The Xothic Legend Cycle

Introduction: Xothic Romance

THE PRESENT collection provides a generous portion of Lin Carter’s work in the Cthulhu Mythos. What it excludes in the main is his considerable body of stories written in the form of chapters from the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, and the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Most of these should appear either in the Chaosium or in a projected volume, The Book of Eibon by Clark Ashton Smith and Lin Carter. What The Xothic Legend Cycle includes is the set of his Mythos stories set in the modern day, usually contemporary with the Lovecraft and Derleth stories upon which they are based.

Of these Lin had segregated a group of five (“The Thing in the Pit”, “The Dweller in the Tomb”, “Out of the Ages", “Zoth-Ommog", and “The Winfield Heritance") to comprise the chapters of an episodic novel resembling Derleth's The Trail of Cthulhu (available again from Carroll & Graf). These stones appeared in the mid-seventies in a handful of anthologies, and it was not easy for the interested reader to sit down and read them together. This novel he eventually submitted to Arkham House under the collective title The Terror Out of Time, a title that Lovecraft neglected to choose from the paradigmatic table, bur just as easily might have. (The title did appear, however, on a collection of some of the pulp stories of Lovecraft's collaborator/revision client Clifford M. Eddy, Jr.) This was a doomed effort, since following the passing of August Derleth, Arkham House seemed to repeat the fate of poor Amos Tuttle, undergoing a horrific transformation after death. Arkham House, it seemed, was no longer very keen on publishing, or even tolerating, that Cthulhu Mythos stuff. It was as if the American Bible Society had kept their name bur decided to quit wasting their time publishing scripture! Thus The Terror Out of Time was burn out of time and found no home.

I have included these stories, in some cases substituting earlier working titles Lin had used for the stories, which seem more fitting to me. Hence, “Zuth-Ommog" has been restored to “The Horror in the Gallery“, while I have retained the published title for “The Thing in the Pit”, instead of changing it to “Zanthu", as Lin intended for the book publication. Partly this is because I am not quite publishing the collection he intended, as is evident from the simple fact that these stories do not stand alone. They premiered as individual stories, and that is how they appear here, flanked by several other tales, some of which have quite as much mutual interconnection with the Terror Out of Time tales as these do among themselves. Most of them participate in that elder lore Lin called the Xothic legend cycle. This refers to the alien star Xoth where Cthulhu’s three offspring were spawned. It is patently obvious that Ghatanothoa, the chief bogey of Lovecraft’s “Out of the Aeons”, is Cthulhu under another name, so Lin, determined to harmonize the two stories (that is, to find some way of placing both in the same narrative universe), decided that Ghatanothoa must be the son of Cthulhu. The other two are Carter creations de novo: Zorh-Ommog and Ythogtha. The entities are connected, by means of the discovery of their images and of certain ancient manuscripts (the Zanthu Tablets and the Ponape Scripture) containing their lore, with the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities. Characters whose names and adventures reverberate throughout the whole group of tales include explorers Abner Exekiel Hoag and Harold Hadley Copeland, curators Henry Stephenson Blaine, Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, and Bryant Hoskins, together with various latter-day Blaines and Hoags, etc.

Lin Carter’s contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos, one can see, is quite extensive, contributing new entities, books, and eerie locations to the Mythos megatext which seem to me on a par with the Mythos work of Ramsey Campbell. I believe that fact will become clear to any who have missed it, now that the whole Xothic cycle is available in one volume. Even readers already familiar with the original published versions are in for a treat, since Lin made numerous changes and expansions in the versions I have used here.

