Dark. I really liked this one. It reminded me of that Frank Belknap Long story where he kills off a fictional Lovecraft. Murder seems to have been the highest form of flattery with these guys.

The standard of most of the stories is pretty decent. There’s a bunch towards the middle of the book that incorporate Bloch’s fascination with Ancient Egypt. I found these a bit tedious, but that was probably because I read all of them in one sitting.

I really liked the longer stories towards the end of the collection. Black Bargain, Notebook Found in a Deserted House, Terror in Cut-Throat Cove, and The Shadow from the Steeple, a sequel to Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark, were all great. These were written more recently than the others, and they feel a lot less like somebody simply trying to write like Lovecraft. Based on the quality of these stories, I would be willing to read more Bloch in the future.

I’ve long known that Lovecraft and Bloch were penpals, but I didn’t realise Bloch was only a teenager at the time of their correspondence. It’s pretty cool that Lovecraft was so encouraging to some pesky kid that kept writing to him.

Strange Eons

Pinnacle Books – 1979 (Originally published 1978)

The premise of this novel is that Lovecraft’s stories were true, and the Old Ones are about to destroy the world. This book will be an absolute waste of time for anyone who isn’t familiar with Lovecraft’s best known stories. It’s pretty silly, but I enjoyed it in a mindless way. There are entities and characters who reappear in Lovecraft’s work, but Lovecraft never tried to codify his mythos. Bloch does. Strange Eons features elements from The Call of Cthulhu, The Rats in the Walls, the Shadow over Innsmouth, Cold Air, Pickman’s Model and several more. I read through it, enjoying the references but deliberately not spending too much time thinking if they worked to create a cohesive whole. This is clearly a homage to Bloch’s old mentor, and I don’t think he meant for anyone to take it too seriously. At one point it discusses the history of the Haunter of the Dark, the story in which Lovecraft kills off a fictionalized version of the author.

This is mastubatory, fanboy trash, but it was entertaining enough. I liked it just fine.

Ok. I guess I’ll start on Robert E. Howard soon.

Donald Wandrei’s Cthulhu Mythos and Horror Fiction

H.P. Lovecraft is celebrated as one of the greatest horror writers of all time, but his fame has been almost entirely posthumous. It wasn’t until after Lovecraft’s death that two of his friends set up Arkham House to publish a collection made up entirely of Lovecraft’s own work. These men were August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. While Derleth wrote a whole bunch of second rate Lovecraftian fi ction after his friend’s death, Wandrei only contributed two tales to the Cthulhu Mythos, and both were published long before Lovecraft died.

Don’t Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei
Fedogan & Bremer – 1997

While Derleth’s Cthulhu Mythos tales are scattered throughout several volumes, absolutely all of Wandrei’s horror fiction can be found in Don’t Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei. This is a companion volume to Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei. At first I thought the completeness of these collections was pretty cool, but even the introduction to Don’t Dream notes that its comprehensive nature “may not be the best way to showcase a writer”. This is EVERY horror story the dude wrote. Some are really good, but some are not. Also, this collection does not include “The Red Brain”, one of my favourite stories by Wandrei. That one is entirely set in space, so it got included in the science fiction collection instead. In retrospect I would have enjoyed a “Best of Wandrei” collection more than a “Collected Horror” collection. Again though, I do love the idea of a nice complete collection. If you are a diehard Wandrei fan, this is definitely the book for you. I don’t know though; are there any diehard Donald Wandrei fans out there?

My primary motivation for reading Wandrei was his “Cthulhu Mythos” fiction. The two tales that are officially considered to be part of the “Cthulhu Mythos” are The Tree Men of M’bwa and The Fire Vampires. Both of these were pretty good. This collection also includes When the Fire Creatures Came. This is an early version of The Fire Vampires. The stories are actually very different, but they share the same antagonist. He goes by “Fthaggua, Lord of Ktynga” in the latter version. I really enjoyed reading both of the Fire Creature stories and would suggest you read both instead of assuming the newer version is better. Neither The Tree-men of M’bwa nor The Fire Vampires mention any of the entities from Lovecraft’s own fiction, but they’re both about a buncha Kansas City Fthagguas (malevolent aliens) coming to Earth and ruining our fun. I’m not really sure who canonized these tales as “Cthulhu Mythos”. One other story, The Lady in Gray, actually mentions the call of Cthulhu, the old ones and the colour out of space in a dream sequence. That story itself is more Poeish, than Lovecraftian, but it’s also worth a read.

