August Derleth (editor) - Worlds of Tomorrow (1953)

It feels like it's been a long time since I read one of these collections and I warmed to this one quite quickly, enjoying the spirit of the enterprise even where a couple of the stories were underwhelming for one reason or another. The spirit of the enterprise was, in this instance, visions of tomorrow, I suppose - which was doomed to failure given science-fiction's somewhat shaky predictive track record; but at the heart of that spirit was the notion of there being a future as something exciting or at least vastly different to the present. I feel we've lost sight of this, so it's nice to be reminded.

Anyway, aside from a few clunkers reliant on twist endings which have since become massive clichés - and may even have been clichés in 1953 for all I know - the collection is mostly great, and actively astonishing in a couple of cases. Jogging straight past the first Earthman on Mars ending up in a Martian zoo, Frank Belknap Long's The Great Cold reminds us of the genre's roots in - or at least its passage through - weird fiction, taking us to a far future where super-evolved barnacles rule the Earth, which the author somehow manages to write as genuinely weird and upsetting rather than just plain screwy, additionally using his beautifully vivid prose to say something beyond weird innit! Somehow, there's a lesson for us even in this world of super-evolved barnacles.

It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The Fires Within by Arthur C. Clarke is similarly fantastic, with weird physics performing the heavy lifting for what is essentially a conversation between a couple of eggheads at a research centre. Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, and Simak collaborator, Carl Jacobi all turn in respectable pieces, but the finest are possibly the last two. The Martian and the Moron may be the best thing I've read by Theodore Sturgeon, and it could be significant that it contains no traditional elements of science-fiction, or at least, the detail upon which the story spins remains ambiguous, leaving us with a radio ham who may or may not have picked up an alien transmission, and his son's relationship with a person I won't describe here because, despite having read the story, I still can't work out what or who she's supposed to be. The Martian and the Moron puts the reader to work, but it feels worth the effort. Finally, William Tenn's Null-P serves up an unfortunately familiar future history of the United States with lashings of sardonic wit. Despite what I wrote in the first paragraph, this is one case of a prediction having been fired in the right direction even if he doesn't quite hit the bullseye. Tenn's future America is founded on a fear of book learnin' with stupidity reclassified as a mark of character. Tenn fails because, as an optimist, he didn't account for basic greed as a motivating factor, with lies and telling people what they want to hear as a means to this end; but it's a wonderful piece of writing, alternately chilling and funny without resorting to slapstick.

August Derleth (editor) - The Other Side of the Moon (1948)

 

This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.

That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.

A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.

The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966 (1966)
Having done my homework on this occasion, I've discovered that Cohen's time as editor of Fantastic was characterised by most of the stories in each issue being reprints, these presumably being cheaper than new material. Five of the seven in this issue are reprints, from what I can tell, and it's not looking great.

I actually plucked this one from the shelf upon seeing Murray Leinster's name on the cover, and while The Psionic Mousetrap isn't necessarily anything amazing, it isn't entirely lacking redeeming qualities. Similarly reprinted is August Derleth's Carousel. Derleth's contribution to the field as editor and publisher shouldn't be underestimated, and when the stars are aligned in a certain configuration, he's even been known to spin a decent yarn, but Carousel is unfortunately not one of them. It's not terrible, but you can pretty much tell how it's going to end before you're half way through the first paragraph. Swinging back to 1932, David H. Keller's No More Tomorrows doesn't make a whole lot of sense but is at least short, so most of your time is spent waiting for him to explain the guy with a massive head and just one eye, which he doesn't; and You Can't See Me! by William F. Temple is harmless, fairly stupid but not without a certain screwy charm.

A regrettably sizeable chunk of this issue is occupied by Eando Binder's The Little People dating from 1940. Eando Binder was a literary gestalt of brothers Earl Andrew and Otto Binder. They had a big hit with Adam Link, a robot character starring in a series of short stories, but whatever magic they may have pseudonymously wrought in issues of Amazing and others is not immediately obvious from The Little People. The Little People is forty leaden pages of science discovering real fairies on the grounds of Charles Fort having proven their existence beyond any doubt whatsoever because of all those myths and legends 'n' stuff blah blah evolution blah blah blah Eohippus was a tiny horse meaning that blah blah blah. It might be less annoying were it not written like Enid Blyton for adults, or at least Enid Blyton for older girls and boys, but mostly boys - although I read one of her Wishing Chair books a couple of years back as an experiment and Enid can be impressively weird in places, whereas this is just squaresville from beginning to end. Recidivist fairies, for example, are punished by reduction to what the Binder lads term woman-status, meaning their duties are limited to cooking and cleaning for a year. Even the illustrator apparently couldn't be arsed to read the thing all the way through, cladding his fairies in tiny versions of human clothes, contradicting the revelation of their captor, the evil scientist Dr. Scott, denying them such traditional fairy clobber.

