The Xothic Legend Cycle

HOW strange that the works of H. P. Lovecraft should include a “canon” of unfinished fragments, a phenomenon reminiscent of A Canticle for Liebowitz. How much stranger that August Derleth, he of the "posthumous collaborations" with Lovecraft (something reminiscent of Herbert West), never ventured to finish up any of these tantalizing bits and pieces, these Pnakotic fragments. That didn’t stop other writers from forcing HPL to participate in a necromantic round-robin.

Brian Lumley undertook a continuation of “The Thing in the Moonlight”, though, strictly speaking, this one wasn’t originally even a fragment, at least not in the same sense, since it began as an excerpt from a letter in which HPL described one of his dreams. Editor Jack Chapman Miske added the three opening mini-paragraphs and the last two closing ones, publishing it as a makeshift tale in his magazine Bizarre Vol. 4, #1, January 1941. (He had first called the mag Scienti-Snaps, if you can believe it!).

“The Book” represents Lovecraft's abortive attempt to make the “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet “The Book” into a prose tale. Martin Warnes picked up where HPL left off and finished it up as “The Black Tome of Alsophocus” (which, forgive me!, always makes me think of “esophagus”, as if the tome were a monograph on the Heimlich maneuver!). You may find this line story in Ramsey Campbell’s New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Lin Carter decided to try his hand at “The Descendent.” The present tale, “The Bell in the Tower”, is the result. He had planned to include it in a collection to be called The Black Brotherhood, a volume of marginal Lovecraft revision tales and posthumous collaborations. After his death I tried to press on with the project with the cooperation of Ted Dikty, but the Grim Reaper took Starmont House away along with Ted, and that was that for The Black Brotherhood.

A related idea, also regrettably cut short by the scythe, was for Lin Carter to finish up August Derleths own Celaeno fragment "The Watchers out of Time", which would have been not only poetic justice, but terrific fun. (Derleth had already incorporated some of Lin’s Mythos lore into the story.) Lin’s eyes widened with the possibility when I mentioned it to him one afternoon at a meeting of our New Kalem Club, but he never got around to it. I have a feeling, however, that someone yet may.

The first appearance of “The Bell in the Tower” was in Crypt of Cthulhu #69, Yuletide 1989.