Lin Carter once styled himself not only a member of what he dubbed "The New Lovecraft Circle", but even as "the Last Disciple." That might seem both an arrogant and a short-sighted boast, as if he were Hegel announcing that philosophy had reached its final acme with him, or the Prophet Muhammad proclaiming himself the Seal of the Prophets. But that would be the wrong way to see it. When Lin Carter claimed to be the Last Disciple, it was a trick of perspective, like one of those posters which show the United States from the chauvinistic viewpoint of a New Yorker or a Bostonian. From where Lin Carter was standing, the whole genre of Cthulhu Mythos fiction seemed to be a great and mighty Ganges flowing toward him. Or think of it as a chain of tradition of which he found himself the inheritor. It all seemed to have aimed itself at him as its destination with the seeming inevitability that hindsight lends to random events.

Lin Carter saw himself as the fortunate possessor of a great inheritance, left to him by the likes of Lovecraft. Derleth, Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and Robert E. Howard. Thus he was much like the typical protagonist of his own or Derleth’s Mythos tales: the scion of a doomed line, inheriting a legacy that is either a blessing or a curse, depending on which side you’re on. In fact, the single, central theme of his Cthulhu Mythos tales is the widening wake of “the Copeland Bequest", a collection of Pacific Island relics and idols brought back by archaeologist Harold Hadley Copeland and bequeathed to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities. Everyone it touches it marks for terrible doom, so chat history repeats itself again and again. Even this standard feature of Mythos fiction can be understood as an allegory of reading for Carter’s oeuvre: By writing pastiches, simply reshuffling the deck and retelling the old stories of Lovecraft and Derleth, Lin was doing what modern Structuralist and Post-structuralist poetics tells us is happening with every literary text. To read or to reread a text is to rewrite the text.

Lin Carter’s stories are much like the ancient Targums, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible dating from around the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. Most Jews in the Holy Land no longer commonly spoke Hebrew, the language of the Bible, so for their benefit paraphrases, something like today’s Living Bible, were prepared in Aramaic, the sister language to Hebrew, which most Jews were then speaking. What is important for today's scholars about these paraphrases is that they preserve popular interpretations of the scriptures. They are fossils of ancient reader response. We read the scriptures for ourselves, but we must not suppose that the ancients read what we do when they perused the same text. Each community of interpreters has its own set of lenses through which it reads the same text, with widely variant results. We all unwittingly bring presuppositions to the texts. When we see an ancient reader recording in a paraphrase of the scripture what he thought the scripture meant, we have a priceless window into the way the text was being understood then.

In the late 1970's and early 1980's, Lin Carter revived Weird Tales as a series of paperback anthologies, he lovingly recreated the unique magazine, not necessarily as it was, but as he remembered reading and enjoying it, and pleasant memory distorts. In the same way, his Derlethian fiction is a record of what he read when he read the tales of Lovecraft and Derleth years before. He had really rewritten the stories years before, when he read and reread them in his youth. It was years later that he formalized it by putting pen to paper. For a similar case, take the difference between the book and the movie named Psycho II. The book was Bloch's own sequel to his original Psycho. The movie (like its own sequels) was the sequel, nor so much to the original novel or even to the original film (quite close to the novel), but rather to the movie as viewers remembered it, a sequel to the legend of Psycho (as Marc A. Cerasini pointed out to me). To tell you the truth, I preferred the movie version of Psycho II.

So Carter was trying to pass onto you the Mythos as he himself knew it and loved it. Some readers recoil, they think, because Carter (or Lumley or Derleth) has dared to rewrite Lovecraft or the Mythos. In fact what they cannot stomach is the fact that it is Carter’s rewriting which is on the printed page rather than their own, which they naively equate with “the real HPL.”

Let me be a bit more specific about the matter of rewriting the earlier fictions of one’s predecessors. There are two points to get straight here, about Lin Carter’s stories and about anyone else’s. The first is that, as Gerard Genette shows us, any pastiche is also a parody, an exaggeration of the original writer’s or story’s most characteristic marks, if you decide to write a Conan pastiche, chances are you are going to wind up having the mighty Cimmerian swear “By Crom!” a few more times than Howard did per story. You will probably increase the quotient of “skull-cleaving” blows, etc. Since the smaller details of the warp and woof of Howard’s style work so well, hypnotizing you as you read, you cannot quite identify or explain them, and thus you cannot quire take aim at them to imitate them in your pastiche. To compensate, you lean more heavily on the most obvious stylistic trademarks and hope the reader will think it sounds like the real thing. This is of course the reason, also, for the way many fan Mythos pastiches turn out. As immature writers, their authors cannot account for what it is in Lovecraft’s stories that grabs them so. So they go overboard with the most blatantly obvious feature, the Myrhos names and monsters. The pitiful result only makes it all the more obvious that this was never really the secret at all.

