Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

Introduction

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.

Lovecraft, inspired no doubt by the fanciful mythologies created for various purposes by Lord Dunsany, Robert W. Chambers, and even Madame Blavatsky, ventured to weave a web of his own mythology that would in its evocative fragmentariness and misty archaism simulate the eerie and august suggestive power of genuine ancient lore. He began in “The Nameless City” (1921) by creating the mad kahin (poet-soothsayer) Abdul Alhazred and his “unexplainable couplet” that would loom so large in all subsequent Mythos fiction: “That is not dead / Which can eternal lie,/ And with strange aeons / Even death may die.”

By “The Hound” one year later, Alhazred had been made the author of a banned book of blasphemies, the Necronomicon, a title so mysterious that even Lovecraft did not understand the true meaning of it. The name came to him in a dream, apparently the fortuitous creation of his subconscious, scrambling elements of the Greek language in which Lovecraft was reasonably learned. In a waking state he reasoned out the meaning as “Image of the Laws of the Dead,” taking the middle syllable as the Greek nomos, “law,” and the last as representing ikon, “image.” In both guesses he was quite wrong, as S. T. Joshi has shown. Rather, on analogy with Manilius’s Astronomicon, a title Lovecraft knew, “Necronomicon” simply means “Concerning the Dead,” or idiomatically, “The Book of the Dead.” At any rate, the Mythos was off and running.

In 1926 he introduced dreaming Cthulhu, a titan based in part on Dunsany’s snoring creator Mana-Yood-Sushai, in a story called “The Call of Cthulhu,” itself suggested in large measure, I am sure, by certain evocative phrases concerning dead and dreaming gods in Dunsany’s “A Shop in Go-by Street.” The interdimensional being Yog-Sothoth first appeared in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) and was later central to the premise of “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). Azathoth the daemon-sultan made his debut in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-7). Nyarlathotep, a kind of combination of Thoth-Hermes and the Antichrist, first appeared as early as 1920 as a sinister charlatan in the dream-inspired prose-poem “Nyarlathotep.” This name was probably another subconscious borrowing, this time from Dunsany’s names Mynarthitep and Alhireth-hotep. The fifth of the five major Lovecraftian entities was Shub-Niggurath (surely from Dunsany’s Sheol-Nugganoth). This creature would be variously de-Over the years, often in his ghost-written “revision” tales, HPL would introduce new devil-gods. Shub-Niggurath herself started her literary life in a revision tale, “The Last Test” (1927). Other entities never or seldom ventured into the fiction Lovecraft claimed as his own. These included Nug and Yeb, Rhan-Tegoth, Ghatanothoa, and Yig, Father of Serpents.

The most important addition to the original group was Tsathoggua, a furry black bat-toad deity worshipped in ancient Hyperborea. This creature was the creation of Lovecraft’s friend and correspondent Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft simply adopted Tsathoggua into his own pantheon, just as Smith began making references to the Necronomicon and Yog-Sothoth.

It was by this sort of cross-referencing and flattery by imitation that the Lovecraft Mythos began quickly to be transmuted into the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft good-naturedly began to encourage his young proteges as well as his colleague-correspondents like Smith to expand the lore by additions of their own. When young Robert Bloch invented Necronomicon analogues including Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm (Lovecraft supplied the Latin “original” De Vermis Mysteriis) and the Comte D’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, or Cults of the Ghouls (Bloch’s invention in truth, despite Derleth’s occasional later claims to paternity), Lovecraft showed himself happy to include ominous references to them in his own tales.

He particularly liked Robert E. Howard’s creation Nameless Cults (rendered into German by August Derleth and E. Hoffmann Price as Unaussprechlichen Kulten) and made extensive use of it in a revision written with Duane Rimel, “The Tree on the Hill,” in which appeared yet another new tome, Rudolph Yergler’s The Chronicle of Nath, invented by either young Rimel or his mentor. Smith added The Book of Eibon, which Lovecraft delighted to use, and in the last stages of the game HPL had welcomed into the canon young Henry Kuttner’s The Book of Iod (rather too close to Smith’s Book of Eibon, one might judge), and probably Willis Conover’s Ghorl Nigral by Herrmann Mulder, about which HPL himself wrote a shuddery anecdote in a letter to Conover.

