Cthulhu '08!!

Just as I did last October, I reread some H.P. Lovecraft for the Halloween season, though actually I read more of Lovecraft's fellow travelers than the master himself. I picked Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, a two-volume (in paperback) anthology from the 1970's with only two stories by Lovecraft, and many by his contemporaries like Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame), Robert E. Howard (of Conan fame), and Clark Ashton Smith (of rather limited cult fame), and by later admirers (Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley). I won't rehash my comments about Lovecraft, found in the link above and here, but I like the nice balance of in-jokiness and dead seriousness found in the earlier stories by the "Weird Tales" writers who chose to expand on Lovecraft's original universe of ancient unspeakable and indescribable gods, and the puny humans who either worshipped them or got in their ways and paid with their lives, or at least their sanity.

Some of the stories are basically just horror tales of cosmic monsters with a Lovecraft name (Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep or Yog-Sothoth) or place (Arkham or Innsmouth) thrown in as an easy reference. The best ones, the most fun and usually the most effective, actually engage in the specifics of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and often use Lovecraft himself as a character. Frank Belknap Long's "The Space Eaters" has Long and Lovecraft as its protagonists; it begins in a fun, cheeky manner, but moves along to become as horrific as any Lovecraft story with its unseen creatures that swoop down out of the trees to suck brains out of heads.

Volume 2 has a trilogy of stories that work together well. Robert Bloch wrote "The Shambler from the Stars," a very short story which has a unnamed version of Lovecraft (pictured at right) at its center; the character is killed horribly at the end. Lovecraft replied with "The Haunter of the Dark," a longer tale in which an author named Robert Blake investigates a mysterious old church which was the home of a blasphemous Cthulhu cult; Blake/Bloch winds up dead. Though it also has an almost jokey manner in the beginnning, it grows in power and is one of Lovecraft's most memorable stories. Years after Lovecraft's death, Bloch wrote "The Shadow From the Steeple" as a direct sequel to "Haunter" and it too is a powerful tale. There are many volumes now of stories by Lovecraft imitators, and while I think it's difficult to find a completely bad story with such inspiration, these early efforts are certainly among the best. Highly recommended, even for newcomers to the Mythos stories.

Last note: as I was standing in line (for over 2 hours!) to vote early today, I was reading one of my Cthulhu Mythos paperbacks when a reporter for Salon.com stopped to ask me a couple of questions, one of which was about my reading matter. I was a little sorry I wasn't caught with something more conventionally literary, but at the same time, I was tempted to tell him I was voting a straight Cthulhu ticket...