The other thing about rewriting, pastiching, is this: It is like trying to reduplicate the results of a favorite recipe you got from your mom or grandmom. You are using pretty much the same ingredients, but it’s not an exact science. It is human imperfection that allows for human individuality. And that’s good! That way, even several writers who are trying their best to imitate Lovecraft, let’s take the young Ramsey Campbell, the young Henry Kuttner, and the young Robert Bloch, each has his own unique spin. So does Lin Carter. If his tales were exactly like Lovecraft’s stories, they would be Lovecraft’s stories, which, one senses, is what some critics really want. They would like all Lovecraftian fiction besides Lovecraft’s to be reduced to nullity; they wish anyone else never to have written. I don't.

As to the how of the thing, I must repair to the Structuralists again. Not that there is no one else from whom to learn it; Lester Dent, with his Mad Libs-like plot board, was already doing Structuralism without knowing it. But I think Claude Lévi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp have drawn some helpful maps for us better to know what we’re trying to do when we write. Lévi-Strauss stressed the importance of the paradigmatic axis along which a story is told. That is, a plot may be almost endlessly repeated without the reader not noticing or at least nor caring much, in tale after tale. The story is not monotonous as long as the Mad Lib blanks are filled in with different options every time. The author has something like a grammatical paradigm before him every time he sits down to write. Who’s the hero going to be? Choose from “male” or “female.” “Old” or "young.” Will the hero be a cowboy? A spy? A swordsman? An average Joe forced into heroism by circumstances? Take your pick. There will be some wrong to redress. What sort will it be? Kidnaping of a maiden? Of a child? Theft of a magic medallion? Or a magic sword? By whom? An evil wizard? An estranged husband? Etc. The various options available in the paradigm are what give the story much of its variety, even if the plot does not vary. Again, read any dozen or three dozen Doc Savage novels: You'll find the same set of narrative roles divided up among a new set of names each time. But so flexible was Lester Dent’s imagination that it never grew tiresome!

The plot is plotted (no coincidence!) along the syntagmic axis. This is the train of logic that carries things along, the narrative syntax, like the governing structure of single sentences. The path proceeds through this set of windings and not that. Even here, what you do is choose from the set of options at each plot juncture: victory? Defeat? Temporary’ setback? Apparent defeat that is later revealed as a victory? There is an infinite number of possible combinations as the writer reshuffles the deck each time, spinning the wheel again for every narrative.

Cthulhu Mythos stories tend to vary more along the paradigmatic axis than along the syntagmic axis. That is, having read your Lovecraft or your Derleth, you have a pretty good sense of what is finally going to happen, though maybe not yet to whom it will happen. Will the doomed delver be a Miskatonic University prof this time? An antiquarian? A genealogist? What sort of secret will he discover? An ancient tablet? An ancestral diary? A forbidden book? And whose unwelcome attention is he going to attract? An ancient sorcerer (like Joseph Curwen, Keziah Mason, Ephraim Waite?), an Old One? If so, will it be Cthulhu, Tsarhoggua, Shub-Niggurath? Narrathoth? Does it matter?

One way to mark the difference between traditional Lovecraftian writing and the New Wave is that the latter dares to experiment more with the syntagmic axis. Different sorts of things happen in Campbell's collection New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos than did in Derleth’s Tales of the Ctbulbu Mythos. You’re off the scale with both axes left dangling when you get to Creation Press’ collection Starry Wisdom.