Much controversy continues to surround the vexed question of whether and to what extent Lovecraft meant the reader to understand his eldritch entities as unknown deities (HPL’s explicit acknowledgment of their ultimate origin in Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana would suggest this) or simply as aliens from outer space taken for gods (a la Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods), as references in many tales imply. It can be argued both ways, and the issue is further complicated if, as I think, Lovecraft intended some of the beings to be superhuman aliens and others as real gods worshipped by these aliens.

But the really crucial question in post-Derlethian interpretation of the Mythos is whether it is harmonious with Lovecraft’s conception of things to envision a cosmic war waged between different superhuman races. Derleth attributed to Lovecraft his own notion of a primordial contest between the benevolent Elder Gods and the Satan-like Old Ones. Derleth, in his introduction to Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and elsewhere, made explicit this parallel between Christian and Cthulhuvian myths.

Interpreters from Richard L. Tierney and Dirk W. Mosig on have hotly repudiated this whole schema, derisively dubbing it “the Derleth Mythos.” They saw in 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 rending of the Lovecraftian fabric, I am not convinced that critics have correctly understood Derleth at this point.

In a book that is an explicit homage to Derleth’s seminal Mythos anthology it is perhaps not amiss to take a moment to defend him. Though Derleth did sometimes in his own Lovecraft pastiches say he was pitting good entities against evil ones (he makes this explicit in, e.g., “The Return of Hastur”), it is not apparent that this turns out to make much difference. Rather we simply have protagonists like Seneca Lapham and Laban Shrewsbury defending human interests against inhuman/superhuman ones, just as we had in Lovecraft, where after all we do occasionally see Henry Armitage and Martinus Bicknell Willet trying (and even succeeding!) to prevent the planet from being cleared of human beings.

And in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” Armitage does not hesitate, as Mosig would have, to call the ancestral faith of the Whate-leys a “wicked cult.” In “The Thing on the Doorstep,” delvers into forbidden lore (“It’s the devil’s business.”) are called “evil souls.” Both authors have their characters call the Old Ones “evil” from an admittedly anthropocentric perspective, not an objective, “cosmicist” one.

Too much has been made by Derleth’s critics of the use he made of the Elder Gods/Old Ones conflict. A close look at Derleth’s Lovecraftian fiction will reveal that Derleth himself saw both groups simply as powerful races of space aliens, as ought to be obvious by his locating the Elder Gods in the vicinity of Betelgeuse (their name for which, Glyu-Vho, Lovecraft himself supplied for Derleth!). And had not HPL made considerable use of the theme of warring alien races, with human earth as their battleground?

Indeed many of Derleth’s most strident critics deem At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time” the greatest works of Lovecraft, and it is in these novellas that such conflicts between “Elder Ones,” “space-devils,” and “Cthulhu-spawn” abound!

Another modification for which Derleth’s critics cannot forgive him is his apportioning of the Lovecraftian entities among the hackneyed categories of the four elements, so that Cthulhu becomes a water-elemental, Nyarlathotep an earth-elemental, etc. Actually this was not Derleth’s idea. He accepted it from Francis T. Laney, a fan whose glossary of the Lovecraft Mythology Derleth read, liked, and reprinted. In fact we owe Derleth’s fire-elemental Cthugha to Laney: Derleth created him (in a singularly uninspired moment) to plug the gap left gaping by Lovecraft who had not obliged Laney by creating any fire-elementals… or, come to think of it, any air-elementals, either! Hence the birth of Lloigor and Zhar, and the pressing into service of Blackwood’s Wendigo under the Derlethian alias Ithaqua, and of Bierce’s and Chambers’s Hastur.

