Lovecraft through the lens of Bloch

I always forget that Robert Bloch was part of the Lovecraft circle. He seems too young to have been one of Lovecraft’s pen pals and he also seems like he’s at least one generation further in the development of horror.

Well, to be fair, he was the youngest member of the circle, still a teenager when he was a part of it. And, while he started out writing Lovecraftian tales, he moved on to develop his own style and voice.

Reading the Mysteries of the Worm, a collection of some (but I don’t think all) of his Mythos works, a number of things struck me. 

First of all, a lot of stories are meh. Which isn’t unreasonable, seeing as how young he was when he wrote most of them. However, they don’t show the promise of how good he was going to become. His afterward pretty much agrees with that assessment lol

But I can’t ignore that some of the stories, The Shambler from the Stars in particular, were influential and important to the Mythos. Not only did Shambler give us the memorable star vampire, it inspired Lovecraft to write the Haunter of the Dark. (Bloch and Lovecraft killed each other in their respective stories because that’s how they had fun)

The other thing was how hard Lovecraft’s death affected Bloch. I hadn’t realized how important a mentor, as well as a friend, Lovecraft was to him. Lovecraft did a lot to push Bloch into becoming a writer. And Bloch was also well aware how unknown Lovecraft was to the world at large when he died. Lovecraft’s passing was devastating for Bloch.

(I get why some people are August Derleth haters. But we wouldn’t have the world of the Mythos without him)

The best story in the book is, unsurprisingly, one of the last ones written. Terror in Cut-Throat Cove, despite having one of the most hackneyed titles _ever_, is a rich and unnerving work. I was reminded of Ramsey Campbell’s The Faces of Pine Dunes in a very positive way. It is Bloch approaching Lovecraft is a very Bloch way.

For me, Mysteries of the Worm was an archeological dig into both the history of the Mythos and Bloch.

Failed Anatomies reminds of how bleak Delta Green is

 Reading Delta Green: Tales from Failed Anatomies, I found myself thinking that I was reading literature based on a RPG that was, in turn, based on literature. 

Honestly, given the fact that more and more intellectual properties have become multi-media entities, that actually doesn’t seem unusual or strange anymore. Products exist in many different formats.

Really, it’s been that way for decades. The deregulation of the 80s allowed intellectual properties to become toy lines and cartoons and comic books and greeting cards all at the same time. And I think that it is safe to say that the definitive version of any intellectual property is whatever you want it to be.

And while the end goal of a multimedia franchise is $money$, I also think that it has become more and more refined to the point that some of it really is art. Because there is some good writing in Failed Anatomies.

Delta Green started out life as a supplement for Call of Cthulhu, the original RPG of Lovecraftian horror. The extremely short version is that it is centered around the government’s response to the Mythos.

The original source book (which I got out and looked at while reading Failed Anatomies) was heavily built around flying saucer conspiracy theories with the grays being actually literal puppets of the MiGo. The official stance of the US government is that of collaborators and Delta Green is a disgraced, officially disbanded, clandestine group trying to stave off the end of the world.

I was actually surprised how narrow the scope of the original Delta Green was. The franchise has grown enough that I had forgotten it’s humble beginnings. However, even from the start there is one core element of Delta Green that has really given some bite:

The stars _will_ be right. The end is coming. Unfathomable eldritch abominations will rise. It is inevitable. And Delta Green may not be fighting to give the world a little more time but only to extend the ignorance of what will happen.

Even by the standards of Call of Cthulhu’s cosmic horror, that is heavy.

Failed Anatomies embraces that bleak despair. The stories form a timeline from the Innsmouth raid (perhaps the only time Lovecraft had the government get involved) to the End. I’ve seen that formula before but Failed Anatomies uses it well. And there are no happy endings.

Failed Anatomies shows why Delta Green continues to be a part of the Cthulhu Mythos. Not because Call of Cthulhu needed the X-Files or Men in Black. But because Delta Green makes cosmic horror visceral.

