The Old Shoe of Cthulhu

The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) by August Derleth, containing the following stories: "The Return of Hastur" (1939);  "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" (1948); "Something in Wood" (1948);  "The Sandwin Compact" (1940); "The House in the Valley" (1953); and "The Seal of R'lyeh" (1957).

August Derleth's Lovecraftian stories can send some people into a rage. The rage seems to stem from Derleth's attempt to recast the Cthulhu Mythos (a term which he coined, not Lovecraft) as a conflict between Good and Evil. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories generally suggested that the ancient aliens/gods that threatened humanity were amoral, not immoral: basically, they just wanted their universe back, and humans were the ants that were getting in the way.

So it goes. A lot of writers have continued in the Derlethian vein of Cthulhu Mythos, though -- among them, Brian Lumley, Lin Carter, and Colin Wilson. It's a subset of Lovecraftian horror, and one that's no more or less legitimate than the far larger school of Lovecraftian horror that ends every story in absolute despair and defeat for humanity. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories ended with humanity still hanging in there, somehow, though his protagonists often took it in the chin. Both schools diverge from Lovecraft's vision, then.

But as to this collection of some of Derleth's wanderings in Lovecraft-land. Well, Derleth was superior to Lovecraft in at least one aspect: his depiction of rural life. His small towns and the countryside around them generally seem fairly believable, and his rural dialects aren't absolutely bananas the way that Lovecraft's forays into self-invented rural dialect in stories that include "The Colour out of Space" and "The Dunwich Horror" tend to be.

Beyond that, there's a sort of comforting nature to Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories. His monsters aren't particularly scary. Indeed, he goes to the well of the Deep Ones (from Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth") so many times in his stories that they lose all capacity to shock. 

So, too, one of Derleth's preferred narratives, in which a person moves into a house or a region and subsequently either gets possessed by ancient, resident evil or at least severely threatened by it. Five of the six stories in this volume follow that pattern; there are an awful lot of the same type of story throughout the rest of Derleth's work as well. It's an interesting psychological obsession: Derleth, working in someone else's milieu, again and again writes about people who end up... working in someone or something else's milieu. Lovecraft himself used this plot on several occasions, though not nearly as many times as Derleth did -- and in Lovecraft's case, the affected parties are related to the ancestors who plague them in the present.

The one story here that doesn't follow this pattern, "Something in Wood," instead has its doomed character gradually possessed by a statue of Cthulhu. I guess we're really six for six in this vein, aren't we? This subset divides into two categories: people who are related to previous occupants of the house and people who aren't. The subset that cuts across these are people who are overwhelmed by the evil in the house and people who defeat it. 

Another thing that happens several times in the collection is a scene in which it's discovered that someone has vanished somehow from inside their clothes, leaving an empty outfit on the floor or on a chair as if they'd been sucked right out of it. It's a nice image when used sparingly. I enjoyed these stories, though they're not frightening and some of the breathless, italicized concluding paragraphs seem almost intentionally self-parodic. Recommended.

Innsmouth Junkies

Shadows over Innsmouth: edited by Stephen Jones (1995/Rev. ed. 2012), containing the following stories: A Quarter to Three   (1988)  by Kim Newman;  Beyond the Reef   (1994)  by Basil Copper;  Dagon's Bell  (1988)  by Brian Lumley; Daoine Domhain (1992)  by Peter Tremayne; Deepnet  (1994)  by David Langford; Down to the Boots  (1989)  by D. F. Lewis; Innsmouth Gold  (1994) by David Sutton;  Only the End of the World Again (1994) by Neil Gaiman; Return to Innsmouth (1992) by Guy N. Smith; The Big Fish (1994) by Kim Newman [as by Jack Yeovil ]; The Church in High Street (1962) by Ramsey Campbell; The Crossing (1994) by Adrian Cole; The Homecoming (1994) by Nicholas Royle; The Innsmouth Heritage (1992) by Brian Stableford; The Shadow Over Innsmouth  (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft; The Tomb of Priscus (1994) by Brian Mooney; and To See the Sea (1994) by Michael Marshall Smith.

Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft's fictional Massachusetts port town, seems to have more of a claim on the imagination of writers and readers than most of Lovecraft's concepts. While mentioned in passing in an earlier story, Innsmouth didn't really come into its own until the publication of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" in a small-press chapbook in 1936. And as that publication sold very few copies, it wasn't really until the magazine publication of the story in the early 1940's that any significant readership got to visit this curious and unwelcoming New England seaside community.

This is the first in what will soon be a trilogy of Innsmouth anthologies edited by the prolific anthologist Stephen Jones (the third arrives in January 2015). Here, the writers are all British with the exception of H.P. Lovecraft and his original story. Some of the stories occur in the British Isles, some return to Innsmouth, and some are darned peculiar.