Mosig had great fun pointing out how ill-fitting the whole schema was. How could Cthulhu be a water-elemental when, on Derleth’s own reading, he was imprisoned under water! But in this case Derleth is more nearly right than Mosig, since after all Cthulhu is described as having the head of an octopus and to be served by the ichthyic Deep Ones! Cthulhu’s imprisonment is not constituted by the simple fact that he is under water, but by the fact that he is sealed in the barnacled tower of R’lyeh, as Lovecraft’s own Necronomicon quote (in “The Dunwich Horror”) says!

Even here I am willing to give Derleth (and Laney) the benefit of the doubt. Granted, the whole elemental business was handled pretty inanely, but the basic notion appears not to be so utterly foreign to Lovecraft at all. In Lovecraft’s stories it is clear that the monstrous elder races do symbolize certain geographic areas or particular landscapes which Lovecraft found potently evocative. We are told that in his night-time walks he would pause before a shadowed arch or a decrepit house and allow his imagination to people its recesses with unknown ghouls and ghosts. When he created the crinoid Old Ones in the ice-fields of Antarctica, or the crustacean Outer Ones of the domed Vermont hills, isn’t it obvious that these entities were in fact intended as incarnations of the sheer strangeness of nature in these places? In a passage of foreshadowing in “The Whisperer in Darkness” Lovecraft actually calls the Outer Ones “elemental spirits.”

Thus in an important sense, the Old Ones are indeed elementals. Can anyone deny that Lovecraft gave Cthulhu the pronounced traits of a mollusk precisely because of his loathing for wriggling sea-life? Thus Cthulhu turns out to be precisely a sea-elemental, Mosig notwithstanding.

Now if Mosig wanted to fault Derleth for writing poor stories in which what ought to remain implicit became explicit, that is another matter. But in fact it is quite evident that Mosig and his disciples were concerned to prosecute what seemed to them almost a religious heresy. They sought, in my view, to defend a system abstracted from Lovecraft, and thus more Lovecraftian than Lovecraft. Mosig had damned Derleth for, among other sins, stripping away the veil that hung before Lovecraft’s mythic lore and creating in its place a dry and over-explicit systematic theology. True, in his poorer work, much of it tossed off casually as filler for Weird Tales, Derleth did indeed commit this sin (though here he was led astray by Francis Laney, and he never sinned so grievously in this respect as Lin Carter did later).

But the pendulum swung fully to the other extreme as Mosig proceeded to substitute his own abstract system for Derleth’s, setting forth his own systematic philosophy of Lovecraft’s fiction and criticizing not only Derleth (explicitly) but even Lovecraft (implicitly) for failing to stick to it. It is amusing to note how Mosig’s successors have had to resort to dismissing Lovecraft’s own “The Dunwich Horror” as irony (“He can’t have meant it! — or my theory’s shot to hell!”) or “The Whisperer in Darkness” as self-parody. I cannot help but recall how in his seminars the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth would sometimes respond to a student question by first turning to one particularly astute graduate student and asking, “Mr. So-and-So, would you please give us the Barthian reply?… Thank you, and now for what I myself think.”

I do not believe we can completely dismiss Derleth’s interpretations of Lovecraft, and this for two reasons. Just as an earlier generation of critics sought to strip away Derleth’s reinterpretations so that Lovecraft’s bold conceptions might clearly be seen, I believe the time has come to recognize that these critics themselves unwittingly caricatured both Derleth and Lovecraft.

Derleth was closer to Lovecraft, and Lovecraft veered closer to what they deem Derleth’s abuses, than Mosigian critics can admit.

For our purposes this entails the recognition that for the Lovecraft Mythos to continue to evolve and develop by the addition not only of new gods and new grimoires, but also by the stretching and adapting of Lovecraft’s original concepts is by no means alien to Lovecraft’s intentions. How could it be, when Lovecraft had explicitly blessed such additions as his letters to Kuttner, Derleth, and others reveal? Again a critic may reply, and some have, that Lovecraft was simply being polite. In other words, again, he was just kidding. And how do we know when he was kidding? When he failed to conform to the abstraction we have of his thought, when he didn’t say what he should have said.

