Chaosium’s Comeback?

As I’ve mentioned, one of the last fruits of Chaosium’s old fiction line was Cassilda’s Song, a collection of stories by female writers all riffing on Chambers’ The King In Yellow. Although it was published under the new regime at Chaosium, after the internal restructuring necessitated by former head honcho Charlie Krank’s botching of the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Kickstarter, that project was signed off on by Joseph Pulver, its editor, before the boardroom coup took place.

Chaosium 1.0 may have had the odd production quality issue with their fiction line, but I thought it was a genuinely valuable presence on the scene. Though it wasn’t exclusively dedicated to Call of Cthulhu-related fiction – it gave us a small number of intriguing bits of Arthurian fiction to tie in with the Pendragon RPG, and it even featured the sole edition of Penelope Love’s enigmatic, Peake-influenced Castle of Eyes – the Mythos fiction line was definitely the crown jewel of Chaosium’s fiction offerings, just as Call of Cthulhu was the biggest hit among their RPGs.

Part of the strength of the old line was that it thought outside the box – rather than settling into a rut and sticking to it, it presented books of a range of different types. You had, as you might expect, all-original anthologies of new Cthulhu Mythos fiction like Cthulhu’s Heirs, but you also had reprints of classic Mythos anthologies such as The Disciples of Cthulhu, you had collections focusing on the work of particular Mythos authors (including Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, and Lin Carter) or authors who influenced Lovecraft (like Robert Chambers or Arthur Machen), you had tribute anthologies in which a range of writers paid tribute to Mythos writers like Ramsey Campbell or Brian Lumley, you had collections where all the stories revolved around a particular Mythos entity or principle like The Hastur Cycle, and you even had a foray of non-fiction in the form of The Book of Dzyan.

Unfortunately, Chaosium’s fiction line was affected – as was many other aspects of their business – by the slipshot management practices which eventually made that boardroom coup necessary in the first place. Though Chaosium 2.0 would bring in James Lowder to shepherd the fiction line, the pace of releases has slowed to a crawl – I suspect because before Lowder could prioritise bringing out new stuff, he needed to right the ship with respect to the old, since the blog post announcing his appointment alludes to the old regime leaving behind a serious mess when it came to contractual snarl-ups and unpaid contributors, and he and the rest of Chaosium management wanted to rebuild bridges and heal old wounds before making new commitments.

Recently, though, two new fiction products have emerged to try and get the Call of Cthulhu fiction line going again – but are they up to the old standards? Only way to find out is to crack them open and take a look…

Sisterhood

Edited by Nate Pedersen, this follows up on the success of Cassilda’s Song by offering another collection of stories by an all-woman slate of writers. This time around, the thematic focus is much looser – the criteria seems to be “horror, Mythos-related or not, with the stories set at any time and place in Earth history you elect”, with the narratives all being presented in chronological order, so we beign in ancient history and conclude in the present day.

The Wine of Men is a poem by Ann K. Schwader, a reasonable imitation of ancient Greek poetry (or, rather, the styles in which said poetry tends to be rendered in English). Usually I am down on poetry in this sort of collection, but in this case I am more tolerant; Schwader is a more competent poet than many who try to write horror poems, and the format she has chosen is an appropriate format to write a hymn of the Maenads – the murderous, riotous women who worship Dionysus through acts of bloody chaos.

By contrast the other poem in the collection – Jane, Jamestown, the Starving Time by Sun Yung Shin left me cold; the structure isn’t appropriate to the 17th Century setting, and the story told is fairly lightweight.

The first prose story in the collection, Monica Valeninelli’s From an Honest Sister, To a Neglected Daughter nearly made me ragequit. The concept is that a coven of witches from 1st Century Wales are trying to make contact across time with Lavinia Whateley from The Dunwich Horror to try and change the outcome of that situation. Unfortunately, the coven don’t really sound like residents of 1st Century Wales, or indeed of any place or culture more ancient than a 20th Century neopagan feminist meetup group, and Lavinia only identifies herself right at the end of the story, despite the fact that we’ve almost certainly guessed her identity already.

Between this and an awkward structural experiment, it just feels a bit third-rate. There’s ways and means to express the ideas it tries to get across in ways more appropriate to the alleged historical setting, but there’s little evidence of Valentinelli even trying. Even if you are willing to forgive this, the story is nothing more than a needless embellishment of an existing tale, which is the sort of thing Mythos anthologies are rife with and which I really wish Chaosium would stop encouraging. If your story relies entirely on another tale for its effectiveness, it probably isn’t a good story, and if you can’t think of an original story to tell with your characters, they probably aren’t very interesting characters.

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.

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…