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  A Del Rey ® Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Compilation copyright © 1995 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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  is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  “The Adder,” copyright © 1989 by Fred Chappell for Deathrealm, Summer 1989, reprinted in More Shapes Than One (St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

  “The Barrens,” copyright © 1990 by F. Paul Wilson; “H.P.L.,” copyright © 1990 by Gahan Wilson; and “Lord of the Land,” copyright © 1990 by Gene Wolfe, reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd; for Lovecraft’s Legacy, edited by Robert E. Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.

  “The Big Fish,” copyright © 1993 by Kim Newman for Interzone, October 1993. “Black Man with a Horn,” copyright © 1980 by T.E.D. Klein; “The Faces at Pine Dunes” and “Shaft Number 247,” copyright © 1980 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc., for New Tales of Cthulhu Mythos, edited by Ramsey Campbell.

  “Fat Face,” copyright © 1987 by Michael Shea for Fat Face.

  “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” copyright © 1990 by Poppy Z. Brite for Borderlands, edited by Thomas F. Monteleone.

  “ ‘I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life!’ ” copyright © 1964 by Joanna Russ for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1964; reprinted by permission of Joanna Russ.

  “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” copyright © 1990 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1990; reprinted in Grimscribe.

  “Love’s Eldritch Ichor,” copyright © 1990 by Esther M. Friesner for World Fantasy Convention 1990 [Program Book].

  “On the Slab,” by Harlan Ellison Copyright © 1981 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the author and the author’s agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York, USA. All rights reserved.

  “Pickman’s Modem,” copyright © 1992 by Davis Publications, Inc., for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1992.

  “The Shadow on the Doorstep,” copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc., for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1986.

  “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai,” copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc., for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1985.

  “The Unthinkable,” copyright © 1991 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1991.

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  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96260

  eISBN: 978-0-307-51842-2

  This edition published by arrangement with Arkham House Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1

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  * (Marginal gloss entered by scholiast Theodorus Philetas after translating Al Azif from the Arabic.)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Cthulhu 2000

  The Barrens, F. Paul Wilson

  Pickman’s Modem, Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Shaft Number 247, Basil Copper

  His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood, Poppy Z. Brite

  The Adder, Fred Chappell

  Fat Face, Michael Shea

  The Big Fish, Kim Newman

  “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But by God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!”, Joanna Russ

  H.P.L., Gahan Wilson

  The Unthinkable, Bruce Sterling

  Black Man with a Horn, T.E.D. Klein

  Love’s Eldritch Ichor, Esther M. Friesner

  The Last Feast of Harlequin, Thomas Ligotti

  The Shadow on the Doorstep, James P. Blaylock

  Lord of the Land, Gene Wolfe

  The Faces at Pine Dunes, Ramsey Campbell

  On the Slab, Harlan Ellison

  24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai, Roger Zelazny

  Other Books by This Author

  Cthulhu 2000

  1.

  In a career as editor of Arkham House that has lasted now for twenty years, I have received a certain type of letter—over and over and over again—arriving from all parts of the world. The correspondent is usually, though not invariably, a young man, but the message is always the same: I have just encountered H.P. Lovecraft, and golly! what a writer. Here is a fairly recent example from a student in Greece, and please recall that what follows is the unemended transcript of someone using English as a foreign language:

  In the early 80’s a Hellenic publishing house … released a book that consisted of stories of various authors. One of them was meant to become an everlasting influence and inspiration for my humble self. His initials were H.P.L. Since then fiction, imaginary landscapes, supernatural and cosmic horror entertain my lonely hours.…

  Why is it, one wonders, that a reclusive writer of weird-fantasy stories, who during his lifetime couldn’t even earn a decent living, now possesses the power to inspire, and even to affect the lives of, readers around the globe?

  Over the past half century, Lovecraft has emerged as a classic exponent of the weird-fantasy narrative, and as a general principle, there is only one acceptable type of such a story: a great one. Either a weird tale overwhelms the reader with what Lovecraft termed “the strange reality of the unreal” (in which case weaknesses are irrelevant), or it doesn’t (in which case strengths are irrelevant). To reiterate Lovecraft’s weaknesses at this point would be gratuitous, for his technical shortcomings are apparent to even the most insensitive reader; one may as well complain that the Venus de Milo has no arms. What then are Lovecraft’s positive qualities to account for his sorcerous hold upon readers the world over?

  In his 1932 essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft establishes at the outset the creative criteria for his craft: “My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights, ideas, occurrences, and images.…” But wait, you ask, what’s all this about wonder and beauty and adventurous expectancy; isn’t Lovecraft supposed to be a preeminent American horror writer? Well, yes, he is, and further along in his opening paragraph Lovecraft allows that his stories “frequently emphasise the element of horror because … it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or ‘outsideness’ without laying stress on the emotion of fear.”