Such, then, is the Mythos, and the debate over it. Now what of the book you are holding? As I have gladly admitted already, this Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos is an homage, thirty years after the untimely death of August Derleth (July 4, 1971), to his important collection Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Many readers, like myself, no doubt found that volume great fun. We were latter-day Lovecraftians, initiated into the wonders of Weird Tales thirty years after the fact through the paperback revival of the 1960s. While our older brothers and sisters were out protesting Cambodia and Vietnam, we were hanging around reading Conan, Doc Savage, and of course Lovecraft. We may have felt ourselves Outsiders, like Lovecraft, born out of our proper time. Only, unlike him, we felt we belonged not in the Eighteenth Century, but rather in the fourth decade of our own, when we might have bought pulps off the newsstand and even struck up an epistolary friendship with the Old Gent himself, as whippersnappers our own age actually managed to do in those golden years!

As we got our hands on those eye-torturing small-print Arkham House books, we became aware of August Derleth, too. We knew he had carried on after Lovecraft’s death, much as L. Sprague de Camp had taken it upon himself to continue the saga of Robert E. Howard’s Conan. But until the publication of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, who in our Johnny-come-lately generation could have guessed the dimensions of the movement Lovecraft had spawned! There was a whole school! A whole cult! Soon we had read all there was by Lovecraft, and until enough time had passed for us to be able to re-read Lovecraft afresh, there were all these other Lovecraft-like tales to be read! At least it was better (though in some cases not by much!) than reading the lame fan pastiches we and our pals dashed off!

For some of us, the delight of reading Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was so great that we would in later years go to some trouble to read any other Mythos fiction we could dig up. It was always fun, even if not always of sterling quality. I have always felt a kind of historical interest in seeing how the whole sprawling thing developed. Thus I have welcomed new collections of old or new material in this vein. New anthologies like Edward Paul Berglund’s Disciples of Cthulhu (1976) and Ramsey Campbell’s New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980) were great treats, and then James Turner updated Derleth’s volume, rounding up some of the better Mythos-inspired items that had appeared in the years since the first publication, but that hadn’t made it into Campbell’s or Berglund’s collections.

All of which leads me, at long last, to the reason for and the logic of the present collection, which I hope you will place on the shelf alongside the Mythos collections just named.

Cthulhu Mythos fiction has burgeoned in the years since Derleth’s original collection. But even in the late 60s there was already an embarrassment of riches, and as a result Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos could be no more than a sampler. My goal in assembling the present collection is, in effect, to go back and do again what August Derleth did: to assemble a flagship Mythos collection that he might as well have assembled. It is an alternate version of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. (Hence I am not one bit uncomfortable having the title of this book sound so much like his.) The contents of his book might as well have been these.

One respect in which Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos differs from its prototype is in its chronological scope. This volume covers the pulp era, but extends no further. We are concerned here with the foundational generation of Mythos writers. If this book generates sufficient interest, there are plans for a second volume which would cover the subsequent period, to be called The New Lovecraft Circle.

Another respect in which Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos is more restrictive than Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is in its lack of any of Lovecraft’s own tales. For the life of me, I could never see why Derleth felt compelled to include “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” Even then it was inconceivable that anyone who had picked up a book with a title like Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (for Yog’s sake!) would not already have both Lovecraft tales in some collection or other! Granted Derleth’s collection as a whole and in individual parts presupposed these particular stories, but why not simply warn readers in the introduction to be sure they’d read them first? So no Lovecraft this time around. That way we can make room for more of the related fiction you probably don’t already have.

If this collection is narrower in its focus, it is also wider in that I have not scrupled to include a couple of tales from pulp era fanzines, written by young correspondents of Lovecraft. I believe that in them the spirit of that wonderful time, plus the sparkle of the initial wave of Lovecraft enthusiasm, comes through and helps re-create the atmosphere of the era we are conjuring.

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos offers several tales that are anything but standard anthology fodder. While you will quite likely have a couple of them already, others you will only have heard of. Some have been reprinted only in obscure fanzines (some of these published by me!); some were reprinted so long ago that they might as well never have been reprinted as far as today’s reader is concerned.