Don’t Dream contains lots of other good stuff. There’s a bunch of stories about people turning into slime, one about a rifle wielding jaguar (The Witch-Makers), one about giant amoebas killing everyone (The Destroying Horde) and another about an idiot dwarf growing out of man’s leg (It Will Grow on You). The title story, Don’t Dream, is about a man whose thoughts become reality regardless of whether he wants to them to or not. Is this where the writers of Ghostbusters got the idea for the Mr. Stay-Puft scene? Uneasy Lie the Drowned was really good too. That one creeped me out.

There’s also a section at the back of this book that collects some marginalia and fecky bits and pieces. I skimmed through most of this section. You probably will too. I recommend the essay that finishes the book though. It’s an interesting look at Wandrei’s role in the story of Arkham House.

This collection was a bit much for me, but I really liked it. It contains plenty of entertaining stuff. Donald Wandrei wrote some good stories, and I recommend you read all those I mentioned above. If you’re interested in the Cthulhu Mythos fiction of Lovecraft’s close friends, you can check out my other posts on the Yog Sothothery of Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long and Henry Kuttner.

J.B. Priestley: Grandfather of Dr. Frank-N-Furter

Here’s two books by an old English wanker:

The Other Place – J.B. Priestley
Valancourt Books – 2018 (Originally published 1953)

I quite enjoyed the first few stories in this collection. None of them are particularly scary, but they’re all quite strange. The only ghost story is about a haunted TV set, and it’s going for laughs rather than scares.

It took me several months to get through the first half of the book, but I rushed through the rest in an afternoon. I think I might have enjoyed this part more if I had continued at my original pace. Reading these tales in close succession highlighted how similar many of them are. It seems that most of them are about people having visions of the past or the future. They’re all competently written and enjoyable, but looking back now it’s tricky to distinguish some of them. This wasn’t the most jaw-dropping book I’ve ever read, but I liked it. After finishing, I was happy enough to give Priestley’s novel Benighted a try.

Benighted – J.B. Priestley
Valancourt Books – 2018 (Originally published 1927)

Benighted is quite good. Yesterday, I was out for a drive with my wife, and I was telling her about the book I was reading. When I explained the plot to her, she responded that it sounded awfully like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She was dead right. This is the story of a couple who get caught in a storm and have to seek shelter in an old house full of weirdos. Unfortunately, there are no sweet transvestites in Benighted. I looked into this a bit, and it turns out that The Rocky Horror Show was directly influenced by The Old Dark House, the 1932 film version of Benighted. I was pretty embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed the similarities beforehand. I love that movie!

I’m a little surprised that Benighted isn’t better known. It starts off atmospheric and mysterious and ends quite exciting. Things get pretty heavy between the characters, and there might be a little bit too much philosophical insight for this to appeal as a straight forward horror novel. It’s creepy in parts, but that creepiness never seems to be the main point of the book. It’s hard to get too concerned about the tongueless ghoul lurking upstairs when you’re trying to figure out the single biggest obstacle to human happiness.

Still, it is fair to call Benighted a horror novel. If you look up “gothic tropes” on google, the first 3 listed are darkness, isolation and madness. Bingo! Those are the main ingredients here. This is also a novel about a labyrinthine mansion filled with a strange family’s shameful secrets. That’s pretty gothic bro. There’s no supernatural element though, so I guess this would be classed as psychological horror nowadays.

Truth be told, I had originally written a more laudatory review of these books. It was going to end with a claim that I would some day seek out the author’s other works. Then I read that he hated Irish people. Fuck you J.B. Priestley, you little jaffa prick. Glad you’re dead and if I ever come across any of your other books, I’ll stick them up my ass.