Never mind.

Of the new material, there's Rocket to Gehenna by Doris Piserchia which I didn't read because it's one of those stories told as an exchange of correspondence, and I can't be doing with that shit. The other one is Roger Zelazny's For a Breath I Tarry - although it actually turns out to have first appeared in New Worlds six months earlier. Anyway, it's more of what I suppose must be Zelazny's customary science-fiction as pseudo-Buddhist parable, as was Lord of Light, but being significantly shorter is more easily digested and is actually pretty great. In fact, it's probably the best thing I've read of his which wasn't an attempt to make sense of Philip K. Dick.

So it's not a great average for this issue, but I guess a few decent efforts mostly cancel out the duds, although I still say The Little People was a barrel scraped too close to the grain.

The Haunter of the Dark

H.P. Lovecraft
The Haunter of the Dark and other titles (1950)
I'm confused. The introduction - unless I read it too fast in my haste to experience that sense-shattering horror which has sent even the most vigorous lunatic gibbering to the gallows in quest of merciful release from the depths of terror of a vintage so rich as to inspire even those amoral low-born ghouls of the night against whom even Vlad of the House of Drăculești might be deemed a reasonable, if not exactly amiable fellow to remark upon how that be some fucked-up shit right there - seemed to imply this was essentially a revised edition of The Outsider of 1939, the first ever published Lovecraft collection put together by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei; but although all fourteen of these tales appeared in The Outsider, that collection comprised thirty-six of Lovecraft's spookiest offerings, and was thus quite clearly a different entity.

Anyway, the illusion of this one comprising the first stories to be gathered together and reprinted as a proper book made sense as I was reading given that these, I would argue, might be considered Lovecraft's best by numerous criteria. For starters, not one tale opens with the usual ghostly house inherited from the uncle no-one wishes to discuss, and the majority of these seem conspicuously better written than his earlier, more campy efforts in which overcooked adjectival content serves to remind readers that we are supposed to be scared roughly every seven words; and he's reigned in the casual racism, at least a little. I therefore assumed these to have been tales written during the final stage of his life, by which point some of the more objectionable aspects of his personality had been smoothed out, which investigation reveals as being no more true than that this collection constitutes his greatest hits. I suppose then that he must have had good days and bad days, and his writing was accordingly variable.

Of what we have here The Whisperer in Darkness, The Colour Out of Space, and The Shadow Out of Time are at least as much science-fiction tales as they are horror, thus providing a welcome break from the clichés of the genre, in fact from the clichés of both genres; and the rest for the most part seems to avoid the kind of recycling which is found in at least a few of his other tales, aside from the predictable references to the usual forbidden books which, despite everything, must surely be amongst the most-borrowed titles from the Miskatonic library. The only problem - at least as I experienced it - is that horror fiction is essentially boring. It does one thing, and usually it does it for far too long, page after page, hammering the point home over and over. I state this in general ignorance of the genre, basing my view on what little I have read, which I presume to count for something given that the authors I've read are so often trumpeted as being the greatest the genre has to offer. I suppose there are exceptions such as Frankenstein, which is wonderful - obviously - but I've never regarded that one as entirely a horror novel.

Unfortunately, even at its best, Lovecraft's fiction tends to do one thing, usually for far too long, page after page, hammering the point home over and over; and so it all depends on how much you enjoy that one thing. I sort of enjoyed most of this - particularly those tales which, tinged with science-fiction, almost managed to do two things - but yeah - slimy slimy, sounds horrible, we get it.

The reduced level of overt racism additionally seemed a welcome change to the norm - a few instances of nigger and dago, but thankfully bereft of the usual qualifying disparagements. Of course, the problem with Lovecraft is that even without actual racial slurs, so much of his horror is either inspired by or else serves as a metaphor to his odious views, informed as they were by an extended childhood spent rotting away in a cloying familial environment, isolated from any real world experience which might have enlightened him as to the extent of his own bullshit; and so Lovecraft's world is that of the white Protestant man-child clinging to mummy's protective bosom, convinced of his own superiority based on secondary - and inevitably biased - accounts of all those degenerate mud races with their weird thumpa thumpa thumpa music and smelly food. His was the same mindset to which Nigel Farage tailors his political rhetoric, and sadly this permeates much of Lovecraft's fiction even without the name-calling.