In Hydra, Kuttner achieved cosmic horror

It’s been about a year since I last wrote about the late Henry Kuttner, author of wonderfully pulpy works in the thirties through fifties. While I had read some of his stuff as soon as I was old enough to find it in library anthologies, I hadn’t realized he was part of the Lovecraft Circle. (To be fair, the internet really wasn’t around when I was doing most of my Kuttner reading)

And, when I did read some of his Mythos work, I felt it fell short of both cosmic horror standards and the  standards of some of the other stuff that Kuttner wrote. However, when I came across a reference to a Mythos being called Hydra that was different than Mother Hydra of the Deep Ones, I went down the rabbit hole to read his short story ‘Hydra’

And in doing so, I found what is the most Lovecraftian thing I’ve read so far by Henry Kuttner.

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Foolish person learns why messing with unearthly abominations is a bad idea

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The plot isn’t really a surprise

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Two foolish students stumble upon an occult ritual that ends horribly for everyone involved. The basic plot is pretty standard. The good stuff is in rhe details and the complete and utter despair.

The title entity is an ocean of gray goo that has a multitude of heads floating on  it. The heads aren’t Hydra’s own heads but those of its victims, who it drains of intelligence while keeping them alive in eternal agony.

Yeah, that’s some solid nightmare fuel.

The ritual that lets it take its victims is fascinatingly convoluted. Its followers published a pamphlet on astral projection. However, Hydra can open a portal whereever your projection goes and take innocent heads.

Soooo… other than getting in touch with a cosmic horror, the person who performs the ritual gets off Scott free? Not going to lie, other than the inevitable insanity, that’s a pretty sweet deal by Mythos standards.

The story also doesn’t explain why the cultists published the pamphlet for innocent people to accidentally use _rather than perform the ritual themselves_

The actual conflict of the story ends up the protagonists being haunted and harried by the severed head of their mentor who they accidentally sacrificed to Hydra. Don’t worry. It ends up working out badly for everyone involved.

Hydra is the most successful Mythos work I’ve read so far by Kuttner due to the visceral horror and existential concept of an eternity as a severed head being tortured in a vast, god-like sea of gray slime. That’s some cosmic horror world building.

From cosmic horror to twee escapism?!

Last year, I read The Burrowers Beneath and The Taint and Other Novellas by Brian Lumley. I decided it was time to go back to him and read the second Titus Crow book, The Transition of Titus Crow.

Lumley, like Ramsey Campbell, is one of the authors who helped keep the Cthulhu Mythos alive before it became a pop culture phenomenon. He has a reputation for writing Lovecraft Lite, meaning that humans can win. To be fair, it’s not like Lovecraft himself didn’t write some stories like that. That said, some of what I had read definitely veered away from cosmic horror, embracing the idea that humanity could understand all the eldritch stuff out there.

Then I read The Transition of Titus Crow. Ooooh boy. Not what I expected.

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Seriously, I’m going to talk about the entire book here.

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At the end of the Burrowers Beneath, Titus and his best buddy Henri de Marigny just barely escape death and worse at the hands of the Great Old Ones via an artifact called the Time Clock, which is a space-time ship that is intelligent and bigger on the inside and Lumley has sworn is in no way based on the TARDIS. 

de Marigney falls off and Titus goes off of his own to have his own crazy adventures while de Marigney recovers ten years in his own future.

And those adventures feel like they came out of a Victorian work. Obviously the Time Machine by Wells is a clear influence. In fact, the first chunk of Crow’s part of the narrative feels like a pastiche of the Time Machine.

But the book gets weirder and cozier with less and less of any trace of cosmic horror. While Crow has adventures with dinosaurs and ancient Romans and gets changed into a cyborg by a helpful robot (that’s the transition in the title), he is also dealing with the Hounds of Tindalos (who are far more escapable than in Frank Belknap Long’s story)

This culminates in a confrontation with Yog-Sothoth. Where Crow realizes he can use the power of the Time Clock to terrify Yog-Sothoth into submission and that it can fire energy beams that will will drive the elder god off. Crow then goes to a magical fairy tale paradise ruled by Cthulhu’s friendly older brother to live with a magic girlfriend.