The Spectral Link – Thomas Ligotti

The Spectral Link – Thomas Ligotti
Subterranean Press – 2014

This is a very short book containing just two short stories. Like Ligotti’s other stuff, these tales are bleak, bizarre and thought provoking. The phrase “thought provoking” is generally used to describe something that encourages a multitude of ideas or thoughts, but I find that Ligotti’s work is thought provoking in the singular sense. It provokes one thought: the idea a that existence is terrible. The knowable universe isn’t just pointless; it’s actually objectively awful.

He’s serious too. Ligotti is not impressed… ever.

This post involves spoilers, so maybe read the book first if that kind of thing bothers you. Then again, Ligotti’s fiction isn’t generally the kind of stuff that will actually be spoiled by spoilers.

The first story, ‘Metaphysica Morum’, is a truly grim piece of work. Fiction doesn’t really get much darker. An unhappy man suffering from strange nightmares convinces his psychiatrist to commit suicide with him. This tale is presented in the form of the suicide note, and the drawn out, verbose narrative sometimes feels more like a homily on the virtues of self-destruction than a story. It’s not really though. There is a plot to this, and it is as nightmarish as you’d expect.

While Ligotti’s fiction is hugely miserable stuff, it can also be very funny.

“Everybody ends up badly. At best, it’s only the luck of one in a million if you don’t see it coming.”
Metaphysica Morum

I don’t think that Thomas Ligotti set out to convince anyone to kill themselves, but still, if you are feeling suicidal, maybe return this book to the library unread (and please don’t kill yourself!)

The second story, ‘The Small People’, is about a world in which regular humans live separately but alongside a race of small people. These small people live in their own cities, and their cities are forever expanding. It seems that they don’t communicate with regular people. The narrator, a boy, grows to hate these small people. I’ve read other reviews of this book that claim that this is a more conventional story than the first. That might be true, but it is easily as complicated in terms of its themes and existential implications. It seems to me that this is primarily a story about identity. Who are we in relation to each other, ourselves, our families…? Bleh, look elsewhere for a deeper philosophical analysis. This tale was unsettling and genuinely weird.

The Spectral Link is only two stories, but they’re both really good ones. This is top shelf Ligotti.

Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary

noctuary - ligotti

Thomas Ligotti – Noctuary

Carroll and Graf – 1994

Noctuary was the first Thomas Ligotti book that I read, but by the time I got around to starting this blog a year later, I had forgotten the whole thing. I’ve reviewed quite a few of Ligotti’s books recently, and I wanted to go back to reread this one.

I have to say, I enjoyed this collection less after having read Ligotti’s other stuff. A few of the stories are so weird that they went over my head, and some of them are so abstract that I found them boring. What the hell is ‘The Medusa’ about? I read it, and I understand all of the words and sentences, but I still feel like I don’t get it. Weird? Yes. Scary? No.

I think the atmosphere of these texts is far more important than their plots, and while I do appreciate some good atmospheric horror, I felt like this was a bit much. I reread Noctuary over the course of a very stressful week last month, and that might well have affected my enjoyment of the book, but I seemed to remember Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco collection being a little more to the point and quite a bit more satisfying.

There’s a compilation of very short works at the end of the book called “Notebook of the Night”. Some of these were fairly dull, but this section also contains my favourite piece in this collection, ‘The Premature Transfiguration’. This is a relatively simplistic tale about people turning into lobsters and then begging to be killed. LOL!

I’m being a bit negative here. I did actually like this book, but I seemed to remember enjoying it more the first time I read it. It took me less than 24 hours to finish it that time, but more than a week this time around. If you’re already a Ligotti fan, then check this out, but I don’t think it’s the best starting place if you haven’t read his stuff before.

The Pale Brown Thing – Fritz Leiber

001 fantasy science fiction pale brown thing

002 fantasy science fiction pale brown thing

Fritz Leiber – The Pale Brown Thing
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction January/February 1977

Late last year, I read Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness. While writing about that book, I discovered that an earlier version of the story had been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Leiber later claimed that this version, titled The Pale Brown Thing, could be read as an alternative telling of the same story rather than just a draft version of Our Lady of Darkness. I was intrigued. A few days after I published my post on Our Lady of Darkness, a kind soul emailed me scans of the two editions of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that featured Leiber. I had really enjoyed Our Lady of Darkness, but I didn’t feel the need to read another version of it straight away.