In later life, as he found his horizons expanded, it seems his views either changed or else were at least tempered by contact with the outside world, and his fear of the unknown and degenerate dragging humanity back into the ooze achieves a subtle shift of emphasis as cosmic horror. It's still fear of the unknown but is directed outwards, expressing Lovecraft's commendable natural curiosity about science and the outside world - that which was denied him for longer than was probably healthy. Therefore in tales such as The Dunwich Horror we find an odd possibility of the monsters themselves being victims of external forces, as opposed to the usual variation on coming over here and taking our jobs. Further, to Lovecraft's awakening sense of wonder and obvious fascination with the known limits of science and the world around him, he was also clearly fascinated with that which horrified him, hence, I suppose, the extended page counts of some of the more repetitive tales. This, I would suggest, may be what makes his work readable, despite an often unpleasant subtext - even when he was pointing a finger and holding his nose, he was at least in a sense exploring rather than expressing only disgust. That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.

...except I suspect the actual chronology of when these tales were written contradicts my image of Lovecraft gradually coming to terms with his own ignorance and in doing so becoming a better writer. Well, for whatever reason, The Haunter of the Dark was certainly more readable than previous collections.

Le Roi en Jaune

Thomas de Castigne (translated by Simon Bucher-Jones)
Le Roi en Jaune (1893)
Once again I find myself somewhat in the position of Homer Simpson required to present a dissertation on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment which, it should be noted, probably wouldn't be significantly more ham-fisted than my own fumbling analysis of Crime and Punishment some months ago.

Le Roi en Jaune or The King in Yellow is a lost play, one which has been alluded to in the works of a number of writers, principally Robert W. Chambers, an author of weird or supernatural fiction with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. It's a lost play through the stigma of having become a forbidden play, one which has the reputation of driving its audience to utter despair or even madness, a promise which rarely ever seems to have much success at getting bums on seats in box office terms. That said, it should probably be remembered that whilst H.P. Lovecraft chalked up a fair old word count in discussion of that which must not be named, he dedicated at least some of that text to quite specifically naming that which must not be named, presumably so as to avoid confusion leading to anyone naming that which must not be named by accident through not knowing its name on account of it being that which must not be named. Jocularity aside, Lovecraft is of some minor relevance here given that he winks at Le Roi en Jaune in a couple of his own stories, it being the source from which Hastur is derived, later reinvented as an unspeakable elder God by Lovecraft and then Derleth to varying degrees.

Another more familiar name would be that of the servant Ubu, popularised by Alfred Jarry and remembered as having been the Sex Pistols of his day in terms of faintly scatological wit in the tradition of Rabelais, some sexual swearwords, having the plugs figuratively pulled halfway through the performance, and the play's brief spark of admittedly lurid genius becoming a formative influence on all which followed - meaning here Futurism, Dadaism and much twentieth century art rather than Sham 69 and the Exploited. The name Ubu is popularly believed to have derived from Henri Morin, Jarry's school classmate who had written a satire called Les Polonais in which Monsieur Hébert, his unfortunate physics teacher, was lampooned as Père Ebé; but Ubu is identified here as a diminutive of ubiquité or ubiquity, a representative of the common man:

I am a man. And as such are found,
Everywhere alike, I needs must be common.

These words are met by the Y'htill character asking Ubu if he has not perhaps been known as Falstaff under other circumstances; and it is possibly significant that Jarry's Ubu - essentially closer in spirit to Shakespeare's comically boorish knight - first appears in print in 1893 within fragments of an early version of Ubu Cocu reproduced in a literary review - not to horrify theatre goers for another three years, by which point his credentials as a modern Falstaff seemed more firmly established.

Anyway, the significant detail here is not so much the possible influence on Jarry as the play being aware of its being a play - as suggested by the reference to a character from another play - and of characters achieving an insight into the future given that the events of Le Roi en Jaune are purported to occur in ancient times, at least prior to the Biblical flood.