Lin Carter, though, was definitely a traditionalist. He just shakes up the paradigmatic dice, whispers “Yig eyes!“, and lets ‘er rip. But you know the game he’s playing. It’s the one he’s always played, with the same rules, the same narrative syntax.

One trait of Carter’s did prove an Achilles Heel, at least when it came to his Cthulhu Mythos fiction. He shared the fan’s enthusiasm for the jots and tittles of the Mythos as a system of lore, just as Trekkies pore over those manuals of the imaginary schematics of the Enterprise. To me, Star Trek lover that I am, that seems a bit much. One might view the sort of thing some of us Lovecraftians do, like compiling Mythos glossaries and theogonies, in the same light. I have that fascinated fixation on Mythos lore myself, in case you hadn't noticed. I do not consider it a fault, as long as you don’t let it run away with you. How do you know when you are in danger of letting it run away with you? I’d say one major symptom is when you start writing stories about the Cthulhu Mythos instead of stories that merely utilize the Cthulhu Mythos. Sometimes, I admit, Lin Carter very definitely did the former.

David C. Schultz maintains that the Mythos is only a set of atmospheric props and should never be brought to center stage. This is the flaw for which Fritz Leiber excoriated Brian Lumley’s The Transition ofTitus Crow. I think Schultz is entirely correct. Being fascinated with Mythos lore in no way means you think that the stories should be about that lore. But Lin Carter did think so. He would even say up front that he wrote a particular story just to get some new Mythos items in print (and thus admitted to the official canon). This is like when a monkish pal of Erasmus asked him why the critical Greek text of the New Testament he was compiling (it was the first one after the Medieval use of the Latin Vulgate) did not contain I John 5:17b (“For there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.”), the single biblical passage in support of the dogma of the Trinity. Erasmus replied that, though he was as Trinitarian as the next guy, he had to admit that the passage was not found in any ancient Greek manuscript known to him. It must have been penciled into the Vulgate to provide after-the-fact evidence for the doctrine. So he had to omit it. He agreed to include it after all if his friend could turn up a Greek manuscript containing the text. It wasn’t long before he did, though Erasmus suspected it was not in fact more ancient than a few days! In the same way, Lin was not above writing out a tale of the Mythos to provide a scriptural citation for a piece of theology he had just dreamed up.

I know it’s a tightrope we all sometimes walk; so much so that to some it must seem there is no difference between a story that uses the Mythos and one that about the Mythos. After all, the collection you are reading, like all its fellows in this series, does not contain randomly selected horror fiction, maybe a little Hawthorne here, a little Stoker there. No, what we have here is a bunch of stories whose supposed virtue lies precisely in their being "Cthulhu Mythos" titles. So aren’t the stories really about the Mythos? Aren’t we playing a pathetic game of self-deception when we pretend stories are not about the Mythos but only utilize it, sounding almost as if we regretted its presence but are able to tolerate it as long as it doesn’t become too obtrusive?

I would prefer to put it a bit differently than the venerable Schultz does. I would say that the Cthulhuvian lore functions as a subtext for the rest of any story in which it appears. I am assuming Michael Riffaterre’s concept of subtext in his book Fictional Truth. What gives a fictional narrative its ring of truth? Deep down, Riffaterre argues, we all take for granted the correspondence theory of truth. That is, we imagine that “true" statements are those which accurately correspond to the way things are. Historians should report "history as it actually happened", as the dictum of Franz Overbeck had it. Art should be strictly representational, even superreal, not that crap by Picasso. This is where the larger literary category of verisimilitude comes in: A story cannot draw the reader into a "temporary willing suspension of disbelief" (Coleridge) unless it answers, for the most part, to the rules of reality as the reader defines it. A reading public who believed much more in divine providence than we do might find Charles Dickens’ wild coincidences less jolting than we do. When we find ourselves saying, "Oh come on now'” we know the author has lost us, has fumbled the ball. He has forfeited verisimilitude and the reader rudely awakens to the fact that he is just spending his time reading some story some guy made up.