I waited 6 months. I felt like that would be enough time to put myself in the frame of mind that would allow me to both enjoy the story for a second time without it being too repetitive and to be able to remember enough of one version to compare it to the other. It was certainly long enough to allow me to enjoy the story again. I remembered enough to stay a few pages ahead of the plot, but I had forgotten enough to stay interested. Unfortunately, I had forgotten far too much to make any kind of interesting comparison between the two versions of this story. I can’t remember a single thing from Our Lady of Darkness, the longer of the two versions, that does not take place in The Pale Brown Thing. In fact, I am quite unsure as to how the second version is longer. How is it different? What did Leiber add? Is the longer version better?

I guess this is a pretty pathetic post. I’ve ended up just repeating the questions I set out to answer. Maybe I’ll reread Our Lady of Darkness in another 4 months and try again. I can conclude that reading both versions of this story is probably unnecessary if you’re not a huge Leiber fan.

I know I haven’t said much about the actual story here, but I will remind you that I wrote a post on that less than a year ago. Check that one out if you’re curious. In sincerity, I don’t plan on another reread any time soon, but I am still intrigued by Thibault De Castries and his science of megapolisomancy. Wouldn’t it be so cool if a copy of that mysterious book actually turned up?

August Derleth’s Cthulhu Mythos Fiction

After finishing up my recent series of posts on Lovecraft, I started to feel a giant shoggoth shaped hole in my life. I’ve read and then reread Lovecraft’s stories twice within the last few years, and as much I enjoy them, I reckon I should wait a while before going over them again. Fortunately, the Cthulhu Mythos did not die with Lovecraft, and there’s lots of Yog-Sothothery left to be read. Many, many horror writers have done their best to emulate Lovecraft’s style and expand the mythos he created. I’m planning to do a few posts on this stuff to see how it measures up to Lovecraft’s own writing.

From what I have read, August Derleth seems to have had more of an influence on Lovecraft’s mythos than anyone other than H.P. himself. After Lovecraft died in poverty and obscurity, two of his friends, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, became determined to get a collection of their pal’s tales published. When they failed to find a publisher, they made their own, Arkham House. If it wasn’t for Derleth, it’s possible that Lovecraft would be practically unheard of today.

On top of being a publisher, Derleth was also prolific writer. He wrote many stories that borrowed characters, places and books from the works of Lovecraft. Lovecraft did this himself. His tales often referenced monsters and books from his other stories, but there was never any real attempt to make these things fit together. (Nyarlathotep, for example, pops up everywhere but often in different roles/guises.) Derleth set about to work these different elements into a cohesive framework. He is credited with creating the term “Cthulhu Mythos”.

With this in mind, I decided that Derleth would be the first of Cthulhu’s Disciples to be featured in this series of posts. Here are 4 of his books of Lovecraftian fiction.

lovecraft derleth watchers time The Watchers out of Time
Carroll and Graf – 1996 (Originally published in 1974)

Wait, you said this post was about Derleth! That book looks like it’s by Lovecraft himself! Well, yeah, that cover is a disgrace. It’s common knowledge that Derleth wrote 99% of these stories, occasionally borrowing a phrase from the notes that Lovecraft left when he died. Other publishers were cheeky enough to list Lovecraft with Derleth on their covers of this collection, but this one brazenly lies. This contains the following tales:

The Ancestor
The Dark Brotherhood
The Fisherman of Falcon Point
The Gable Window
The Horror from the Middle Span
Innsmouth Clay
The Lamp of Alhazred
The Peabody Heritage
The Shadow in the Attic
The Shadow Out of Space
The Shuttered Room
The Survivor
The Watchers Out of Time
Wentworth’s Day
Witches’ Hollow

In truth, this isn’t great. Half of the stories in here are about descendants of the Whately family who inherit houses in Dunwich, only to find that their grandfathers were evil wizards. The houses all bear terrible secrets. Some of the other tales are very obvious Lovecraft rip offs. Every time I’d sit down and read one, I’d think, “Oh yeah, I remember this bit.” Some of it’s blatant too; ‘The Watchers out of Time’ is only a variation on Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow out of Time’.

