Cthulhu Mythos Anthologies Are Trash and I Hate Them

Multi-author anthologies of Cthulhu Mythos short stories are nothing new – not in the field, where they’ve been mainstays since August Derleth put out Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and not on this blog, where I’ve made a fairly regular habit of reviewing them. Lately, however, I’ve run into a rut. There’ve been several Mythos anthologies which have sat on my to-read pile; the two volumes of The Madness of Cthulhu, edited by S.T. Joshi (who despite his somewhat curmudgeonly opinions is generally one of the more discerning editors in the field), and various collections edited by Paula Guran, which I picked up in part because of positive buzz and in part because I think it’d actually be healthy for the field if anthology editors weren’t all dudes and so I wanted to economically encourage that.

Over the last few months I’ve finally gotten around to tackling the collections, but they’ve been falling flat with me – so much so that I’ve been unable to finish them. I genuinely don’t think it’s that my tastes have shifted – it’s more that the general tenor of the field has changed, as such things eventually do, and it’s now less aligned with my preferences than in general.

In some respects this is good – the alternative to change is stagnation. On the other hand, sometimes change involves moving away from the very thing which long-standing fans found enjoyable about the whole thing. If they’re the sort of fan who appreciates the racist undertones of Lovecraft’s stories, then so much the better. But if the Mythos field is walking away from cosmic horror itself, that may be a bigger problem…

Less Madness, More Muddle

The Madness of Cthulhu, put out in two volumes, is a weird one. S.T. Joshi hasn’t put out any further volumes in the series, and each individual one is comparatively thin by the standards of, say, the Black Wings series; I kind of wonder whether it was originally intended to be a single-volume thing and was then chopped in half by the publishers to milk it a little further. For the most part, it’s original stories, but there’s also a few reprints.

One of those reprints is the lead story: it’s At the Mountains of Murkiness, a parody of At the Mountains of Madness which Arthur C. Clarke knocked off for The Satellite fanzine in 1940. This is very silly, and rather gentle in nature – imagine Douglas Adams without the disguised anger which tends to disguise a lot of satire and you’re in the right sort of ballpark – but it’s more or less exactly the sort of thing you would expect someone to scribble for a fanzine or Internet forum as a little joke, not something of the substance you really want as the lead-off story in a Cthulhu Mythos anthology.

Black Wings: the Final Flight?

Well; here we are at what some feared would be the end. After providing my response to Shimmin’s Ferretbrain-era review of the first Black Wings of Cthulhu volume, I’ve covered the second, third, fourth, and fifth collections in the series, and found my patience for them waning as I go.

Now I’ve finally gotten around to the sixth volume. For a while, it’s seemed like this is where the series stops. After dutifully producing a new Black Wings entry every year or two (with the release schedule going annual from Black Wings 3 onwards), series editor S.T. Joshi has let the sequence lie fallow since 2017. With Black Wings taking a long break after this, does it go out with a bang, or does it fade away uninspiringly? Let’s see…

Ann K. Schwader leads us off with Pothunters, another episode in the Cassie Barrett series. I liked this one substantially more than I did Night of the Piper from Black Wings 4; that story tried to make the Kokopelli figure part of the horror, which felt like a dodgy appropriation of still-current beliefs. This one still touches on the indigenous cultures of the American Southwest in order to set up its plot, but I feel that it does so in a substantially less problematic way.

In particular, rather than conflating the horror with actual traditional practices and real cultures in a dodgy way, Schwader makes sure to draw a clear distinction. The sinister pots found at an archaeological site which kick off the terror are, it is repeatedly emphasised, of a different design and construction from anything else found in the area, which is the tip-off that it doesn’t belong to any of the local cultures – instead, it belongs to aliens which, perhaps, are doing a rough mimicry of the aesthetics of the local cultures as an attempt to blend in.

