The Xothic Legend Cycle

MANY of Lin Career’s tales in this book share the premise of the narrator or protagonist inheriting a legacy that proves to be more trouble than it’s worth. (This premise was itself, of course, inherited by Carter from August Derleth and from many others.) In such stories, it is almost as if the benefactors had passed on to the next generation not their work so it might be brought to completion, but rather their own terrible fate. Lovecraft’s tales “The Facts in the Case of the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family” and "The Shadow over Innsmouth" employ this theme of the "tainted lineage" as a literal genetic transmission of non-human genes, while in other stories the inherited taint is in the form of a haunted house or a set of books. The latter is the version the theme takes in "The Winfield Heritince" (the title of which seems to have been derived from yet another tale of this type, August Derleth's “The Peabody Heritage”).

This sort of story appealed to Lin Carter especially, I think, because it so closely fit the role he saw himself playing. He viewed himself (and his generation of fans, and ours) as the heirs of a tradition of blasphemous elder lore, that of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos.

As the great yogi named Berra said, "It’s déjà vu all over again," when we come to the scene in which the "Hardy Boys" discover more scar(c)e manuscripts than you can shake a shoggoth at. Haven’t we heard of these titles before? Of course, they’re ficticious fictions, imaginary literary horrors with power to damn the soul of the reader, thus all bastard whelps of Chambers’ The King in Yellow. Not the collection of tales he himself wrote, mind you, but rather the play which he did not write but which he wrote tales about. Don’t we wish our own horror creations could have such an impact on readers and censors alike!

Lin has gathered these evocative titles from various pulp tales of horror. He has catalogued them here much as he did the Mythos grimoires in his early article "H. P. Lovecraft: The Books” (a new, updated edition of which is shortly due out from Borgo Press in the second edition of Darrell Schweitzer’s Discovering H. P. Lovecraft). The rare and potent horror tomes he lists here are nor quite heavy artillery like the Necronomicon or the Livre d'Eibon. They’re no mere Arkham House or Chaosium titles either! No, they are right in the middle, written by people like HPL or CAS, but with a little help from certain Outside forces.

Now just where did Lin get these titles? Figuring it out for yourself is part of the game, a sort of "Test Your Mythos Knowledge" quiz, as if Reader's Digest might contain such a thing. If you want to cheat, here’s the answer key. Edgar Henquist Gordon’s books Night-Gaunts and The Soul of Chaos and his story “Gargoyle” are taken from Robert Bloch’s "The Dark Demon." The weird magazine Outré is possibly derived from the amateur press zine of the same title by J. Vernon Shea. Of course, Derby's Azathoth and Other Horrors comes from Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep." Justin Geoffrey and his verse collection People of the Monolith come from Robert E. Howard’s "The Black Stone." Whispers magazine is the fictive Weird Tales analog in which Randolph Carter's shocking tales, including "The Attic Window", used to appear, according to “The Unnamable.” Amadeus Carson is a Henry Kuttner alter ego, the hapless renter of the Witch Room in "The Salem Horror", with his novel Black God of Madness reflecting his experiences in the ill-fated apartment. Michael Hayward is the author who stimulated his imagination by means of a time-vision drag in Kuttner’s "The Invaders." He was only following in the staggering footsteps of Halpin Chalmers, author of The Secret Watcher, who used the Liao drug to abet his own creative juices in Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos.” Ariel Prescott's Visions from Yaddith appears in Carter’s own “Dreams in the House of Weir” (available in The Shub-Niggurath Cycle). Phillip Howard is, believe it or not, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Lin Carter is referring to Frank Belknap Long’s "The Space Eaters", in which the narrator, one "Frank”, refers to his pal “Howard" and his “The House of the Worm” and “The Defilers”, together with the storm of protest the latter aroused among the stolid citizenry of Partridgeville. Finally, "Shaggai", ”In the Vale of Pnath”, "The Burrower Beneath", "The Feaster from the Stars", and "The Stairs in the Crypt" are the short stories Lovecraft attributes to his Robert Bloch analog Robert Blake in "The Haunter of the Dark."

"The Winfield Heritance" first appeared in Lin Carter (editor), Weird Tales #3, Zebra Books. 1981.