Once upon a time, Innsmouth was just another New England fishing village. But then, Captain Obed Marsh brought back something from the South Seas. Perhaps plenty of somethings. And gradually, as the years passed and new generations were born, more and more citizens developed The Innsmouth Look. To be succinct, as people aged, they looked more and more disquietingly like giant, bipedal frogs. 

Marsh and his businesses flourished. A new church set up shop in Innsmouth, dedicated to the Esoteric Order of Dagon. And out on the Devil's Reef in Innsmouth harbour, strange beings gibbered and frolicked in the waves. Normal people began to flee Innsmouth or to disappear mysteriously, never to be seen again. This is the point in the 1920's that Lovecraft's novella begins, its narrator a man with Innsmouth heritage travelling to the town for the first time and discovering horrors.

I don't think there's a real stinker among this array of first appearances and the occasional reprint. Neil Gaiman's entry is a bit too arch to be effective as horror and not really funny enough to be effective as humour. But it's not awful. Basil Copper's period piece, set in HPL's equally fictional Massachusetts city of Arkham in the 1930's, invests the bipedal amphibians (aka the Deep Ones) with just a few too many new and plot-convenient powers, but it's still a fun read.

The Ramsey Campbell piece, from his impressively early-career collection of Lovecraft pastiches, has only a peripheral connection to Innsmouth. Going further (and farther) abroad, Nicholas Royle's "The Homecoming" uses Lovecraftian terminology and imagery in the disturbing and disquieting service of a story about just-post-Ceausescu Romania. 

Recurring supernatural investigators battle ancient menaces in several of the pieces, including those by Gaiman, Newman, and Mooney. Brian Lumley contributes a nearly pitch-perfect modern-day pastiche of Lovecraft by way of August Derleth. Michael Marshall Smith's "To See the Sea," while not a stylistic homage to HPL, is nonetheless a fairly straightforward frightener that demonstrates once again that in horror fiction, you can go home again, but you really shouldn't.

Originally, this was one of the Lovecraftian anthologies that helped kick off the revival of publications that tipped their rugose caps to the Revelator from Providence. The Titan books revised edition is a nice piece of work, as have been all their Lovercraft entries over the past couple of years. And the range of fiction here demonstrates much of the range possible when dealing with Lovercraft's legacy: pastiches are but a small portion of the fictional spectrum available to those gazing upon Innsmouth. Highly recommended.

H.P. Lovecraft's "One Froggy Evening"

Weird Shadows over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones (2005; this revised edition 2013), containing the following stories: Another Fish Story by Kim Newman; Brackish Waters by Richard A. Lupoff; Discarded Draft of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft; Eggs by Steve Rasnic Tem; Fair Exchange by Michael Marshall Smith; From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6 by Caitlin R. Kiernan; Raised by the Moon by Ramsey Campbell; Take Me to the River by Paul J. McAuley; The Coming by Hugh B. Cave; The Quest for Y'ha-nthlei by John S. Glasby; The Taint by Brian Lumley; Voices in the Water by Basil Copper.

England's Titan Books seems to have gotten into the H.P. Lovecraft business. Gratifyingly, their first two releases are the long-out-of-print tribute anthologies Shadows over Innsmouth and Weird Shadows over Innsmouth, both of which riff on Lovecraft's novella "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (which was retitled "The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth" for one American collection of the 1960's). A third anthology, Weirder Shadows over Innsmouth, came out in hardcover in late 2013, though Titan hasn't yet reprinted it in paperback.

I eagerly await Completely Normal Shadows over Innsmouth.

Most of the stories were original to the volume, with a couple of exceptions. Lovecraft's early 1930's novella about a New England coastal town inhabited by human/man-sized-frog hybrids really seems to strike a chord with a lot of writers. It's not my favourite Lovecraft novella, but it is a good time. And with the sea containing an awful lot of volume to contain multitudes of sinister, intelligent servants of the malign Great Old Ones, the novella offers a lot of avenues to explore. Or canals, to keep with the aquatic theme.

The Deep Ones are Lovecraft's ancient race of sentient amphibians, worshippers of Dagon, a demi-god-like lieutenant of the Great Old One Cthulhu, one of many beings with designs on Earth that don't include leaving humanity in charge. Or alive. The Deep Ones can produce viable offspring with human beings. Which is unusual, but so it goes. They apparently want some stuff they can only get from land-dwellers, so a pact is struck with a Yankee South Seas trader named Obed Marsh. He comes home to Innsmouth in the late 18th century having struck a pact with Deep Ones.

Consequently, Innsmouth goes to the frogs.