  Never during the final decade of his life—a period coinciding more or less with the Cthulhu Mythos fiction—did Lovecraft expressly consider himself to be a horror writer. He rather, as a cosmic fantasist, endeavored “to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.” Lovecraft further explains that “In relation to the central wonder, the characters [in weird fiction] should shew the same overwhelming emotion [i.e. fear] which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life”; the horror element, in other words, is an ineluctable concomitant to his aesthetic theories, not an end in itself. Only decades after Lovecraft’s death, when he was rediscovered by a shell-shocked postwar generation who had endured a cataclysmic global holocaust, followed by the omnipresent specters of Cold War paranoia and atomic annihilation—only then was Lovecraft adjudged a “horror writer” by a generation of readers who had forgotten the meaning of cosmic wo
nder. Thus the reclusive Providence dreamer was invoked as orchestrator of the major uncertainties of our century, his Cthulhu deities the mythopoeic presentiment of everything from societal collapse to nuclear devastation.

  The reason the mature Lovecraft was never a writer of conventional horror fiction is that horror presupposes an actively malicious universe, both within and without the individual, whereas Lovecraft all his life was a scientific materialist for whom the concept of “evil” conveyed no absolute meaning. “Only another collection of molecules” was his characterization of an unfortunate encounter with a fellow human being, while in his relation to the cosmos-at-large, Lovecraft described himself as an “indifferentist”: “The interplay of forces which govern climate, behaviour, biological growth and decay, and so on, is too purely universal, cosmic, and eternal a phenomenon to have any relationship to the immediate wishing-phenomena of one minute organic species on our transient and insignificant planet.”

  The Judeo-Christian theological tradition, on the other hand, posited a great cosmic drama of sin and redemption in which man, perched precariously between heaven and hell, was at the very center of Creation. But beginning in the fifteenth century, the Copernican revolution displaced the Earth as the center of the universe, and today our third-from-the-Sun planetary habitat is simply an inconsequential aqueous orb amid a whirl of other planets in a tiny outpost of the Milky Way galaxy, itself but one of billions of other galaxies in the visible universe; the divinely Edenic origin of our species likewise has given way to a creeping carbon-based creature struggling to emigrate from a primordial planetary pool. American physicist Steven Weinberg concluded his 1977 book The First Three Minutes with the chilling phrase “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Four decades earlier, in a 1935 letter to one of his correspondents, Lovecraft had written presciently of “the blind, indifferent cosmos, and the fortuitous, deterministically motivated automata who form a sort of momentary insect part on the surface of one of the least important of its temporary grains of dust.”

  If the scientifically minded Lovecraft had no belief in conventional notions of good versus evil, there remains to account for the extraordinary fascination he continues to exert over a worldwide readership. In a 1930 letter to James F. Morton, Lovecraft extols “the quality of mystic adventurous expectancy itself—the indefiniteness which permits me to foster the momentary illusion that almost any vista of wonder and beauty might open up, or almost any law of time or space or matter or energy be marvellously defeated or reversed or modified or transcended. That is the central keynote of my character and personality.…” Despite Lovecraft’s obdurate lifelong atheism, his fervently expressed feelings of “mystic adventurous expectancy” are similar to what some would term a religious—or at the very least, an unabashedly ecstatic—experience; they are mystical and transcendent feelings, albeit engendered from dispassionate contemplation of a marvelous natural order.

  A few years after the Lovecraft letter cited above, Albert Einstein wrote of the cosmos that “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead. … A knowledge of something we cannot penetrate [i.e., the infinite universe], our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty … it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity.” And here, in comparison, is Lovecraft’s definition of the “true function of fantasy”: “… to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space.…”

  The “rapturous ecstasy of the unknown,” shall we call it? Lovecraft’s implacable aesthetic revolt against the temporal and the corporeal cannot be easily articulated, but exists as an unmistakable philosophic underpinning to his entire adult fictional oeuvre, from the early Dunsanian stories to the mature Mythos masterworks. And this intensely obsessive tension between a finite mind grappling with infinite reality will serve to ensure Lovecraft’s reputation among future generations. In his 1994 essay “The Creatures Of Hyperspace,” astronomer Alan Dressler argues that within a few hundred years, science is likely to reach its limit regarding a fundamental model of the universe. At that point, all continuing cosmological conundrums—what happened before the Big Bang? what lies beyond the visible universe? and so forth—will remain inaccessible to the human race, probably forever. And then the incomparable Lovecraft will be recalled: “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.”

  Yes, H.P.L., that’s what you told us all along, wasn’t it?

  2.

  There remains to account for the eighteen stories assembled herein as a sort of Lovecraftian festschrift.