The use of a subtext provides a hidden layer of symbols with which the surface narrative text will resonate, and to which it will seem to correspond. The subtext might be a set of conventional assumptions or sentiments which the reader can be expected to hold. Then the surface events of a horror tale will ring against them like the hammers moved by the piano keys striking on the strings inside. Stephen King does this quite well, e.g., in Pet Cemetery by erecting the superstructure of the zombie tale (which by itself would be mighty hard to take seriously) upon the hidden foundation of a subtext of real-life tragedy: the horrendous aftermath of the mundane death of a child. The latter is a horror only too real to any reader who has been close to a real-life case of it.

In its opening chapters, the Gospel of Matthew depicts the Messiah as being born miraculously of a virgin, fleeing persecution by repairing to Egypt, entertaining magi from Parthia who have timed his birth from their star charts, etc. All this is built upon a subtext, a substructure of scripture citations ("This happened so as to fulfill the scripture, saying, 'Out of Egypt I have called my son' {Hosea 11:1}"). These fictive events would have sounded scarcely more credible to the ancients than they do to us, except that Matthew undergirded them with a subtext layer of scripture-citation. Did those Old Testament texts really foretell the gospel events? Hell, no! It’s a trick! Literary sleight-of-hand. Lovecraft’s tales work the same way. They lay a groundwork of ancient myths (of Cthulhu, etc.) of which glimpses surface in the story once present-day events start to seem to correspond to them. The air of menace in "The Call of Cthulhu" would dissipate quickly if we were to remove all the references to the ancient cult of the Old Ones, the Necronomicon, the Eskimo diabolists, the theosophical Masters in Tibet, etc. If all we knew was that some castaway on Gilligan’s Island suddenly had a big green octopus-man chasing him, it would look as stupid as that idiot flick Yog, the Terror from Beyond Space. Mythos tales work best when the Mythos is seen but nor heard. It stays a subtext. It does its indispensable work behind the scenes. Bur if we drag it our on stage, it ceases being the subtext. If the subtext becomes the story, we are in trouble, because the Mythos can no longer be taken for granted as hoary and ominous background. In the foreground it will be seen for what it is, like the Great Oz once he is forced to emerge from behind his curtain. With the Mythos on stage, it finds itself dangling in the air, twisting in the wind, because it has no subtext of its own on which to rely. Or does it?

August Derleth brought the Mythos into the spotlight in his Mythos tales, with Laban Shrewsbury and Seneca Lapham giving windy disquisitions on its details and conundrums. Derleth seemed to know he had to try to set the Mythos against some subtext of its own, and to serve this purpose he invoked genuine mythology, usually ancient Greek, biblical, and Polynesian. He hoped the Mythos, which was now itself the great bogey, would ring true against the ancient tales of the Titans, Satan’s fall, and a bunch of frog totems. Famously, this failed. He sank the Titanic, because all these myth cycles were already so familiar to the reader that, far from lending exotic and esoteric ambiance to the Mythos, they tended to reduce the Mythos to the contemptuously familiar, to make it mundane textbook fodder. Derleth played taxidermist and taxonomist: He killed and stuffed the Mythos so as to install it safely and motionlessly in its place in the museum exhibit.

Lin Carter, too, has flipped the boat over. He has, like Derleth, made the Mythos the protagonist of the story (at least sometimes), and for his new substitute subtext Carter employs the previous Mythos fiction of Derleth and Lovecraft. If the story rings true, it is ringing off the bell of the stories it is retelling. As Tzvetan Todorov says, all parodies, pastiches, and plagiarisms, to be understood and appreciated for what they are, must be seen as translucent to their source material. If not, then it’s like an in-joke that you happen not to be in on. “I guess you had to be there.” Thus, Lin Carter’s stories strike readers in one of two ways: You think, "This story was a lot better when Derleth wrote it!" or “Hey, this is the real thing! Just like Derleth!” It’s like a mystery story when someone is searching for a secret panel in the wall by tapping against one section of the wall, then another. When the echo sounds thick, immediate and pat, you know your cap is just resonating through the solid wall going away from you. When it sounds hollow, like an echo, it means your tap has passed through intervening air and is coming back as an echo from a farther, inner wall. Voila! If you like Carter’s Mythos pastiches, you’re measuring the distance between Carter’s story and its Lovecraftian or Derlethian source/subtext, and it rings true. If Carter’s story seems flat and pat, it is likely because it seems to lie directly atop its source, like a layer of sheet rock.