The stories riff in a fairly wide variety of ways on Innsmouthian horror and miscegenation. Some, like "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" by Caitlin R. Kiernan, cleverly offer stories seemingly set in the same universe as Lovecraft's original novella without slavishly imitating that novella in form or content (though Kiernan's non-linear approach to the narrative seems to me a bit of a mis-step). Others offer what could be called parallel situations, or variations on an aquatic theme -- Ramsey Campbell sends an English student-teacher on an ultimately unfortunate (though bleakly comic) detour into a mysteriously deserted village by the sea, while Paul McAuley offers up a terrifically entertaining story about a Bristol music festival where the bad drugs do a lot more damage than Woodstock's brown acid.

There are a couple of questionable inclusions here, but the problems are minimal compared to a lot of Lovecraft-themed anthologies. And the delights, whether a history-twisting, metafictionally tinged outing from Kim Newman or Brian Lumley's bleak "The Taint", are many. Highly recommended.

Arkham and Manchester

Ghosts Know by Ramsey Campbell (2011): What initially seems to be a horror novel soon turns into a murder mystery, with prickly first-person narrator Graham Wilde both the amateur investigator and the prime suspect. Wilde, the host of a Manchester call-in radio show when the novel opens, soon finds himself drawn into the world of "psychic investigators" and into the mysterious disappearance of a female teenager, Kylie Goodchild, who was ostensibly trying to track down Wilde on the night she disappeared.

Wilde's painful childhood has left him with anger-management issues that flare up verbally at unfortunate times. But he's also rightfully angry at a self-proclaimed psychic who inserts himself into the police investigation -- and then points the finger at Wilde, who's become a vociferous critic of such psychics. Wilde demonstrates on a couple of occasions the tricks people such as John Edward use to "read" an audience. And the psychic here, Frank Jarvis, turns out to be an especially odious charlatan whose tricks, Wilde believes with mounting frustration, should be transparent to all.

Campbell's use of first-person narration is solid here, and periodically leads us to question how much we actually trust Wilde and what he's telling us. Such narration also leads to a slightly different narrative voice for Campbell, whose off-beat descriptions of things have to be tailored to his narrator's relatively straightforward way of observing the world. Wilde is much more verbally inclined than he is to the visual, which makes perfect sense given his job.

The mystery aspect of the novel plays scrupulously fair with the reader. It helps, of course, to realize this is a murder mystery, but once one goes back to the relevant earlier sections of the novel, upon the revelation of the culprit, the whole thing has indeed been laid out fairly. There's a decent helping of humour here, both bleak and not-so-bleak. Wilde's callers sometimes seem to be completely addled, while Wilde, when angered, sometimes verges on Yosemite Sam-level outrage that he can barely contain.

As with many of Campbell's works, this one deals in large part with the scars, physical and psychic, of childhood, and the ways in which they have shaped the adults the children become. And one last twist towards the end of the novel comes like a kick in the stomach. Highly recommended.


　

The Watchers Out of Time by August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft (Collected 1974): Besides collecting and keeping in print the stories and letters of H.P. Lovecraft for 30 years at the small press he co-founded, Arkham House, August Derleth also published the work of many other fantasy and horror greats while also maintaining a thriving writing career himself. He's one of fantasy literature's most indispensable figures for Arkham House alone.

Derleth also extrapolated a number of stories from notes, fragments, and sections of letters left by H.P. Lovecraft. This collection actually lists Lovecraft as the primary author (as Derleth himself would have), though there's little here that's actually written by Lovecraft. And I've actually read enough pastiches and homages derived from Lovecraft's Commonplace Book to recognize a couple of examples here.

The bad news is that Derleth's odd love of italics, especially for the concluding paragraph of a story in which terrible things are revealed, is displayed here. Boy, I hate that, and I'm not alone.

The good news is that while Derleth lacks Lovecraft's weird imagination, he can sometimes make up for this with a superior sense of how to depict rural settings and rural residents. Derleth, a regional Wisconsin writer when he wasn't Lovecraft's posthumous Boswell, has a fine eye for natural description. Even a slight story like the first one collected here, "Wentworth's Day", benefits from that studied and accurate creation of an isolated rural world.

Other than a story or two too many about Lovecraft's Innsmouthian hybrid human-amphibians, this is a solid collection. It's also weirdly soothing, which is not something I'd say about Lovecraft's work. The one real debit here is that Derleth's last work, which gives the collection its title, appears here unfinished as it was on Derleth's death in the early 1970's. Given Derleth's own work finishing up Lovecraft, surely someone could have paid Ramsey Campbell or Brian Lumley -- two discoveries of Derleth in the 1960's who are still popular and active writers today -- to complete the story. Preferably without concluding italics and exclamation marks. Recommended.