These are Lovecraft knock-offs, and none of them reach the quality of Lovecraft’s best work. That being said, I personally enjoy Lovecraft’s middle tier stuff, and some of these tales aren’t far from that. ‘The Dark Brotherhood’, perhaps the most original tale in the collection, was pretty good. I liked ‘Witches Hollow’ and ‘The Horror from Middle Span’ too. This collection is not essential reading, but if you read it over a few weeks it’s not a horrible experience.

derleth lurker threshold

The Lurker on the Threshold
Arkham House – 1945

(The original Arkham House editions of The Watchers out of Time included this novel, but later publishers omitted it and printed it separately.)

See my complaint in the above review of The Watchers out of Time? The part where I said that a bunch of these stories were about lads inheriting houses in Dunwich and then moving in and discovering their grandfather was a wizard? I swear, I wrote that before starting this novel. This is basically the exact same as those stories except it’s far longer and more repetitive. There’s a part at the end where an anthropologist reels out a huge explanation of the relationships between the of the different Elder Gods and Great Old Ones that is kind of interesting, but otherwise this was horribly dull. There’s sections in here that were actually written by Lovecraft, but again, this is Derleth’s story. It’s dumb to have Lovecraft’s name above his on the cover. I was looking forward to finishing this pretty soon after getting started. It made me not want to read anything else by Derleth.

Also, the name of this tale and the entity in it are very similar to Lytton’s ‘Dweller of the Threshold’ from Zanoni. I wonder if that was intentional.

The Mask of Cthulhu
Arkham House 1958

At least half of the stories in this collection are about lads who inherit houses in Dunwich/Arkham/Innsmouth and then discover that the previous owner (usually one of their distant relatives) was a devotee of the Cthulhu cult.

The Return of Hastur
The Whippoorwills in the Hills
Something in the Wood
The Sandwin Compact
The House in the Valley
The Seal of R’lyeh

I honestly don’t know if this collection is any worse than The Watchers out of Time, but the stories in here are so similar to the ones in that already remarkably repetitive collection that I gained little to no enjoyment from reading this book. These tales are so dull that I actually started to wonder if I any longer had an interest in Lovecraftian horror.

In these stories Derleth pushes to organise different entities and elements of Lovecraft’s tales into his cohesive mythos. He distinguishes between the benevolent Elder Gods and the malevolent Great Old Ones like Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlehotep. Derleth is reverting to pre-Lovecraftian good vs. evil horror. For me, a huge part of the appeal of Lovecraft’s monsters is their utter disinterest in morality, and the the binary structure of Derleth’s system makes his villains here a little too similar to Dennis Wheatleyesque black magicians, doers of evil for evil’s sake. There’s a time and a place for that kind of thing, but it isn’t in Lovecraftian horror. Derleth also classifies the great Old Ones by their elemental force. (The three I mentioned above are linked with water, earth and air respectively.) This is dumb. I want crawling fucking chaos, not a god damned overgrown pokemon.

The Trail of Cthulhu
Arkham House – 1962

After finishing The Mask of Cthulhu, I was loath to begin another book by Derleth, especially one with a similar title to that piece of crap. Fortunately, The Trail of Cthulhu turned out to be a significantly more enjoyable book.

