Robert Price: Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

I do not believe we can completely dismiss Derleth’s interpretations of Lovecraft, and this for two reasons. Just as an earlier generation of critics sought to strip away Derleth’s reinterpretations so that Lovecraft’s bold conceptions might clearly be seen, I believe the time has come to recognize that these critics themselves unwittingly caricatured both Derleth and Lovecraft.

Derleth was closer to Lovecraft, and Lovecraft veered closer to what they deem Derleth’s abuses, than Mosigian critics can admit.

For our purposes this entails the recognition that for the Lovecraft Mythos to continue to evolve and develop by the addition not only of new gods and new grimoires, but also by the stretching and adapting of Lovecraft’s original concepts is by no means alien to Lovecraft’s intentions. How could it be, when Lovecraft had explicitly blessed such additions as his letters to Kuttner, Derleth, and others reveal? Again a critic may reply, and some have, that Lovecraft was simply being polite. In other words, again, he was just kidding. And how do we know when he was kidding? When he failed to conform to the abstraction we have of his thought, when he didn’t say what he should have said.

Such, then, is the Mythos, and the debate over it. Now what of the book you are holding? As I have gladly admitted already, this Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos is an homage, thirty years after the untimely death of August Derleth (July 4, 1971), to his important collection Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos . Many readers, like myself, no doubt found that volume great fun. We were latter-day Lovecraftians, initiated into the wonders of Weird Tales thirty years after the fact through the paperback revival of the 1960s. While our older brothers and sisters were out protesting Cambodia and Vietnam, we were hanging around reading Conan, Doc Savage, and of course Lovecraft. We may have felt ourselves Outsiders, like Lovecraft, born out of our proper time. Only, unlike him, we felt we belonged not in the Eighteenth Century, but rather in the fourth decade of our own, when we might have bought pulps off the newsstand and even struck up an epistolary friendship with the Old Gent himself, as whippersnappers our own age actually managed to do in those golden years!

As we got our hands on those eye-torturing small-print Arkham House books, we became aware of August Derleth, too. We knew he had carried on after Lovecraft’s death, much as L. Sprague de Camp had taken it upon himself to continue the saga of Robert E. Howard’s Conan. But until the publication of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos , who in our Johnny-come-lately generation could have guessed the dimensions of the movement Lovecraft had spawned! There was a whole school! A whole cult! Soon we had read all there was by Lovecraft, and until enough time had passed for us to be able to re-read Lovecraft afresh, there were all these other Lovecraft-like tales to be read! At least it was better (though in some cases not by much!) than reading the lame fan pastiches we and our pals dashed off!

For some of us, the delight of reading Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was so great that we would in later years go to some trouble to read any other Mythos fiction we could dig up. It was always fun, even if not always of sterling quality. I have always felt a kind of historical interest in seeing how the whole sprawling thing developed. Thus I have welcomed new collections of old or new material in this vein. New anthologies like Edward Paul Berglund’s Disciples of Cthulhu (1976) and Ramsey Campbell’s New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980) were great treats, and then James Turner updated Derleth’s volume, rounding up some of the better Mythos-inspired items that had appeared in the years since the first publication, but that hadn’t made it into Campbell’s or Berglund’s collections.

All of which leads me, at long last, to the reason for and the logic of the present collection, which I hope you will place on the shelf alongside the Mythos collections just named.

Cthulhu Mythos fiction has burgeoned in the years since Derleth’s original collection. But even in the late 60s there was already an embarrassment of riches, and as a result Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos could be no more than a sampler. My goal in assembling the present collection is, in effect, to go back and do again what August Derleth did: to assemble a flagship Mythos collection that he might as well have assembled. It is an alternate version of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos . (Hence I am not one bit uncomfortable having the title of this book sound so much like his.) The contents of his book might as well have been these.

One respect in which Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos differs from its prototype is in its chronological scope. This volume covers the pulp era, but extends no further. We are concerned here with the foundational generation of Mythos writers. If this book generates sufficient interest, there are plans for a second volume which would cover the subsequent period, to be called The New Lovecraft Circle.

Another respect in which Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos is more restrictive than Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is in its lack of any of Lovecraft’s own tales. For the life of me, I could never see why Derleth felt compelled to include “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” Even then it was inconceivable that anyone who had picked up a book with a title like Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (for Yog’s sake!) would not already have both Lovecraft tales in some collection or other! Granted Derleth’s collection as a whole and in individual parts presupposed these particular stories, but why not simply warn readers in the introduction to be sure they’d read them first? So no Lovecraft this time around. That way we can make room for more of the related fiction you probably don’t already have.

If this collection is narrower in its focus, it is also wider in that I have not scrupled to include a couple of tales from pulp era fanzines, written by young correspondents of Lovecraft. I believe that in them the spirit of that wonderful time, plus the sparkle of the initial wave of Lovecraft enthusiasm, comes through and helps re-create the atmosphere of the era we are conjuring.

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos offers several tales that are anything but standard anthology fodder. While you will quite likely have a couple of them already, others you will only have heard of. Some have been reprinted only in obscure fanzines (some of these published by me!); some were reprinted so long ago that they might as well never have been reprinted as far as today’s reader is concerned.

Even so, there remains an embarrassment of riches. This book only makes a dent. Many other stories, e.g., by Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, would have fit well here. Why have I chosen these in particular? All I can say is that as a Mythos novice I read many stories by Lin Carter, Brian Lumley, Colin Wilson, and others, in which I kept running across strange names I had not read in Lovecraft or even in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos! What did they mean? Where had they come from?

Was I missing something the author assumed I’d already know? The occasional Mythos glossary was of precious little help, since their compilers seemed to feel they had rendered adequate service by compiling all the known information about this or that entity without tracing its roots, providing its context. As the years went by and I discovered more and more unreprinted, marginal, or neglected Mythos tales, I was able to put most of the pieces together.

So what I have tried to do here is to assemble the stories in which certain important Mythos names or items are either first mentioned or most fully explained by the author who created them (as you know, one Mythos author feels remarkably free to enlarge upon the creations of another!). I believe this is especially important since yet another generation of Lovecraft enthusiasts has appeared, not just since the 60s, but even since the early 80s! There are young readers who have never even seen copies of Bloch’s collection Mysteries of the Worm (Lin Carter, editor, Zebra Books, 1981), much less Campbell’s The Inhabitant of the Lake (Arkham House, 1964)! I trust this book will be a valued reference book as well as a source of much enjoyment and amusement.