What did I just read?

We’ve gone from ‘humans can win’ to ‘Great Old Ones are wimps’ Instead of cosmic horror, this is twee escapism. Even if you interpret it as Titis Crow actually died and went to Heaven, that’s still a far cry from cosmic horror.

The epilogue, after both Crow and de Marigney have gone to Elysia, brings us full circle though. We learn that Cthulhu has brought down natural disasters on New England and Miskatonic University has been completely destroyed.

So, the adventure continues and there is still the promise of horror to come.

All the same, that was one weird read.

Why I think Ithaqua is cool

 October is almost done. Time for one more Mythos post!

One of my personal favorite Great Old Ones and my favorite that wasn’t made up by H.P. Lovecraft is Ithaqua, the Wind Walker.

A big part of that is one of my earliest exposures to Mythos was a collection of Wendigo legends, stories and anthropology references that I can’t seem to find any record of. (Mostly because pop culture has now become super saturated with Wendigo and there’s so much out there) It included The Thing That Walked On the Wind and Ithaqua.

I know that there is plenty of nostalgia involved but I think Ithaqua is Derleth’s best addition to the Mythos.

But there is an additional reason why I think Derleth’s creation of Ithaqua is so solid. He blatantly and pretty openly stole quite a bit from Algernon Blackwood’s novella The Wendigo.

Blackwood’s story has informed so much of the popular idea of The Wendigo. Heck, a simplified version of the story is in the children’s book Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Even if you don’t know you know the story, you probably know it. If ‘oh my burning feet of fire’ rings a bell, this story is where that comes from.

The elevator sketch is that a hunting guide gets taken by the Wendigo, possibly partially transformed into a Wendigo himself. While the lost guide, or the Wendigo disguised as him, briefly reappears, the guide does not truly reappear until they find him dying of exposure.

One of the reoccurring motifs of the story is that the Wendigo has strange, deformed or unnatural feet. The footprints are wrong and when the guide is under the sway of the Wendigo, his feet are unnatural as well. Indeed, the feet are never truly seen but only briefly glimpsed as dark and oddly massed.

Written in 1910, the Wendigo captures many cosmic horror elements. The northern woods become a liminal space. (I wrote that sentence just so I could use the word liminal.) The characters enter another world, one they don’t understand. And one is horribly transformed by the experience.

More importantly, the Wendigo is never truly defined or even seen. There is no explanation for it or its nature. It is outside the context of the hunters’ experience. Blackwood wrote eldritch cosmic horror before that was cool.

To be fair, he had already done that in his earlier story The Willows.

Many earlier authors influenced Lovecraft and the Mythos. Usually, though, there is some changes along the way. (Ambrose Beirce’s Hastur doesn’t resemble the Hastur we know and dread today) Blackwood, on the other hand, gave Derleth Ithaqua in a package with a bow.

Where I’m mean to Henry Kuttner

I have been going through a phase of reading a bunch of Henry Kuttner’s short stories after I read his Hogben stories. And, in the process, I learned he was a part of the Lovecraft Circle. That’s the bunch of folks who not only wrote Mythos stories but corresponded with Lovecraft himself.

And the circle included some pretty big names. Robert E Howard. Clark Ashton Smith. Robert Bloch. August Derleth (who is admittedly more famous for keeping Lovecraft in print than anything he wrote) And there are others (Like Frank Bellknap Long, who seems to only be remembered for writing The Hounds of Tindalos. Which is worth remembering) Lovecraft was a letter writing fiend.

But I wasn’t familiar with Kuttner being part of the circle and I’ve been reading Mythos stuff for most of my life. And it’s not like I’d never heard of Kuttner. I first read his Gallagher stories in high school.