This is a small distinction, but an important one when it comes to making sure the story doesn’t end up demonising actual cultures. Furthermore, the story itself flows somewhat better than Night of the Piper did, building to climactic revelations which were a surprise to me but which in retrospect were actually nicely hinted at over the course of the story.

Black Wings: Flight Five

I think S.T. Joshi must have really enjoyed doing the Black Wings of Cthulhu anthology series. Though it seems like the sequence has ended – Black Wings VI emerged in 2017, there’s been no Black Wings VII yet, the volumes in the series tended to come out every 1-2 years (with the series being reliably annual for III to VI), and you don’t keep up that sort of schedule when you also have a swathe of other projects on your plate unless you get a kick out of it.

So far, I’ve found the series hit and miss, but that’s going to be rather inevitable with a series of multi-author anthologies; a collection where you enjoy all of the authors and all of them happen to be to your taste would be a pretty fortunate thing to encounter (unless, that is, you’re the one picking the stories – which might be where the appeal for Joshi lay). I thought the first one was alright, the second and third pretty solid, but didn’t hold onto the fourth. Still, three out of four ain’t bad, so I’ve gotten around to reading the fifth; let’s see if it’s a keeper.

Nightmares In a Red Brain’s Realm

S.T. Joshi has become one of the more prominent editors in the realm of horror fiction and related genres, but this work has tended to come in two distinct categories. The first consists of his efforts spent in producing textually amended and accurate editions of work by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Robert Chambers; the Joshi-corrected texts of Lovecraft’s stories are considered definitive these days. Here he has made an effort to provide the authentic texts of the stories in question whilst not viewing his subject matter with rose tinted glasses, making an effort to each of the pieces collect into the context of a writer’s wider career. His Chambers collection for Chaosium, for instance, makes a game effort to present the best of Chambers’ post-King In Yellow supernatural fiction, whilst quite candidly admitting that Chambers was kind of phoning it in for most of his career.

The other tranche of his work is as an anthologist, editing collections of stories by multiple-different authors – either great stories selected from yesteryear or soliciting new stories. Up until the 2010 publication of the first Black Wings anthology, this had only been a very occasional sideline of his, and he had only produced three such collections; after Black Wings, he has been more prolific in this vein, producing numerous collections both in the Black Wings series and outside of it.

Soliciting and accepting stories for a multi-author collection is, to my mind, a very different proposition from producing a collection of work by a single author. In the latter case, including stories of inferior quality can be sometimes be justified. It should still be avoided if one is billing the collection as “the best of” the author in question; a “best of Bram Stoker” collection which included the confused mess which is Lair of the White Worm should be rejected out of hand, for instance.

On the other hand, if the collection is intended to bring to light lesser-known stories by the author in question, or is meant to be a complete edition of the writer’s fiction (as with Joshi’s Machen collections for Hippocampus Press), or is meant to provide an overview of the author’s career spanning their entire professional period, even those times when their work wasn’t up to their usual standard (as with Joshi’s Chambers collection for Chaosium, or his multi-volume Machen collection for them), then including a few mediocre or outright bad stories is wholly understandable. If you bill a collection as The Complete Short Stories of H.P. Lovecraft and don’t include The Street, that’s false advertising, even though The Street is a horrible story. Likewise, if you’ve been tasked with producing a collection which, say, picks one story from a prolific writer’s output from each year of their career, and they happened to spend one year in the middle of it churning out trash, you’re going to have to hold your nose and pick out the least bad story.

The same considerations do not apply to multi-author anthologies; there is, frankly, little reason to include a story in such a collection if it is outright bad or not really in the spirit of the collection you’re putting out. In many respects quality is a matter of taste, so a good anthologist whose tastes broadly align with yours should be able to select a crop of stories which you as a reader will personally enjoy fairly consistently – if, however, your own reading sensibilities are not really compatible with what a lot of stories in the anthology are trying to do, that can be a sign that your tastes and the anthologist’s are diverging.