The narrative describes the coming of seven Princes of which one will be wed to the Princess Cassilda, just as soon as she's made up her mind which of their number is the least disappointing. Unfortunately everything goes tits up, the Princes all perish before the meeting can transpire, and reality itself seems to break down. Cassilda becomes her mother, the Queen, and the Queen is now to be wed to one of the Princes, and time appears to flow in reverse, not only as mother becomes daughter but as the child Thomas is directed to walk backwards across the stage, all seemingly returning to the notional point of Original Sin so that it may be undone - although there's a fair chance I'm getting my wires crossed here, Cassilda's line reputedly having descended from Abell and Aclima, the line which in Hebrew legend endures without the stigma of the murdering Cain. In addition to this, certain characters appear to revive from the dead, or else are experienced prior to death in scenes occurring later. The nature of the play was further exposed by the final scenes of the second act being staged in differing orders on different performances, regardless of the inevitable contradictions and loss of narrative cohesion. It sounds like a nightmare in production terms, but peculiarly I can see that it may have worked at least in so much as the written form isn't significantly weirder than, for example, the plays of Tristan Tzara which it doubtless inspired.

The confusion of the non-linear narrative not only emphasises the artificial nature of the performance, but also the artificial nature of the reality it describes, not least once the suggestion is made that the direction in which time flows doesn't seem to matter that much. One might take as a similar example Lovecraft's fabled Necronomicon, a book with no existence outside the lad's fiction, and the fiction he ultimately inspired, and yet which has come to take on such a profoundly convincing life of its own that the detail of its origin and historical legitimacy has been reduced to a vestigial irrelevance. So too is Le Roi en Jaune a play which generates its own existence in so much as it seems to reverse the traditional primacy of words and that which they describe, relegating reality to a creation of its own description; so no wonder it freaked everyone out back in 1893.

This is a slightly bewildering work, although partially because I'm somewhat out of my depth with this kind of thing, but it greatly rewards all effort put in. I've now read the thing twice, and it becomes more and more engrossingly peculiar each time. Simon Bucher-Jones has done a tremendous job of translation and annotation, and in case anyone cares, I can see how this may have fed into The Brakespeare Voyage, even to the point that it seems to be where Captain No-one came from.

Buy it here.

Liberating Earth

Kate Orman (editor) Liberating Earth (2015)
Here's another one for which I painted the cover, thus once again potentially presenting a question of how impartial my review is likely to be, the answer to which is - I would hope - business as usual. The only difference would be that if I hated it, I wouldn't bother posting the review online because it's uncomfortable when someone you vaguely know produces tripe, and we all have to sit around saying well done, old bean, and nobody quite knows where to look.

Thankfully Liberating Earth is a long, long way from being tripe, as roughly anticipated on the grounds of having been edited by Kate Orman who can generally be relied upon to pull a half-decent story together with the words in the right places and everything. A few emails ago as we were discussing what was to be on the cover, I  recall references to the more metaphysical designs which so often graced the jackets of science-fiction anthologies of the fifties and sixties - the Yves Tanguy with space rockets school of illustration, roughly speaking. Such is the tendency I was hoping to channel here - and pedants with too much time on their hands may like to play spot the difference with a copy of the Consul edition of The Outer Reaches collection as edited by August Derleth - and now, having read the thing, I see the sense in this.

Liberating Earth is a collection of short stories with alternate and often genuinely weird versions of terrestrial reality as the unifying theme, all chained together as part of a larger narrative by Playing for Time, Kate Orman's own sequential contribution; so you could probably read it as either a novel or individual stories depending on your preference. I actually found it a little difficult to follow the precise details of the larger story, Playing for Time, as a consequence of it being divided into nine parts, which wasn't a problem. It seems to hold together in so much as it feels like it all adds up and is nevertheless enjoyable. Playing for Time is also more or less the token Faction Paradox element of the recipe, with the remainder relating to the mythology by slim terms, or at least at a bit of an angle and often in spirit rather than furnishings. Hopefully this shouldn't be a problem for anyone requiring a certain quota of grandfathercidal teenagers in skull masks; and it certainly wasn't for me because - to swing back around to the point begun in the previous paragraph - the collection as a whole goes a long way towards invoking the spirit of some of the great science-fiction anthologies of the fifties and sixties, less in terms of any nostalgic tendency as the sheer range of mood and theme, and the thrill of having no idea of what you're going to get. Everyone will doubtless have their favourites, and there were a couple I personally found a little chewy - which is probably more to do with my own preferences than the quality of the stories. Those which stood out as possibly exceptional for me were E.H. Timms' Dreamer in the Dark, Red Rover Red Rover by someone identifying herself only as Q, and Kelly Hale's wonderful Project Thunderbird, another presentation of evidence in the mystery of why publishers aren't simply throwing massive wads of cash at her. Similarly noteworthy is Annie's Arms by Xanna Chown presenting a sort of surreal, suburban horror which put me in mind of the stark contrasts of the first Siouxsie & the Banshees album - all very John Heartfield. Also we have the highly entertaining The Vikingr Mystique by Dorothy Ail, a sort of Thelma & Louise with space Vikings. The last thing I read involving space Vikings was a short story called Indifference by Brian Aldiss, which intrigues me slightly given that Ail's Nordic seeker of pillage is named Aldis with one s. For what it's worth, The Vikingr Mystique pisses all over the Aldiss story, in the event of there being any conscious homage involved.