Even so, there remains an embarrassment of riches. This book only makes a dent. Many other stories, e.g., by Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, would have fit well here. Why have I chosen these in particular? All I can say is that as a Mythos novice I read many stories by Lin Carter, Brian Lumley, Colin Wilson, and others, in which I kept running across strange names I had not read in Lovecraft or even in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos! What did they mean? Where had they come from?

Was I missing something the author assumed I’d already know? The occasional Mythos glossary was of precious little help, since their compilers seemed to feel they had rendered adequate service by compiling all the known information about this or that entity without tracing its roots, providing its context. As the years went by and I discovered more and more unreprinted, marginal, or neglected Mythos tales, I was able to put most of the pieces together.

So what I have tried to do here is to assemble the stories in which certain important Mythos names or items are either first mentioned or most fully explained by the author who created them (as you know, one Mythos author feels remarkably free to enlarge upon the creations of another!). I believe this is especially important since yet another generation of Lovecraft enthusiasts has appeared, not just since the 60s, but even since the early 80s! There are young readers who have never even seen copies of Bloch’s collection Mysteries of the Worm (Lin Carter, editor, Zebra Books, 1981), much less Campbell’s The Inhabitant of the Lake (Arkham House, 1964)! I trust this book will be a valued reference book as well as a source of much enjoyment and amusement.

So here you will find the truth that had hitherto been mercifully cloaked beneath the mystifying names Abhoth, Atlach-Nacha, Unter Zee Kulten, Hydrophinnae, the Eltdown Shards, ’Umr at-Tawil, Lloigor, Zhar, the Tcho-Tcho people, Ithaqua, Iod, Vorvadoss, Zuchequan, the Chronicle of Nath, and others. Better bring along your Elder Sign.

A few notes anent a few of the stories. Most readers will know that Lovecraft penned “The Haunter of the Dark” as a sequel to Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars,” and that Bloch wrote another installment, some years later, called “The Shadow from the Steeple.” But the sharp-eyed reader will notice that Bloch’s earlier tale “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” (Weird Tales, December, 1937) is in a real sense an earlier sequel to “The Haunter of the Dark,” as it develops Lovecraft’s evocative hint, dropped in that tale, about some abominable deed wrought by the Pharaoh Nephren-Ka which caused his name to be stricken thereafter from all Egyptian stelae.

August Derleth, as we know by now, was one of the great architects of the expanding Mythos (in this connection one recalls the references in several of his tales to old mansions whose original ground plans could no longer be discerned for the profusion of extra wings and rooms added over the course of generations). He appropriated for the Mythos the legendary Wendigo as fictionalized by Algernon Blackwood in his famous story “The Wendigo.” Derleth’s Ithaqua the Wind-Walker figures in many of his stories and has come into new prominence in some of the novels of Brian Lumley. Yet the stories (“The Thing That Walked on the Wind” and “Ithaqua”) in which the Mythos version of the Wendigo debuts have lain unreprinted for so long that few readers will have seen them.

Derleth’s and Schorer’s “The Lair of the Star-Spawn” is another of the pivotal stories in the evolution of the Mythos. In it we see for the first time Derleth’s version of the “Elder Gods versus Old Ones” contest, though Derleth is still experimenting with nomenclature.

If the ending seems to you far too redolent of the Derleth Mythos attacked by Mosig, what with its celestial deliverance, just recall the bolts of lightning that shoot down from the heavens to dispatch the monsters at the climaxes of “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” By the way, Lovecraft himself suggested the title for the tale to his correspondent Derleth and later referred to its events in “The Horror in the Museum.”

I have included two tales by Robert E. Howard, the famous creator of Pike Bearfield. One will not be unfamiliar to you, “The Thing on the Roof.” I would rank this as number two behind “The Black Stone” among Howard’s best efforts at Mythos fiction. In terms of the lore it presents it runs parallel to “The Black Stone” (which was of course included in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos), providing various data concerning Von Junzt’s Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten. (May I point out that the initial article die must have stood in Von Junzt’s original, since without it the title would read Unaussprechliche Kulten?) For Howard’s references to his own Old One Gol-Goroth, you may consult his tales “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” and “The Children of the Night.”

