Remarks: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Years spent on the fringes of Cthulhu Mythos fandom have conditioned me to dislike August Derleth. Yes, he is responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s work and keeping it in print, and without Derleth there may have been no modern Mythos fandom. On the other hand, he screwed around with Lovecraft’s work an awful lot, changing things, adding his own edits and re-writes and completing unfinished stories, exploiting Lovecraft’s works. It’s only thanks to S.T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s primary historian and biographer, that we have access to the true, original, unexpurgated Lovecraft texts today.

That said, I’m currently reading some Derleth collections and enjoying the stories immensely. Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, volumes 1 and 2, are relatively slim paperback published in the early 1970s with disrespectfully comical covers — one would not expect to find cosmic horror behind a cover depicting a silly-looking skull with what appears to be steam blowing out of holes in its cranium. I am far from a completist, and am certainly not a collector. I don’t feel the need to have every version of every story sitting on a shelf. As a more casual reader, though, these cheap old paperbacks are worth picking up. I bought them, and am reading them not for the Lovecraft stories — I’m pointedly ignoring them, to avoid the supposedly blasphemous Derleth edits so despised by others — but for the stories by other writers.

Volume 1 has two tales by Clark Ashton Smith, two by Frank Bellknap Long, two by Derleth himself, amd one each by Henry Kuttner, J. Vernon Shea, and Robert E. Howard*. Volume 2 has three from Robert Block**, two from Brian Lumley, a James Wade, a Ramsey Campbell, and a Colin Wilson.

Not all of these stories are gems, but they’re certainly entertaining and provide a nice sampler of other Mythos authors. Some of these authors’ works are difficult to find (I would personally lead the charge for a popular revival of Clark Ashton Smith), so an anthology with even one of their stories is a treasure. some are frightening; others are parody (“The Space Eaters” by Long features characters named “Frank” and “Howard” trying to help a man with a hole in his head; it apes Lovecraft’s beats but not his style, in so far as it’s not perilously over-written and crammed with lurid vocabulary).

I’ve been reading these stories in between my extended re-reading of Lovecraft. They keep my in a Mythos frame of mind, but provide a welcome respite from Lovecraft’s sometimes difficult, sometimes terrible, prose.

*Although I skipped the Howard story,”The Black Stone”, having a “better” version in Nameless Cults, Chaosium’s anthology of Robert E. Howard’s Mythos fiction.

**Including “The Shambler from the Stars”, which inspired Lovecraft to write “The Haunter of the Dark”. Bloch based the protagonist in “Shambler” on Lovecraft, which is not a stretch as most of Lovecraft’s narrators are based on himself; Robert Blake in “Haunter” is transparently Bloch.