Finally and possibly my favourite is Rachel Redhead's Judy's War, partially because it demonstrates the great range of the collection, and partially because it's a genuine pleasure to see her work in fancy-pants print at last. I read her self-published The Raithaduine Saga and concluded that once you're past the occasionally loose sense of grammar and the fact of it being so bloody long, it has a lot in its favour. Redhead's prose disregards established science-fiction or literary conventions, weaving a bewildering path strewn with weapons-grade jokes, huge, crazy ideas, and sudden narrative swerves which seem entirely her own. At times it reads like A.E. van Vogt channelling Vicky Pollard or maybe some of the earlier, slightly more warped John Waters movies - which I suggest as a recommendation in case that isn't obvious: she probably isn't likely to get commissioned to write anything so respectable as the next Young Bond novel, but she writes with the kind of mad genius which can't be faked, and which by definition needs to cut its own path. I hope she realises that her writing has a lot more going for it than many of the things from which I gather she has drawn influence, and I hope this is the first of many such appearances in print.

Liberating Earth is great. Now can we have a full-length Kate Orman novel, pleeeaaase.

...and in case you were wondering...

The Trail of Cthulhu

August Derleth The Trail of Cthulhu (1962)
Yes, I know. My to-be-read pile is organised and tackled in a specific order so as to keep pace where I have two or more titles by the same author, or of a fairly specific type. This is done so as to avoid my coming to the end of the pile and finding I've obliged myself to read, for example, seven A.E. van Vogt novels in a row. Therefore having come to the Lovecraftian segment of the established sequence, it was a toss-up between this or the third Grafton paperback collection of shorts by the man himself. I ended up going for Derleth, experiencing a vague sensation of having reached H.P. sauce saturation point in recent months, what with Grant Morrison and Alan Moore borrowing bits of the mythology, that horrible shite I read by Colin Wilson, and whatever that last fucking awful anthology was; in addition to which, I coincidentally dip my toe into a certain internet forum, and there's the one particular complete knob and self-declared Lovecraft expert holding forth as usual, and apparently holding forth in a belief of anyone caring what he thinks about anything, penning his missives as ever in the tone of a nineteenth century librarian whilst revealing the emotional development of a fifteen-year old. This month, having given the matter some consideration, our boy has come to the view that the quintessential distillate of Lovecraft's genius is to be found not in any of the space octopus tales, but in one of the others of which I can't remember the name - something scary happens, I think some bloke inherits a house and there's a ghost or something like that...

The thing that irritates the living shit out of me is that whilst Howie undoubtedly had a vivid turn of phrase - providing you ignore the stinkers - we're not talking fucking Schopenhauer here. We're not actually talking anything you could term even moderately philosophical without looking a bit of a berk. We're talking about a man who wrote scary stories about creepy uncles with books of magic spells, and who wrote these scary stories on paper and published them in magazines because Scooby Doo hadn't yet been invented so his traipsing along to Hanna-Barbera with a proposal would have been a complete waste of time. Of course, none of this is specifically Lovecraft's fault, and as always the worst element of any cultural success story will usually be its stupid fucking fans.

To return to the point, August Derleth, so I reasoned, was a capable writer, albeit one perhaps lacking the poetry of Lovecraft, from whom he otherwise took much inspiration. For all his failings, Derleth was unambiguously in the business of keeping his readers happy and therefore might, by some terms, be seen as attempting to save the Cthulhu mythos from its creator, at least in so much as that he occasionally managed to write a story not involving some guileless tosspot inheriting a book of magic spells from a creepy uncle whom no-one liked to talk about.