So I went and read some of the stories that were part of Kuttner’s Mythos work. And, for the most part, it fell short of having a Mythos feel. I’m not asking for cosmic horror and despair but I do want some level of greater scope and the inexplicable.

The best of what I read was the Graveyard Rats, which has nothing remotely Mythos related. It probably just gets lumped in because it’s a really strong, cracking good story. Well, that got me to read it so I’m not complaining.

The Spawn of Dagon was one that particularly struck me because it used the deep ones as essentially a competing race with humanity, not something outside of nature and rational thought. It was pulpy sword and sorcery with a Myrhos post it on it.

Not that there is anything wrong with pulpy sword and sorcery. And it can be combined very well with Mythos. Robert E. Howard’s Worms of the Earth is a magnificent example of blending those two genres.

Kuttner could write. Just not Mythos.

There are many authors who took the seeds that Lovecraft planted (in a graveyard on a moonless night, possibly using a human femur for the shovel… I let the metaphor get away from me, didn’t I?) and wrote memorable works. For me at least, Kuttner didn’t pull it off.

Brian Lumley’s fun with the Cthulhu Mythos

A long time back, possibly when life was still crawling out of the ocean and the Elder Things still thought Shogoths were a good alternative to bulldozers, I first saw the entry in the Call of Cthulhu RPG entry for Cthonians and Shudde M’ell. Now, I finally have read The Burrowers Beneath by Brian Lumley.

I’m honestly not sure Lumley is obscure or not as far as Mythos writers are concerned. I couldn’t find any of his books until digital publishing brought them back. But I have seen his short stories in different anthologies. He was writing before the Mythos went mainstream so he kept the fire going.

Lumley is allegedly controversial because he fully embraced the Lovecraft Lite style. That is basically defined as ‘humans can win’. So actual Lovecraft works like The Dunwich Horror count. I also think of it as the normalization of the Mythos. Not necessarily ‘the ghouls are stealing the wifi’ normal but the Mythos being a regular part of the world, not something that drives you insane.

Okay, spoiler time:

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Titus Crow, paranormal Sherlock Holmes, and his Watson Henri de Marigny figure out the existence of the burrow horrors the Cthonians and their blasphemous god Shudde M’ell. Their attempts to thwart the Cthonians put them extreme danger until they meet the Wilmarth Foundation. That’s an organization devoted to the extermination of Myrhos stuff. Our heroes help them make some major victories but the book ends on a cliffhanger.

But since there are five or six more books, I am sure Crow and de Marigny are okay.

Next, some thoughts about the work.

On the one hand, I have to give Lumley full props on creating a whole new Mythos element with Shudde M’ell and the Cthonians. On the other hand, with a detailed life cycle, the Cthonians stop being a cosmic horror and just an alien life form that is comprehensible. Water being a huge weakness also makes them one of the vulnerable Mythos creatures, giving humanity a fighting chance.

Speaking of which, the Wilmarth Foundation, with its global network, psychics, and the ability to create unlimited elder signs, are what Delta Green wishes it could be. That said, Crow and and Marigny’s induction into the foundation really  reminds me of my college group’s transition from a traditional Call of Cthulhu game to a Delta Green One. Down to the GM being the only one who knew it was happening.

I also liked how the Wilmarth Foundatiions aren’t small bands of pulp adventurers on commando missions. No, they are massive works of civil engineering, using drilling rigs to drop elder signs and bombs deep in the earth. Killing Mythos is a major endeavor.

I also have to note that, as Lovecraft Lite as the book may be, there are some horrific elements. The physical prowess of the Cthonians is not as dangerous or insidious as their psychic powers.

And the fate of the explorer Amery Wendy-Smith, his brain placed in what sounds like a Shogoth to be tortured for decades, makes the Migo’s brain canisters seem quaint.

(I also have to note that the early part of the book is full of references to not just Lovecraft works but also works by other Mythos authors like Derleth and Campbell. Back when those weren’t as widely punished as they would be just ten years after Burrowers Beneath was published) 

I had fun. I’ll hunt down more Lumley.

