Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (2 page)

To pursue further the correspondences between the Cthulhu
Mythos and twentieth-century science would be pointless, since Lovecraft’s appropriation of such concepts arose not from a formal knowledge of the higher mathematics involved in, say, relativity, but rather from a sort of serendipitous temperamental insight into “the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” Historically Lovecraft had identified himself with a social and economic aristocracy that had been left behind by the modern twentieth century; an outsider in his own time and place, the dispossessed dreamer had become an outsider in the cosmos as well. The Argentine writer Julio Cortázar has suggested that “all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares, or hallucinations neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain.” In Lovecraft’s case, his conception of the universe as a harboring place of eldritch wonders is simply his outsider complex writ large; just as Lovecraft was an outsider in his own contemporary Providence, so in the Cthulhu fiction is modern man an alien entity, lost, adrift, teetering on the brink of an awesome abyss.

Thus when Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” with its intimations of the mysterious immensities of the cosmos, was serialized in
Astounding Stories
, what readers in 1936 had considered “drivel” has been proved by the scientific revolution of this century to be true. As physician Lewis Thomas observed in a recent article, “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.” With the preceding statement in mind, stop for a moment, turn to
this page
of the present volume, and read the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu.”

After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, eldritch horrors continued to abound. Lovecraft missed by a few years the accession to
Astounding Stories
of John W. Campbell, whose editorial skills and influence would dramatically improve the entire field of American magazine science fiction. For all his prodigious talents, however, Campbell maintained an essential engineering mentality—a transcendent faith in the triumph of technology and in the absolute efficacy of human ingenuity and resourcefulness—against which Lovecraft seemed like a freakish anomaly in the science-fictional firmament.

The lonely Providence recluse and his fabled fictional legacy instead were kept alive by a coterie of friends and admirers who preserved the Cthulhu Mythos like members of some secret society guarding its sacred lore and icons. To these noble efforts at preservation, which included the founding of Arkham House in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, was added the more debatable proposition of imitation.

During the 1930s Lovecraft himself had concocted ersatz Mythos
yarns for various revision clients, stories regarding which he significantly noted that “[I] wouldn’t under any circumstances let my name be used in connexion with them.” The years following Lovecraft’s death, beginning with Francis T. Laney’s 1942 glossary of Mythos terminology, inaugurated an era in which Cthulhu and his cosmic cohorts were scrutinized, analyzed, categorized, systematized, bent, folded, stapled—and mutilated. Thus by the 1970s, in a notably superficial book on the Mythos, an American fantasist opined the presence of “lacunae” in Lovecraft’s conception, regarding which it was incumbent upon himself and others to “fill in” with new stories. Before Lovecraft’s time, the market for tales of batrachian anthropophagy had always been rather limited; in the decades after his death, the pastiching of Cthulhu & Co. evolved into an industry of cyclopean proportions.

That the preponderance of such derivative work has been, in the words of the late E. Hoffmann Price, “abominable rubbish” is less significant than the very real injustice done thereby to the Mythos. Lovecraft’s imaginary cosmogony was never a static system but rather a sort of aesthetic construct that remained ever adaptable to its creator’s developing personality and altered interests. Thus as Gothicism gradually gave way to extraterrestrialism over the last ten years of Lovecraft’s life, an early Mythos tale such as “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) is still firmly ensconced in a degenerate New England backwater, while just six years later, in “The Shadow Out of Time,” Lovecraft’s narrative is a dazzling Stapledonian romp through the universe past, present, and future. Similarly, as Lovecraft finally began to outgrow horror fiction in the 1930s, one again can compare “The Dunwich Horror,” in which the Mythos deities are still demoniac entities to be kept at bay with grimoire-gleaned incantations, to “The Shadow Out of Time,” in which the extraterrestrials have become enlightened card-carrying socialists, a direct reflection of Lovecraft’s emergent interest in society and its reform. Had the man lived into the 1940s, the Mythos would have continued to evolve with its creator; there was never a rigid system that might be posthumously appropriated by the pasticheur.

Secondly, the essence of the Mythos lies not in a pantheon of imaginary deities nor in a cobwebby collection of forbidden tomes, but rather in a certain convincing cosmic attitude.
Cosmic
was Lovecraft’s endlessly iterated term to describe his own central aesthetic: “I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces.…”

In a sense, Lovecraft’s entire adult oeuvre is comprised of tales of cosmic wonder, but over the last ten years of his life, when he began to abandon Dunsanian exoticism and New England black magic and to seek for subject matter the mysterious abysses of outer space, he achieved a body of work to which has been posthumously applied the term Cthulhu Mythos. The Mythos, in other words, represents those cosmic wonder tales by Lovecraft in which the author had begun to direct his attention to the modern scientific universe; the Mythos deities in turn hypostatize the qualities of such a purposeless, indifferent, unutterably alien universe. And thus to all those Lovecraftian imitators who over the years have perpetrated Mythos pastiches in which eccentric New England recluses utter the right incantations in the wrong books and are promptly eaten by a giant frog named Cthulhu: the Mythos is not a concatenation of facile formulas and glossary gleanings, but rather a certain cosmic state of mind.

The preceding strictures do not apply, of course, to the present assemblage of stories, which are among the relative handful of successful works that have been influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos. A few of the earliest pieces in this volume by certain “divers hands” now seem like pop-cultural kitsch, perhaps, but everything else is quite wonderful, with the tales by Robert Bloch (“Notebook Found in a Deserted House”), Fritz Leiber, Ramsey Campbell, Colin Wilson, Joanna Russ, and Stephen King in particular exemplifying the darkly enduring power of H. P. Lovecraft over a disparate group of writers who have made their own inimitable contributions to the Mythos.

And Richard A. Lupoff, author of the final story in this collection, possibly has given us something more: “Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” is not just a distinguished Mythos tale; it is the only Mythos tale I have ever encountered by an author other than Lovecraft that conveys some sense of the iconoclastic audacity that attended the initial publication of Lovecraft’s work and that so outraged the contemporary readership of
Astounding Stories
. In this brilliant narrative Lupoff has managed to include not only the requisite Mythos terminology but also the essential ambience of cosmic wonder, and then additionally has re-created some of the mind-blasting excitement of those original Mythos stories. If you would like to discover for yourself what all the shouting was about back in 1936, turn to
this page
of the present volume and begin reading about three cyborgs having sex aboard a spaceship traveling beyond Pluto to a mysterious unknown planet named Yuggoth.

J
AMES
T
URNER

(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

T
he most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That
glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.

As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.