So, The Trail of Cthulhu it was...

The Trail of Cthulhu is five individual short stories sharing sufficient characters and themes as to work as a novel when read in the order given here, more or less. This distinguishes it from Lovecraft's writing in so much as H.P. never wrote anything of this length. The problem is that although The Trail of Cthulhu works as a novel, it isn't necessarily a good novel. Its narrative comprises the somewhat predictable accounts of five individuals who just had to write it all down, all of whom meet up in the final tale as a sort of Cthulhubusters task force. The pattern of events is already familiar: there's this scary thing and it's probably just my imagination, but - fuck me - it wasn't just my imagination after all, and wow, that really is pretty damn scary, over and over with the traditional cock-obvious clues screaming at the reader left, right, and centre.

You are alive, and yet I definitely saw you die. How unusual!

The customary list of forbidden books are checked in and out of the library at Miskatonic University with such frequency as to call into question just how forbidden they could really be, and we get the familiar itinerary of unpronounceables repeated over and over, seasoned with some new faces which Derleth added so as to emphasise his good squelchy guys versus bad squelchy guys interpretation of the Lovecraftian playset. This wouldn't be so bad for someone reading these stories in isolation, but welded together as a single novel, the repetition becomes tiresome. On the other hand, one major criticism of Derleth's version of Lovecraft has been, as I understand it, with regard to his efforts to superimpose a variant of the traditional Christian morality tale; although in his favour, that particular drum is beaten fairly softly here, and the comparison of Cthulhu's imprisonment to Satan's expulsion from heaven works quite well, I thought.

The only elements to which I had any strong objection - as opposed to just wondering whether or not I should skip a page or two - were Derleth's attempts to ground the mythos in legitimate archaeological and anthropological references, essentially doing a von Däniken, something of which H.P. was equally guilty. Here we get frequent name-checks for the cultures of Easter Island, the Marquesas group, the Tlingit, and Mesoamerican and Inca civilisations. Such references work fine if you don't really know anything about the cultures involved and tend to think well it's all the bleedin' same innit, bleedin' octopus gods and dancing around in the nuddy, all the bleedin' same innit, but strikes me as very lazy.

Tlaloc the Mexican Rain God, for one example, may indeed appear to have a face full of tentacles and certain aquatic associations, except those are stylised snakes rather than tentacles, and part of a pictogram signifying rain. So his image is actually a written representation more akin to an elaborate Chinese character than necessarily a depiction of anything physical; but such cultures are poorly understood and hence fair game for interpretation and appropriation, which is why no post-Lovecraftian tale ever added Lloyd George to the pantheon of elder Gods or tried to suggest that Mansfield Park was a forbidden text describing nameless horrors, at least not so far as I am aware.

The Trail of Cthulhu is readable but a bit stupid in places. On the other hand I've read much worse, and significantly I've read much worse by H.P. Lovecraft himself.

The Mask of Cthulhu

August Derleth The Mask of Cthulhu (1958)
I seem to recall finding The Lurker at the Threshold something of a slog, this being the same Lurker at the Threshold which began life as a piece of paper upon which H.P. Lovecraft had written the word and, posthumously expanded to novel length by his friend and publisher, August Derleth. It wasn't terrible, but it really didn't need to be more than thirty pages, a length beyond which the story suffered for having a plot which wouldn't have been quite so annoying were it all over and done with a bit quicker, and for having specifically the same plot as most other tales of the Cthulhu mythos.

Well, here I am having inherited a big spooky house from an uncle whom no-one liked to talk about, the one everyone said had started worshipping a dark God called Cthulhu, even though they really didn't like to discuss it. This Cthulhu chap, as I gather from these books belonging to my uncle which are obviously undiluted mumbo-jumbo and definitely not descriptive of anything real, appears to be some sort of scary space octopus much like the one about which I've been dreaming ever since I moved in.

I wonder what that noise was?

It was therefore difficult to approach this, a collection of Derleth's own tales expanding on Lovecraft's mythos, with much enthusiasm; but happily, against expectations, it's not bad at all.

Every single story is more or less the same, following the template summarised in the passage above, but then this narrative conservatism was as much Lovecraft's vice as that of any who endeavoured to continue his legacy; and with this sort of story, as with the jokes of Frank Carson, it's they way you tell them. Derleth told them fairly well, and if he lacked the ornate flourishes of his mentor, he compensated with a breezy pace which, at least here, was never quite so pulpy as everyone seems to claim; and crucially he keeps it short and snappy, quickly building the atmosphere to a head before it has time to collapse beneath the weight of its own absurdity.