  The late Leo Margulies, who during his long lifetime published as much popular fiction as anyone, once observed that “storytellers are born and not made.” And the same might be said for cosmic fantasists: the steps of the Hall of Dagon are littered with the bones of would-be pasticheurs who tried to write a Lovecraftian story but, lacking the Silver Key, failed utterly to attain the incantatory awe of their intended prototype. In a 1930 letter to Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft himself commented on the relative rarity of this cosmic sensibility among his acquaintances: “I have taken some pains to sound various persons as to their capacity to feel profoundly regarding the cosmos and the disturbing and fascinating quality of the extraterrestrial and perpetually unknown; and my results reveal a surprisingly small quota.”

  And yet the cosmic element is there, compulsively present in Lovecraft’s own fiction: In “The Other Gods,” Barzai the Wise climbs to the summit of Hatheg-Kla in order to confront the gods of earth and encounters instead “the other gods … of the outer hells …!” In “The Music of Erich Zann,” a garret room in a tottering house on the Rue d’Auseil opens onto “the blackness of space illimitable … having no semblance of anything on earth.” And in “The Shadow Out of Time,” a college professor confirms on the final page that his “present body [had] been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time.”

  Three stories, from three different areas of Lovecraft’s creative work—Dunsany, Poesque/Gothic, and Mythos—yet all incorporate the author’s characteristic cosmic epiphany, his hallucinatory ecstasy of the unknown. Truth to tell, there is more in common between an early (1921) Dunsanian fable such as “The Other Gods” and a mature (1934) Mythos tale like “The Shadow Out of Time,” than there is between “The Shadow Out of Time” and a contemporary Mythos imitation written by someone other that Lovecraft. An inimitable cosmic vision shines throughout Lovecraft’s work like a beacon; the latter-day Mythos pastiche will simply be a banal modern horror story, preceded by the inevitable Necronomicon epigraph and indiscriminately interspersed with sesquipedalian deities, ichor-oozing tentacles, sundry eldritch abominations, and then the whole sorry mess rounded off with a cachinnating chorus of “Iä! Iä!”—chanting frogs. Literary cosmicists, to paraphrase Leo Margulies, are born and not made.

  If only H.P. Lovecraft could write an Azathoth-approved Lovecraftian story, it follows that the works collected in the present volume are not great Lovecraft stories; they rather are great stories in some way inspired by Lovecraft. Each reader is invited to determine for himself the Lovecraftian influences in the pages that follow; sometimes these will be immediately apparent, at other times quite subtle. For this introduction I’ll specifically consider only the concluding work, Roger Zelazny’s Hugo Award—winning novella “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai.”

  Zelazny presents a Japanese death odyssey in which a dying woman seeks to destroy her former husband, who in turn has survived his physical body to become an increasingly aberrant presence on the “data-net,
” a sort of cosmic cyberspace. At the ninth “station” in this woman’s pilgrimage, Zelazny interjects an ostensible narrative divagation: his protagonist tells of an ancient religious shrine near the sea, “far older” than the indigenous Shinto faith, and whose monks display “a certain thickening and extension of the skin between their fingers and toes.…” The monks, we learn, are acolytes of the infamous Old Ones, preserving their abominable rituals in anticipation of a beatific return to the lost city of sea-sunken R’lyeh.

  Zelazny teases us with these playful references to the Cthulhu Mythos, and then the allusion is abandoned for many subsequent pages. Only near the very conclusion, when his protagonist realizes that she has been followed by two strange monks, does she notice “the heavy ridge of callous along the edge of [the monk’s] hand,” the monks themselves being affiliated with a mysterious unmarked temple. Inferentially throughout this extended narrative, the woman has been stalked by demonic emissaries from the unhallowed R’lyeh cult.

  Now Roger Zelazny, in such classic novels as This Immortal and Lord of Light, has demonstrated a masterful command of world mythology; why in “24 Views” would he decide to incorporate (admittedly secondary) elements from Lovecraft’s imaginary cosmogony? It’s my guess that the author felt the need to employ a pseudomythology of sufficient grandeur to accommodate his culminating concept: “It will mean that everyone on Earth is in far greater peril than I had assumed,” his protagonist warns us; “for I am not dealing only with things, but of something closer to the time-honored Powers and Principalities.…” Given the corrosive menace, the transcendent maleficence, of his adversary, Zelazny could only summon the cosmic realm of H.P. Lovecraft for a mythopoeic underpinning of appropriate magnificence and awe.

  Thus if Lovecraft, on the one hand, will be remembered by future generations for the sheer intensity of his cosmic vision, Roger Zelazny’s novella suggests a second intimation of immortality. Kadath and Cthulhu, Arkham and Ulthar, Necronomicon and Nyarlathotep—the incomparable dreamworld conceived by this strange Rhode Island recluse has become, in the decades since his death, a permanent contribution to our popular culture. And as the portals of the twenty-first century swing open, a man-eating frog named Cthulhu joins Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stoker’s Dracula, and Tolkien’s hobbits among the perdurable icons of world literature.