The second Howard story, “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” is rather less well known, though not infrequently reprinted. However, what you will read here is Howard’s original version, previously published only in the Spring 1972 issue of The Howard Collector. As you will see, though this version is a tale of Oriental adventure, not of supernatural horror, it is nonetheless a tale of the Lovecraft Mythos, illustrating a crucial fact about the lore of Lovecraft: the Old Gent himself treated his “artificial mythology” as a fund of atmospheric mood generators, not as the main spectacle on stage. Howard here follows this Lovecraftian prototype.

With Richard Searight’s “The Warder of Knowledge,” we have a special treat: a story that Lovecraft read in manuscript, but which was never published — until now. Searight, you will remember, had created the Eltdown Shards, cited in his story “The Sealed Casket,” and used to good effect subsequently by HPL in “The Challenge from Beyond” and other stories. Interestingly, Lovecraft and Searight were simultaneously developing the concept of the Shards in different directions, as can be seen from “The Warder of Knowledge.” Of it Lovecraft said in a November 4, 1935, letter to Searight, “I like the story exceedingly, & hope you will not let [Weird Tales editor Farnsworth] Wright’s rejection discourage you…. The references to the Eltdown Shards are fascinating — but woe is me! I’ve given a lot of dope in that composite story [the round-robin “The Challenge from Beyond”] which conflicts directly with the true facts as here revealed!.. I also fear that I described the shards in a conflicting way. Oh, well — in sober truth relatively few people will ever see the composite yarn anyhow.” Ah, the ironies of history.

Bertram Russell’s “The Scourge of B’Moth,” Mearle Prout’s “The House of the Worm,” and C. Hall Thompson’s “Spawn of the Green Abyss” are a set of stories which do not bear all the customary Mythos touches, but which are significantly influenced by Lovecraft’s seminal tale “The Call of Cthulhu.” In Russell’s tale the scholarly protagonists are puzzled at the outlandish name of the monster B’Moth, but it turns out to be a contraction of the name of the Bible’s primeval sea titan Behemoth. The name itself reveals its owner as a cousin of Great Cthulhu.

“The House of the Worm” caught Lovecraft’s attention when it first appeared in Weird Tales (October, 1933). In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith he dubbed it one of the high points of the issue: “[Mearle Prout] is a newcomer, but to me his story seems to have a singularly authentic quality despite certain touches of naivete. It has a certain atmosphere and sense of brooding evil — things which most pulp contributors totally lack” (unpublished letter of October 3, 1933). What HPL did not remark upon was the thinly veiled opening lines of his own “The Call of Cthulhu,” which Prout appropriated almost verbatim for his later tale! You will have no difficulty recognizing them.

By the way, part of the tell-tale passage is missing in the only anthology appearances of the tale that I am aware of. The resurrected text has been abridged at many other points as well. But here you will see the complete text of “The House of the Worm,” rescued from obscurity at last.

“Spawn of the Green Abyss” partakes about equally of “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” This is one of four horror tales Thompson wrote for Weird Tales, one of the others (“The Will of Claude Asshur”) also bearing clear marks of Lovecraft’s influence. But the story goes that August Derleth intimidated Thompson into dropping the Lovecraft pastiche hobby, apparently because Thompson was working Derleth’s side of the street (and selling a better product).

“The Abyss” by Robert 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.

Carl Jacobi’s “The Aquarium” is another Derleth casualty. At Derleth’s request Jacobi wrote the tale for inclusion in Dark Mind, Dark Heart (1962), but he wrote it with certain Mythos references that Derleth promptly axed. Derleth had much more of a protective attitude toward things Lovecraftian than Lovecraft himself ever had! One may only guess that Derleth did not care for Jacobi’s independent variations on items of Mythos lore and wanted to keep things orthodox! (For the same reason, Lin Carter once remarked that, despite his zeal to incorporate data from all previous Mythos tales, he could never figure out what to do with the unorthodox reinterpretations in Henry Hasse’s “The Guardian of the Book,” also included in this volume.) The original version of “The Aquarium” appears here. From it derive, as you will see, Brian Lumley’s many later references to books of arcane seabottom lore such as Unter Zee Kulten, Jacobi’s mad creations.