A major, and entirely legitimate criticism of Derleth's take on Lovecraft was his reduction of the mythos to your archetypal conflict between good and evil of the kind favoured by C.S. Lewis. The dark Gods of Lovecraft are amoral symbols of an uncaring universe in the wake of the supposed death of God in the late nineteenth century, innit? They embody our fear of the unknown. Derleth adds a group of nameless nice guys to the pantheon and rewrites Howard's bunch as Satanic forces.

The Elder Gods could so easily have become the Christian Trinity; the Ancient Ones could for most believers have been altered into Sathanus and Beelzebub, Mephistofeles and Azarael. Except that they were co-existent, which disturbed me, though I knew that systems of belief constantly overlapped in the history of mankind.

For the sake of argument, this doesn't actually work because whilst systems of belief may indeed overlap throughout the history of mankind, they don't always overlap in quite the same way, and the roughly Abrahamic moral duality Derleth imposes upon his friend's creation is entirely absent in a good few of the pantheistic religions he cites as examples, notably those of the Precolombian Americas; but then Derleth was a writer rather than a religious anthropologist, and I would guess he kept this in mind at least whilst writing the stories collected here. He takes liberties with the mythos, but liberties that serve as narrative garnish and can generally be taken to reflect the beliefs of the main character without conflicting too greatly with anything written by he whomst did first pen this world; and, if nothing else, it does at least show Derleth attempting to move things along, to keep things interesting in an otherwise claustrophobically limited genre.

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

August Derleth (editor) Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969)
It could be argued that Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos served to reinvent a specific genre of horror just as Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker revised earlier Gothic narratives to account for the changing nineteenth century view of humanity's place in the great scheme of things; although it's probably worth noting that I'm guessing here, horror fiction never really having been my thing. To varying degrees, both Frankenstein and Dracula addressed the emergent possibility that, contrary to Christian teaching, there might not be an afterlife to which the human soul migrates after death. Lovecraft's weird tales similarly revise earlier demons and spirits as creatures from realms beyond the Earth, and whose existence is defined in relation to scientific understanding specifically through being beyond the scope of quantification by its twentieth century expression. Horror defined in relation to something understood and at least partially accepted at the time - science as opposed to pure superstition - perhaps held greater emotional resonance than when grounded in ideas which no longer worked quite so well as they may once have done. That said, Lovecraft still chose an astonishingly limited genre, essentially one barely requiring narrative content, which is why much of his tales can be reduced to I hope that isn't a monster followed by well, I guess it really is a monster; although as with Frank Carson, it was all in the way he told 'em.

This much becomes painfully obvious when others have a crack at playing with Lovecraft's slimey and tentacular train set. Of the eleven authors gathered here by August Derleth, just four manage to tell 'em with anything like the conviction of the tales from which the mythos is drawn. The rest, although far from terrible, tend to suffer from trying to do a Lovecraft and simply not doing it particularly well, dropping one generic clanger after another and in one instance even trying to pass off the idea that the terrified narrator scribbled his final second by second commentary even as the nameless monstrosity from beyond the dawn of time was oozing through the keyhole.

I can hear it coming now even as I record these, my last words - it's scratching at the door - oh God! That face! Aaaaaaaaa-

Sure. That's really going to happen. The guy who delved into that which man was not intended to know is going to conclude his testimony with the word Aaaaagh written in his notebook just as the ancient bumfaced nightmare draws near.

You might hope August Derleth would himself put in a decent showing given that he was Lovecraft's friend, biggest fan, tireless promoter, and a capable writer, but still you get the impression he hadn't quite got the hang of Cthulhu and all his squelchy pals, instead writing something that relates to Lovecraft in the same way that the version of Dracula which fought Spiderman on a few occasions relates to Stoker's novel.

On the other hand, Clark Ashton Smith succeeds simply because he was a wonderful writer, and Robert Bloch manages an original spin on the basic Lovecraftian template; whilst more recent authors Ramsey Campbell and Colin Wilson provide what might be the most convincing selections by virtue of bringing new elements to the basic recipe, and I still like to think that Wilson's The Return of the Lloigor bridges a gap between Lovecraft and Grant Morrison's Zenith.