 

Sandy Peterson and the reading list of doom

It’s October! One of the twelve best months to talk about the Cthulhu Mythos!

During a recent conversation about how the Cthulhu Mythos has become mainstream, I commented on how much Call of the Cthulhu (the RPG, not the short story or the telephone joke) and Sandy Peterson had to do with that. One of the other folks in that conversation proceeded to send me a link to Sandy Peterson talking about just that.

I am just barely old enough to appreciate how obscure Lovecraft and his influence was before Sandy Peterson began to share his love of Lovecraft and the Mythos. I work with kids who have always had plush Cthulhu’s in the world but there was a time when Lovecraft was basically a footnote in fantastic literature. Yes, August Derleth kept his name and work alive but Arkham House was a niche publisher at best.

These days, scholars write about Lovecraft. There’s a whole genre of cosmic honor named after him that includes literature, movies, video games and music. He is held up as second only to Edgar Allen Poe. But there was like half a century when obscure and thought  of as a hack if he was thought of at all.

And, while Call of the Cthulhu and Sandy Peterson didn’t single-handedly change that, they were one of the first dominos to fall.

According to Sandy Peterson, he had been a big fan of Lovecradt way before it was cool. And Chaosium picked him to design the game because he wouldn’t view it as a joke and he would be able to make a serious game.

Looking back, I realized that Sandy Peterson did one thing that was crucial to introducing audiences to the wider world of the Mythos. (Plenty of authors were influenced by Lovecraft, even when readers weren’t) He didn’t just include a list of source materials like Gygwx did with Appendix N.

No, for every entry in the bestiary, he included a quotation from a work that introduced or used that particular horror. And he cited the name and author of that work. Peterson integrated the reading list into the rules. And he didn’t just use Lovecraft’s own works. He also quoted August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and that’s not the end of the list. Sandy Peterson gave me a reading list that I’m still not done with, literally decades after I first read  book.

And I’m going to argue that that is why Call of Cthulhu didn’t just have an impact on RPGs but on literature in general. It didn’t just introduce us to Cthulhu or H. P. Lovecraft or the idea of Cosmic Horror burning away sanity like cobwebs under a flame thrower. It showed us a broader picture of the literature of Cosmic Horror. 

Sandy Peterson didn’t single handedly make it possible for me to buy Cthulhu t-shirts. (The fact that Lovevaft is now public domain has a lot to with that too) But he had a lot to do with making the Mythos part of mainstream culture.

Mythos don’t need no continuity

I decided to read Ubbo-Sathla by Clark Ashton Smith, whose one of those authors I feel like always need to read more of.   I know the story has been co-opted into the Cthulhu Mythos because Smith was part of the Lovecraft circle and why not? The short story certainly deals with cosmic horror and nightmarish secrets man will always regret poking at.

So I then decided to look at how Ubbo-Sathla, the primordial slime that spawned all life and guards the tablets of dark gods, has been jury-rigged into the greater Mythos. The phrase proto-shoggoth came up more than once, with the idea of the Elder Things harvesting samples of Ubbo-Sathla to create those teddy bears of the Mythos, the shoggoth. 

That seemed a little odd with Smith’s story having Ubbo-Sathla kick off life on this fragile globe in a more wild and natural fashion. (Not that I think Smith had any desire to have the story fit neatly into a carefully organized cosmology)

That’s when I realized that I was going about the whole matter all wrong. A key element of Lovecraft’s flavor of cosmic horror is that the universe, in addition to being 100% uncaring, is inexplicable, beyond the comprehension of the soft, squishy human mind. Trying to categorize and organize it just isn’t playing the game, by Jeeves. 

(No offense to you, Mr. August Derleth. You know I still love you. Okay, mostly for Solar Pons but you did keep the Mythos alive)

Yes, there is value and justification in having some kind of cosmology and taxonomy for the Mythos if you’re going to have a game like Call of Cthulhu. A game like that does get a lot of help from a system and I do love me some Call of Cthulhu. 