A quick survey of Lin Carter’s Mythos fiction, such as I give in the chapter "The Statement of Lin Carter", in my book Lin Carter: A Look behind His Imaginary Worlds (Borgo Press), reveals that Carter was very selective in his choices of which portions of Lovecraft’s canon he would take as his chief inspirations. He did not start in the center but rather at the margins. What I mean is that his own Mythos tales often tend to be sequels to stories from particular categories of tales in which Lovecraft’s genius was diluted with the influence of others. For instance, some of the stories in this collection branch off Lovecraft’s revision tales, stories ghost-written for a client, perhaps based on some minimal plot-germ supplied him by Hazel Heald or Zealia Bishop. While the prose in these tales is usually 100% Lovecraft, one can sense a certain lack of seriousness, a tendency toward self-parody and pulp magazine extravagance, that does not characterize the stories he knew would appear under his own byline. It is this "Lovecraft on vacation", this frivolous alter-ego Lovecraft, that Carter recognized as a kindred spirit.

Another favorite Lovecraft source for Carter was “Through the Gates of the Silver Key*, the collaboration between HPL and E. Hoffmann Price. This was not something Lovecraft would ever have written by himself, and even in its finished form it contains large amounts of prose and conceptuality from Price. It is not straight Lovecraft. Since Lin was not planning to write straight Lovecraft (who could?), this collaboration appealed to him as a kind of prototype for what he did plan to do: a mix of Lovecraft and his own stuff.

"Straying" even farther into deuterocanonical territory, Lin Carter found to his liking certain of August Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations" with Lovecraft. These are stories (now available in two paperback volumes from Carroll & Graf, The Lurker at the Threshold and The Watchers Out of Time) in which Derleth did no more than to choose some idea from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and write a tale of his own based on it. They are like a can of Slice or Sunkist: They make a great noise about being refreshing cirrus drinks, bur the label reveals that they contain but a molecule or two of actual juice. In The Lurker at the Threshold, Derleth had actually incorporated a couple of pages of Lovecraft’s prose, extended notes for three different stories he might have gotten around to writing someday. Carter was, again, much influenced by this novella. Another Derleth tale that attracted him was "The Return of Hastur", one that made no pretense of containing Lovecraft verbiage, but which was, to some degree, written under Lovecraft’s supervision, as was “The Lair of the Star-Spawn”, the title of which HPL even supplied. These foundational stories of the emergent Derleth Mythos proved seminal for Carter as well.

Remember, Lin Carter was not so much interested in Lovecraft’s work in its own right, but rather as the root of the Cthulhu Mythos. Thus when he staked his claim to mine the rich acres of Lovecraft’s texts, the section he chose was right on the border, where others had already prospected. Or to return to our earlier categories, he had his own reading of Lovecraft, to be sure (and you will be surprised to see how close it is to that of Richard L. Tierney and Dirk W. Mosig if you read Lin’s Lovecraft: A Look behind the "Cthulhu Mythos", a new edition of which, revised and corrected by yours truly, will soon be available from Borgo Press). Lin was also well aware that there were other readings of Lovecraft, such as Derleth’s, and he wanted to draw upon all of them. Lovecraft’s were not the only set of bony shoulders he stood upon, and unlike many others of whom the same is true, he knew it.

Happy Magic!

Robert M. Price

August (Derleth) 24, 1996