Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Read online

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Compilation copyright © 1990 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.

  “The Call of Cthulhu,” copyright 1928 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1939, 1945 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, copyright 1963 by August Derleth; “The Haunter of the Dark,” copyright 1936 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1939, 1945 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, copyright 1963 by August Derleth.

  “The Return of the Sorcerer,” copyright 1931 by The Clayton Magazines, copyright 1942 by Clark Ashton Smith; “Ubbo-Sathla,” copyright 1933 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1942 by Clark Ashton Smith.

  “The Black Stone,” copyright 1931 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, renewed 1959 by Steinberg Press, Inc., assigned to Mrs. P. M. Kuykendall.

  “The Hounds of Tindalos,” copyright 1929 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1946 by Frank Belknap Long; “The Space-Eaters,” copyright 1928 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1946 by Frank Belknap Long.

  “The Dweller in Darkness,” copyright 1944 by Weird Tales, copyright 1945, 1953 by August Derleth; “Beyond the Threshold,” copyright 1941 by Weird Tales, copyright 1945, 1953 by August Derleth.

  “The Shambler from the Stars,” copyright 1935 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1945 by Robert Bloch; “The Shadow from the Steeple,” copyright 1950 by Weird Tales; “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” copyright 1951 by Weird Tales.

  “The Salem Horror,” copyright 1937 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, renewed 1965 by Catherine Reggie.

  “The Terror from the Depths,” copyright © 1976 by Edward P. Berglund.

  “Rising with Surtsey,” copyright 1971 by August Derleth.

  “Cold Print” and “The Return of the Lloigor,” copyright 1969 by August Derleth.

  “My Boat,” copyright © 1975 by Joanna Russ.

  “Sticks,” copyright © 1974 by Stuart David Schiff.

  “The Freshman,” copyright © 1979 by Mercury Press, Inc., reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

  “Jerusalem’s Lot,” copyright © 1978 by Stephen King, reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  “Discovery of the Ghooric Zone—March 15, 2337,” copyright © 1977 by Richard A. Lupoff.

  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 simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98–96130

  eISBN: 978-0-307-54790-3

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

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

  The Call of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft

  The Return of the Sorcerer, Clark Ashton Smith

  Ubbo-Sathla, Clark Ashton Smith

  The Black Stone, Robert E. Howard

  The Hounds of Tindalos, Frank Belknap Long

  The Space-Eaters, Frank Belknap Long

  The Dweller in Darkness, August Derleth

  Beyond the Threshold, August Derleth

  The Shambler from the Stars, Robert Bloch

  The Haunter of the Dark, H. P. Lovecraft

  The Shadow from the Steeple, Robert Bloch

  Notebook Found in a Deserted House, Robert Bloch

  The Salem Horror, Henry Kuttner

  The Terror from the Depths, Fritz Leiber

  Rising with Surtsey, Brian Lumley

  Cold Print, Ramsey Campbell

  The Return of the Lloigor, Colin Wilson

  My Boat, Joanna Russ

  Sticks, Karl Edward Wagner

  The Freshman, Philip José Farmer

  Jerusalem’s Lot, Stephen King

  Discovery of the Ghooric Zone, Richard A. Lupoff

  Other Books by This Author

  Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

  “Why in the name of science-fiction did you ever print such a story as ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by Lovecraft? Are you in such dire straits that you must print this kind of drivel?… If such stories as this—of two people scaring themselves half to death by looking at the carvings in some ancient ruins, and being chased by something that even the author can’t describe, and full of mutterings about nameless horrors, such as the windowless solids with five dimensions, Yog-Sothoth, etc.—are what is to constitute the future yarns of Astounding Stories, then heaven help the cause of science-fiction.”

  The object of the preceding epistolary animus, taken from the letter column of the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories, was of course one of two Cthulhu Mythos works by H. P. Lovecraft that were being published by the magazine during that same year. Reader response to the Lovecraft stories was not unremittingly negative, but the favorable commentary tended to be overwhelmed by wails of indignation, bemusement, dismay.

  During the 1930s American magazine science fiction was largely the province of a ghettoized group of action/adventure hacks who simply transformed the Lazy X ranch into Planet X and then scribbled forth the same formula stories, substituting space pirates for cattle rustlers. For readers accustomed to hopping aboard a starship, flipping on the faster-than-light drive (never mind Einstein’s special theory), and blasting the bejesus out of the eight-legged men of Betelgeuse, Lovecraft’s painstakingly detailed and overtly atmospheric sojourn across the Antarctic wilderness, in which his two intrepid explorers gibber and shriek before the culminant horror, was largely incomprehensible to the SF enthusiasts of 1936.

  And the difference between Lovecraft’s Mythos fiction and the galaxy-bustin’ ebullience of Doc Smith and his cohorts is more fundamental than a simple action-versus-atmosphere dichotomy. Many of the space-opera exponents of the era, such as E. E. Smith, Nat Schachner, and Ralph Milne Farley, had been born in the previous century when the universe was still perceived to function in terms of an immutable Newtonian order. Each star was a sun just like ours, and as nineteenth-century astronomers directed their spectroscopes to the heavens, they received back the reassuring message that the stars contained hydrogen, helium, magnesium, sodium, and other elements precisely like those found within our own solar system. Toward the end of the century, when physicists were congratulating themselves on what they thought was their complete understanding of the universe, was the ultimate human conquest of the cosmos really so improbable?

  Not according to Albert Einstein, who in 1905 inaugurated the revolution in twentieth-century science that ultimately would forever shatter the tenets of classical physics. With subsequent developments in relativity, quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, and the like, the universe no longer seemed so comprehensible. Just as Copernicus and Galileo had wrenched humanity from the center of creation, so too has modern man come to realize that not only is he not at the center of the cosmos, but that he is a singularity in the cosmos. The universe with its neutron stars and quasars and black holes is strange to us, and we are a stranger in the universe.

  Of all the science-fiction writers whose work appeared in the magazines during the 1930s, only H. P. Lovecraft transcends the gosh-wow insipidities of his colleagues to convey this twentieth-century sensibility of
the essential mystery of the cosmos. “All my tales,” wrote Lovecraft in a 1927 letter, “are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large,” a statement that virtually encapsulates the revolution then occurring in modern science, as wide-eyed physicists were in the process of discovering a strange new world not vouchsafed by Newtonian mechanics. Thus the non-Euclidean angles of Cthulhu’s sea-sunken city (see this page) represent the same non-Euclidean geometries with which Einstein had to grapple in formulating his general theory, while the unearthly emanations from the meteorite in “The Colour Out of Space” replicate the radium experiments undertaken earlier in the century by Becquerel and the Curies. Even current developments in higher mathematics—the phenomenon of chaos—are presaged in the Mythos tales, for the supreme deity in Lovecraft’s imaginary pantheon, the blind idiot god Azathoth, reigns “in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos.” Suitably accoutred in Mandelbrot fractals and equipped with the Feigenbaum constant, Azathoth would feel eminently at home amid the permutations and perturbations of contemporary chaos theory.

  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 th
e 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.

  JAMES TURNER

  The Call of Cthulhu*

  H. P. LOVECRAFT

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

  Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival … a survival of a hugely remote period when … consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity … forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds.…

  —ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

  I. THE HORROR IN CLAY

  The 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.