The Xothic Legend Cycle

HERE is the first of a pair of tales which are more or less direct sequels to August Derleth’s seminal Mythos story “The Return of Hastur.” In fact, so close is the relation between them that “Behind the Mask” (which appeared originally in Crypt of Cthulhu #47, Roodmas 1987) almost fails to stand on its own unless “The Return of Hastur“ is pretty fresh in the reader’s mind. Here we begin to sense Lin Carter having said about all he had to say in the Cthulhu Mythos subgenre.

Too often Carter’s stories have the failing of merely rehearsing hackneyed Mythos gimmicks which are just too familiar by now to frighten. When the veil is drawn aside and we see the same old stuff, well, the story kind of falls flat. Such stories are written with a strange obliviousness to reader response. The implied reader (i.c., the audience who seems to be in view) of such tales is a first-time reader, a Mythos novice. Did Lin (or Derleth, etc.) really believe the bulk of their readers fell into that category? I doubt it. Rather, what has happened is that the author is working too hard to open up an ironic gap between the reader and the narrator/protagonist. The wide-eyed recitation of Mythos data by the narrator/character who has just discovered it (Paul Tuttle, Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, etc.) is not intended to educate us, the readers, about the Mythos. Just the opposite: These seemingly inevitable Mythos catechisms are intended to show us what novices these characters are, otherwise it would not be plausible for them to come to the nasty ends they do. They are ill-prepared for the challenge (even, apparently, after having learned all the Mythos data they throw at us!).

Tedious as these Mythos lectures are, they may be necessary; it may work. But what if the bulk of the tale is taken up with it, and even the climactic revelation is old news to us? I suppose we are being asked to see something familiar through new eyes, those of this Mythos greenhorn, and maybe we will experience a small share of vicarious horror. But this does not often seem to work. Instead, we are tempted to conclude: “Too bad! He should have checked with me first! I could have saved him some sanity points.”

You will form your own judgment concerning this particular story, but I think Lin just manages to avoid the pitfall, or at lease to climb back out of it momentarily, at the point of his description of the masked hierophant of Leng. Here he has taken the traditional picture just enough farther to make us do a double-take.