This is a collection of 5 short stories that combine to form a novel. They’re about a collection of men who come into contact with Laban Shrewsbury, an eyeless academic who needs their skills in hunting down the mighty Cthulhu. These stories were written over the course of 8 years, and they weren’t compiled until almost 20 years after the first one was published. In each tale, Derleth has to lay out the background information for his readers. All of these stories contain very similar passages explaining the conflict between the Elder gods and the Great Old Ones, the separate Lovecraftian deities, and the forbidden books. While I have already complained about repetition in Derleth’s other books, it was far easier to stomach here. Remember that these stories were originally published years apart. A bit of a reminder would have been necessary for the original readers, and I’m glad the stories weren’t edited or abridged for this collection. Also, these 5 tales have almost identical plot structures, but this isn’t as annoying as the similar plots in Derleth’s other books. The tales in The Trail of Cthulhu form a cohesive whole. They are part of a series. A certain amount of repetition in a series makes sense. The repetition in the other books is annoying because it makes it seem like Derleth only had one idea.

These are the stories:

The House on Curwen Street
The Watcher from the Sky
The Gorge Beyond Salapunco
The Keeper of the Key
The Black Island

This is not a great book. I wouldn’t even say it’s a good book. It’s horribly overwritten, and I had to force myself to get through it. All that being said, this is Derleth’s best book of Lovecraftian fiction.

Throughout this post, I tried to refer to Derleth’s work as Lovecraftian fiction rather than Lovecraftian horror because at no point during the 1000 or so pages I read by him was I afraid or even remotely creeped out. These stories have none of what made Lovecraft great. When I was slogging through these books, I kept wishing I was reading ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ or ‘The Whisperer in the Darkness’ instead. Honestly, even the best of Derleth was pretty boring. Derleth wrote a lot, and he might have written other books of Lovecraftian fiction. If he did, I don’t want to read them, but I probably would if they weren’t too hard to track down.

August Derleth The man himself

I have been very critical of Derleth’s writing, but I want to acknowledge that I have been comparing him to one of the most important horror authors of all time. (It’s hard not to do so when you’re looking at work that Derleth tried to pass off as having come from Lovecraft.) While his fiction may have been second rate, fans of modern horror owe a lot to this man for bringing Lovecraft’s work to a far bigger audience. August Derleth, I salute you.

I’m hoping that the other authors of Lovecraftian horror are going to be better than this crap. I’m considering looking at either Robert E. Howard or Robert Bloch next. I was going to do Clark Ashton Smith, but I realised as I was writing this post that I actually did a post on his Cthulhu mythos stories a few years back. I seemed to have a real bee in my bonnet about the poor quality of the physical book when I was writing that post though, so maybe I’ll do a more level headed post on Klarkash-ton’s Cthulhu mythos tales soon.

Nightshade and Damnations and Nightmares and Geezenstacks – Classic Strange Stories reissued by Valancourt

nightshade and damnations - gerald kersh Nightshade and Damnations – Gerald Kersh
Valancourt Books – 2019 (Originally published 1968)

When I added Michael Blumlein’s The Brains of Rats to my to-read list on goodreads, this book by Gerald Kersh popped up in my recommendations. It’s a highly rated collection of short stories titled Nightshade and Damnations, so I threw it on the list too.

There’s quite a few similarities to Poe here. The range and focus of these stories is similar, the general outlook is as twisted, and these stories are superbly written. Kersh acknowledges Poe’s influence by actually framing one of the tales as a submission from Edgar to a local newspaper.

Aside from Poe, the closest thing to which I can think of comparing these stories is The X-Files. There’s communities of freaks, bendy men, radioactive time travellers and immortals. Of course, these stories were published long before The X-Files was produced. While reading this, I started to wonder if Alvin Kersh, the unpleasant boss character in The X-Files, didn’t get his name from the author. (This is apparently not the case.) One can easily imagine Mulder and Scully appearing on the scene at the end of most of these tales in an attempt to figure out what has been happening.

In truth, this collection wasn’t quite what I expected. These stories are not straightforward horror, but they are weird, and some are quite creepy. I’m very, very glad to have read this book, as I enjoyed it immensely. I strongly recommend it to anyone with any interest in strange, well written short stories. (If you don’t consider yourself part of that group, fuck off.)

nightmares and geezenstacks frederic brown Nightmares and Geezenstacks – Frederic Brown
Valancourt Books – 2015 (Originally published 1961)

This collection caught me off guard. Most of the stories in here are short vignettes of speculative fiction. I wasn’t hugely impressed until I got to the 12th story, ‘The Cat Burglar’. It was at the ending of this tale that I understood the genius of Frederic Brown. While other authors throw out their ideas haphazardly, Brown takes his readers where he needs them to be before planting a one sentence bullet right into their skull. The final sentence in ‘The Cat Burglar’ is hilarious, but the plot twists in some of the later tales feel more like punches than punchlines. Frederic Brown was an excellent writer.

