The Xothic Legend Cycle

THIS tale, which had early borne as a working title ‘The Horror in the Gallery”, then “The Terror Out of Time”, wound up appearing first in Edward Paul Berglund’s 1976 anthology The Disciples of Cthulhu under the title “Zoth-Ommog." I am glad to have the chance to restore one of the earlier titles, which is superior despite, or rather perhaps because of, its obvious derivation from the title of Lovecraft’s “The Horror in the Museum” (though in fact it has almost nothing in common with that tale, being far more reminiscent of, “Out of the Aeons.” As a gaffe in the first edition of Carter’s Lovecraft: A Look behind the "Cthnlbu Mythos" [Ballantinc/Starmont/Borgo] reveals, Lin seems to have found it easy to confuse the two tales, since both have sections set in a museum.). The title “The Horror in the Gallery” signals the campy nostalgia of the whole enterprise, unlike “Zoth-Ommog”, which tells the reader exactly nothing. That Lin opted for this latter title perhaps reflects his not-so-hidden agenda in writing these stories: to fill in gaps he saw in the Mythos as currently outlined. The data, the system, was more important than the story, which existed simply as a vehicle for getting the new data into print. The story "Zoth-Ommog" is titled simply for the piece of Mythos data it embodies.

Yet this story rises above its underlying motivation. More than a little inspired, I suspect, by Fritz Leiber’s tribute to HPL, “To Arkham and the Stars” (see my anthology Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, Fedogan & Bremer, 1990), this story represents a radical departure in narrative technique from the approaches evident in the previous stories in this sequence. "The Thing in the Pit" and "The Red Offering" are both cast in Carter’s pseudo-Dunsanian archaic style, while “The Dweller in the Tomb” and “Out of the Ages” both employ the narrative shortcut of the journal or diary, throwing a bunch of narrative fragments at us rather in the manner of a set of story notes, which is finally all such a "story" is. “The Horror in the Gallery”, by contrast, tries (and succeeds, in my judgment) to enclose the story and the reader in a distinct and convincing narrative world of sufficient texture and color. It must be, and is, sustained by the weaving of a continuous narrative web of scene as well as summary, process as well as conclusion.

The end of the story, hackneyed though it seems, is on another level semiotically quite appropriate. When Hodgkins resolves the situation by simply throwing the star stone at the idol, we have the basic plot syntax stripped down to the bare bone: The whole story is a simple process (disguised as complex by the twists and turns of the narrative discourse) of two symbol systems pursuing a collision path. At that last moment, all the fiendish lore of the "Alhazredic Demonology" meets the wisdom of the Elder Gods (larger-than-life shadows cast by the Miskatonic savants whose advice Hodgkins seeks) head on, and all superfluities such as characters, narrative motivation, etc. drop away like booster rockets. The bare symbols themselves—the Elder Sign and the Old One idol—must finally clash, and one must annihilate the other.

Or perhaps both must annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter, and this is the moral of the story. The forces in opposition really do not have any ultimate moral reference in human terms. The Old Ones are not devils with the Elder Gods playing angels. Rather, they are an utterly alien factor aloof to and unmindful to us, but dangerous to us, like nuclear energy if we dare get in its way. The genuine Lovecraftian character of this bleak vision need hardly be pointed out, though most might not expect to see it in Lin Carter.