E. Hoffmann Price’s “The Lord of Illusion” is a real literary surprise. It is the draft of the Price-Lovecraft collaboration “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” The importance of Price’s original for the Lovecraft scholar should be obvious: it enables one to determine precisely who contributed what to the story. For lack of access to Price’s original, more than one scholar has mistaken what were really Price’s concepts for Lovecraft’s, in the process drawing erroneous inferences as to development in Lovecraft’s thought as seen in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” Even Maurice Levy’s monumental Lovecraft is not free of this confusion.

Here is Price’s own account of how “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” came to be written, taken from his memoir “The Man Who Was Lovecraft,” in Something About Cats:

One of my favorite HPL stories was, and still is, The Silver Key. In telling him of the pleasure I had had in rereading it, I suggested a sequel to account for Randolph Carter’s doings after his disappearance. Before long we had seriously resolved to undertake the task. Some months later, I wrote a six thousand word first draft. HPL courteously applauded, and then literally took pen in hand. He mailed me a fourteen thousand word elaboration, in the Lovecraft manner, of what I had sent him. I had bogged down, of course. The idea of doing a sequel to one of his stories was more fantastic than any fantasy he has ever written. When I deciphered his manuscript, I estimated that he had left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original words: one passage which he considered to be not only rich and colorful in its own right, but also compatible with the style of his own composition. He was of course right in discarding all but the basic outline.

But as you read Price’s original, you will see that Price had modestly overestimated the extent of Lovecraft’s revision. True, the result is a largely different tale, much augmented by HPL, but much of Price’s substructure remains. Price must in retrospect be assigned a greater share of credit for the finished tale than he was willing to accept. Incidentally, as can be surmised from the cliffhanger ending of “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” the story looked forward to yet another sequel to resolve poor Carter’s fate. But by this time HPL (never really keen on Price’s original notion, as his letters to other correspondents make clear) was tired of the whole business and by no means willing to spend the time on a Part Three.

Finally, Fritz Leiber’s “To Arkham and the Stars,” a touching tribute to Lovecraft’s memory, written for inclusion in the 1966 Arkham House collection The Dark Brotherhood, is in a sense an elaborate joke, yet it is so finely wrought that one must consider it to be a serious Mythos story, at least as serious as the stories of August Derleth in which Lovecraft figures as a character in the fictional universe of the Mythos. It is most enjoyable in its own right, but beyond this it has proven to be a seminal Mythos tale, as in it we first see the depiction of Miskatonic University as having, as it were, a Mythos Studies Department.

Lovecraft had at most shown the ivy-covered walls harboring a famous collection of ancient and medieval occult works and a Department of Medieval Metaphysics. But the latter need denote no more than the study of Aquinas, Bonaventure and Averroes. It might brush up against Albertus Magnus and alchemy, and Alhazred might gain his toe-hold here. But Leiber’s Miskatonic is home to a formidable team of scholarly experts (most from experience) in the no-longer-secret Mythos: the surviving protagonists of Lovecraft’s own tales.

The same picture meets us again in Lin Carter’s “Zoth-Ommog,” Philip Jose Farmer’s “The Freshman,” and Brian Lumley’s novels of The Wilmarth Foundation (The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow, etc.). Indeed, in Farmer’s and Lumley’s tales, the seed planted by Leiber has attained fantastic growth. But it started here.

And all in all, perhaps the one thing the stories in the present collection illustrate over and over again is how the original name or notion that often reappears in subsequent Mythos fiction may have been quite modest in its intended scope, less than spectacular in its first effect. The single flake at the center of the growing snowball, as it were. And reading these original tales gives us the opportunity to appreciate the original, perhaps more subtle, impact made by these items, as well as to trace the whole process of Mythos evolution back to its Ubbo-Sathla-like sources. Herewith, the efts of the prime.