While many of these tales in here are lighthearted (or downright silly), some of the longer tales towards the end get quite dark. These were the ones I enjoyed the most, but I did like the rest of the book too. Stephen King claimed that this book was “particularly important” to the horror genre, and this would be true if all it contained were ‘The Joke’ and the ‘Little Lamb’. Both tales are similar in their set-up, but I enjoyed both immensely.

These two books weren’t quite what I was expecting. Most of the short story collections I’ve read recently have been ultra-violent books of trashy horror. Gerald Kersh and Frederic Brown steer clear of that approach; their writing is far more interesting and enjoyable. I wasn’t expecting the caliber of the writing to be so high, but that was just my naivety. Both books were recently reissued by Valancourt Books, and the general rule with Valancourt is that the books they put out are awesome. You should definitely read both of these collections.

My Work Is Not Yet Done – Thomas Ligotti

My Work is Not Yet Done ligotti.jpg My Work is Not Yet Done – Thomas Ligotti
2002 – Virgin

I read a lot of books, but in truth, there are relatively few authors whose books I savour. I actually hold off on reading Thomas Ligotti because I don’t want the day to come when I have already read all of his books. His low opinion of humanity is both tragically hilarious and brutal, and while I don’t necessarily share the outlook of the narrators of his stories, I find his pessimism the perfect vehicle for horror. The message that our existence has no worth is perhaps the most disturbing idea that an author can offer to 21st century humans.

My Work Is Not Yet Done is a novella and two short stories. All of these tales are about workers’ lives as part of a corporation. There’s a very Kafkaesque vibe running throughout, but Ligotti covers the bureaucratic angst with layers of supernatural horror and misanthropy and turns it into something far darker. The first act of the eponymous novella portrays a man who decides to go on a killing spree in his office after he’s unfairly dismissed from his job. I know Stephen King found himself in hot water for writing a novel about a school shooting, so I was impressed that Ligotti had done something so extreme. I won’t tell you what happens later on in the story, but I will say that it’s actually far worse than what you’d expect.

I know full well the misery of working for a company that you hate, and while I’ve only spent a little over a year working in an “office job”, I spent enough of that year fantasizing about murdering my boss to have thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Little things about the book stuck out to me. Characters have stupid names – coworkers are named Sherry, Terry, Mary, and Perry, and detectives are named Black and White. Also, the purpose of the corporations that these characters work is barely discussed – the nature of the work that the characters engage in is almost entirely passed over. Why does Ligotti omit these details? Why doesn’t he put more effort into naming his characters? Because that stuff doesn’t matter. Human beings are entirely interchangeable. You are no different to the people you hate the most. What corporations actually do doesn’t make any difference to their workers. Nothing fucking matters. Every living thing is going to die without having made any noticeable difference in the universe, a universe in which every single atom will eventually decay.

Oh, I forgot to mention that this is the first post of 2020. Happy New Year everyone!

“Generally speaking: Expect nothing but nightmarish obscenities to be born when human heads come together in intercourse.

More generally speaking: Whatever is born will ultimately grow into a nightmarish obscenity – in the grand scheme of things.”

There’s moody nuggets like this sprinkled throughout the book, but the closing lines of My Work Is Not Yet Done sum it all up. I don’t want to quote those here as it might ruin the effect when you do get around to reading it, but fuck me, they’re perfect. Please believe me when I say that this is a novella worth reading.

I’ve also reviewed Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco and The Conspiracy Against the Human Race if you’re interested. I read Noctuary years ago too, but I haven’t reviewed that one properly yet. There’s a copy of the Penguin edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe on my shelf, but I’m waiting for a special occasion to allow myself the luxury of reading it.