There's some great stuff here, a fair bit that's simply middling, and apropos of nothing - a shitload of material to keep fans of self-referential fiction happy, with just about everyone writing old H.P. into their own stories as an author of weird tales who somehow stumbled upon the truth; but as both collection and tribute to the big guy with the chin, it is mainly of historical interest.

The Lurker at the Threshold

H.P. Lovecraft & August Derleth The Lurker at the Threshold (1945)
I haven't read Lovecraft in ages - ages probably equivalent in this case to about two decades, and it seems this figure still stands even after reading The Lurker at the Threshold which amounts - according to some bloke on the internet - to about fifty-thousand words of which a little over a thousand derive from a fragment penned by Chuckles before his untimely demise. Said fragment was subsequently expanded to novel length by August Derleth. One might at this juncture frown upon Derleth's sauce - although I'm told it's delightful with pheasant - but I'm not convinced this was undertaken entirely in the spirit of milking a dead cow, despite appearances. Aside from anything, the two of them were good friends - albeit solely through the postal service - and Lovecraft's name might quite possibly have vanished into pulp magazine obscurity were it not for August Derleth and Donald Wandrei publishing posthumous collections of his short stories. Furthermore, Derleth was himself not lacking in talent and contributed much to the Cthulhu mythos even to the point of providing its overarching title, to my mind an improvement on Lovecraft's preferred Yog-Sothothery which just sounds like some sort of weird and messy criminal offence. If anyone was qualified to write this novel then it was probably Derleth, and given how much use it makes of the mythos in question, it would  have been worse form to omit Lovecraft's name from the cover.

That said, for all his talents, Derleth was quite a different sort of writer to his friend, and whilst he pulls all the Lovecraftian moves you would expect, it's still not really the same. This isn't necessarily bad, for Derleth adds flourishes that Lovecraft would not have considered for one reason or another, writing from a slightly more worldly, even mainstream perspective.

The only problem is that The Lurker at the Threshold is still very much the generic Lovecraft tale and as such might arguably work better in short form. The innocent inherits the house that no-one dare discuss, assumes all those tales about his deceased relative summoning tentacled types to be bullshit, but little does he realise...

Lovecraft wrote this same tale over and over, mostly getting away with it through the sheer poetry of his prose and the immediacy of tales which demanded no suspension of disbelief lasting much longer than an hour; but after a hundred pages of our hapless and transparently doomed hero desperately maintaining that nothing funny is going on and certain nameless monstrosities from beyond the dawn of time can probably be put down to poor digestion, he begins to look like a bit of an idiot.

The Lurker at the Threshold is enjoyable enough depending on how much you're into Lovecraft, but most readers will probably be better off with the short stories.

The Outer Reaches

August Derleth (editor) The Outer Reaches (1951)
It feels like an age since I picked up one of these satisfaction-pretty-much-guaranteed vintage collections, possibly because whilst it seems like every other English charity shop has a box of these things stashed away somewhere, their like has proven more elusive here in the States. Therefore I'm re-reading The Outer Reaches, presented to me along with Derleth's Beachheads in Space some years ago by Glenn Wallis who told me here, you might be able to get some ideas from these; these collections represented the inaugural dip of my symbolic toe into the golden age bath tub, the first stories I read out of sheer curiosity without prior knowledge of their authors, my first voyage out beyond the orbit of Philip K. Dick to the older worlds of Astounding Science-Fiction, Amazing Stories, and so on. August Derleth had been chums with H.P. Lovecraft, I reasoned, so that seemed like a recommendation.

The stories collected in The Outer Reaches represent the personal favourite of each author from amongst his own body of work, at least as of 1951. Whilst, in this respect, there's a couple of slightly puzzling submissions - notably Leon Sprague de Camp's Git Along!, an oddly disappointing effort from a generally solid author; and David H. Keller's Service First which had me wondering whether his might be another of John Wyndham's myriad pseudonames, it being so close in tone to the dreaded Pawley's Peepholes; but, these aside, it's a predictably satisfying collection with cracking stuff from Poul Anderson, Nelson Bond, Ray Bradbury and others. With the past being something of a foreign country, the appeal of short stories of this form must surely increase as years go by, and so I'm inclined to dispute the general accusation of it being less than great literature. This was shamelessly populist science-fiction written without anything like the number of unspoken literary rules of today: stupid, wacky, and mostly wonderful.

Considering how much of this stuff I've read since Glenn first sent this book my way, it's probably fair to say that The Outer Reaches did indeed give me some ideas.