However, that madman Clark Ashton Smith has reminded me that you can’t cling to that structure too much. Sometimes, you have to remember that the continuity of the Mythos has a lot in common with the continuity of Red Dwarf. It doesn’t make sense and that’s just fine.

A collection of harboiled Cthulhu stories

Noirlathotep is an anthology of stories that combined hard-boiled noir with the Cthulhu Mythos. The one sentence review is that it’s a mixed bag of stories but the best stories in the book are very good.

In all honesty, combining those two genres isn’t much of a stretch. Both of them came out of the pulp magazines in the early part of the twentieth century. Indeed, the private investigator, the stock character of noire, is also one of the go-to roles in the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

More to the point, while Lovecraft didn’t write anything that I’d call noire, his friend and correspondent Robert E Howard wrote stories that blended the themes, although I’ll admit that calling them noire might be pushing it. But it’s close.

Okay, I’m basically picking nits. Yes, with the exception of a couple of comedic send-ups of hard boiled detectives, there’s nothing in Noirlathotep that would be out of place in a more general Cthulhu anthology. But that completely ignores the only question that actually matters. Are the stories worth reading?

And, on the whole, the answer is yes. The greatest sin of the worst of the stories is that they were forgettable. Which is a pretty big sin but there were at least three stories that struck me and have stuck with me. Enough that if I were grading the book as a sixth-grader, I’d give it a B.

Into the Valley of San Fernando is a light hearted comedy about a PI who gets stuck looking for Cthulhu’s missing teenybopper daughters. It takes absolutely nothing serious or sacred and that’s why I think it ends up working. Sometimes, going all in works.

However, the two stories that I really liked were The Lurker in Darkness and The Shadow Over Braxton County. Both stories had a visceral level of horror while still embracing cosmic horror.

They also deal with miscegenation, which is both a reoccurring theme for Lovecraft and proof of how incredibly racist he was. Instead of ignoring this particularly unpleasant aspect of Lovecraft, the stories explore it with a lot more nuance and compassion than his works ever did. The result is effective and memorable stories.

Noirlathotep is not a perfect collection but it has some real gems.

Can’t get enough Cthulhu and Holmes

My two favorite forms of pastiches are Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu Mythos. Both are public domain so plenty of folks try their hand at either creating new Sherlock Holmes stories, sometimes with fanatic elements and sometimes just ‘lost’ stories, or opening up the can of worms that was Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. And while there is some complete garbage out there, a surprisingly amount is fun reading or even actually good.

Part of the reason why I think both subjects work so well as pastiches is because there’s a lot of room to work with. Which is obvious with the Cthulhu mythos. Compare The Strange High House in the Mist with At the Mountains of Madness. Just in Lovecraft alone, there was a wide spectrum of stories and tones. Even in his own life, his circle of friends like Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E Howard worked with elements of his ideas.

It seems a little stranger with Sherlock Holmes can inspire such a wide variety of work that, well, isn’t a train wreck. I mean, the character inspired a genre but all the stories are about two guys, Holmes and Watson. That’s a lot more limited.

I think the secret to Sherlock Holmes being open such a wide variety of interpretations and still being ‘true’ and entertaining is that the character in the original stories is pretty flat and distant. Which isn’t a dig because the original stories were driven by plot and some really good plots at that.

In comparison, Hercule Poirot has a much more defined personality and would be much harder to write about good pastiches about. Holmes is enough of a cypher that Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch all play very different Holmes that all still work.

The author who straddled both pastiches was, of course, August Derleth. While I appreciate that he kept Lovecraft in print enough to become a part of culture, he really didn’t capture the cosmic despair of Lovecraft. On the other hand, his Solar Pons stories, openly pastiches of Holmes, are a lot of fun and frankly much better written.

These pastiches are almost a guilty pleasure for me except that I don’t think there’s anything to feel guilty about.