At the same time, it is possible for an anthologist to do an outright bad job here. Some of my bugbears I’ve mentioned on here in the past include goofs like:

• Throwing in a clearly inferior story simply because it happens to be historically interesting, even though the anthology is meant to be a “best of this genre” sort of affair; if a story is not actually enjoyable it has no place in an anthology which doesn’t have a historical intention behind it.
• Including a story by your favourite authors, even if it isn’t up to their usual standards. Especially infuriating when the author in question is a well-established writer: that spot could have gone to someone starting out on their career (or another story from the same writer that’s up to their usual standards).
• Bringing in a story which clearly doesn’t fit the overall concept of the anthology, like billing a collection as being serious cosmic horror and then subjecting the reader to comedy nonsense.

Alas, it feels like in the glut of anthologies he has edited since the Black Wings first flapped, a few of these anthologies end up falling into these pitfalls. Whilst I do still like many of the Joshi-edited multi-author anthologies I’ve covered so far – I thought the hit/miss ratio on Black Wings was holding up pretty well until the fourth one – but these two didn’t work for me.

The Red Brain

This is very much marketed as a followup to A Mountain Walked, an anthology which followed the model of the seminal Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos in the sense of collecting a mixture of brand-new stories and reprinted gems. However, it is substantially shorter than that volume – much less than half as long, in fact – which may give rise to suspicions that the well might be running a little dry.

Black Wings: the Fourth Flutter

Another Halloween season, another opportune time to review one of the Black Wings of Cthulhu anthology series by S.T. Joshi – a regular collection of all-original Cthulhu Mythos fiction, freshly squeezed from the minds of a wide stable of writers. This time around, I’m going to take a look at the fourth volume in the series.

The first story in the collection, Fred Chappell’s Artifact, is a bit of a misfire. It doesn’t help that it traipses into making proclamations about race that display either a basic ignorance of the facts or a very odd interpretation of them. For instance, there is a passing assertion that the term “gypsy” doesn’t really refer to any specific ethnicity; this is demonstrably incorrect.

Worse, this is in the context of discussing a concept of ancient familial lines going back to ancient civilisations which retain within them the kernel of hideous cults of barbaric ancient gods (settle down, QAnon qultists, this is fiction). Whilst there’s ways of depicting this theme which don’t open the door to awful racist implications, directly saying that they have been referred to as “gypsies” over the years and depicting them as people from Foreign Lands who have infiltrated well-heeled American society in order to overthrow Western civilisation, which is basically what happens here, is highly dubious.

It gets even more dubious when Chappell draws a comparison between the situation here (the member of the secret family here has gained employment as the live-in maid to some WASPish aristocrat, the implication being that they are banging and his father and grandfather have banged maids from that family – or the same maid refreshing her look every so often – for generations) and the situation of plantations in the antebellum south where, according to Chappell, sometimes the master would take a slave woman as his concubine, put his wife aside, and allow his new lover to rule over the plantation, a situation which invariably led to the ruination of the plantation.

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Its Imitators, Part 7

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

The story so far: Arkham House shapes what it means to put out a Cthulhu Mythos anthology by releasing the seminal Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and major followups in the form of New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Cthulhu 2000. Then Robert M. Price makes not one, not two, but at least three attempts to push his vision of the fandom by producing similar “best of the Mythos” anthologies.

Fortunately for us, Robert M. Price isn’t the only big beast of Lovecraft fandom and scholarship; with credentials and a standard of work putting Price in the shade, S.T. Joshi – when he isn’t flipping out about people removing Lovecraft’s likeness from the World Fantasy Award trophy over Lovecraftian racism that Joshi himself has exhaustively documented – is the major figure in Lovecraft criticism these days, and over the years has become increasingly known as a fiction anthologist too, editing not only general horror anthologies or collections by specific authors but also turning his hand to Mythos anthologies. But it would take a while before he’d produce something that qualified as a potential followup to the original Arkham House anthology that started it all…