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: 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.

The Necronomicon Wars

Even in his own lifetime, H.P. Lovecraft got the occasional bit of fan mail from occultists either asking if his mythology of the Great Old Ones was real – or insisting that it was real. Over time, it seemed like the Necronomicon became the particular focus of this sort of inquiry – perhaps because of Lovecraft’s technique of listing it and other invented Mythos tomes alongside real books when using it in his stories.

Lovecraft gently let down all such inquirers. He’d also disappoint fans who knew it was fictional but thought it’d be wicked awesome if he’d write an actual Necronomicon, by pointing out that he’d already established in his stories that the damn thing was hundreds of pages long – and whilst he might be tempted to cook up some scraps, he really didn’t want to spend that long cranking out a tome of that length. Nonetheless, an appetite for the book remained.

After Lovecraft died, pranksters would slip references to it into library catalogues and the like, but the efforts of Arkham House to exert control over Lovecraft’s intellectual property (despite August Derleth’s rather weak claim to be Lovecraft’s literary executor, a role it’s now generally agreed that R.H. Barlow had a better claim to) may have dampened any efforts to turn the artifact into reality. Derleth’s death in 1971, however, made such fakery significantly more tempting.

The early 1970s also saw Kenneth Grant put out The Magical Revival, the first volume in his epic Typhonian Trilogies – a sprawling account of his further development of Aleister Crowley’s occult system of Thelema. This included an astonishing claim – that Lovecraft’s fiction wasn’t fiction, but was on some level communicating psychic truths that were not only compatible with Thelema but were actually important components of it in their own right.

This created the impetus for a bizarre new feature of the occult scene – a spate of purported Necronomicons, at least one of which would inspire readers to actually try out the magic described therein, and a raging conflict in the wider scene over whether these books a) were what they purported to be and b) had any legitimacy as grimoires. In short, the stage was set for a conflict in which shots are still fired to this day – the controversy I like to call the Necronomicon Wars.

Three Books of Warehoused Notions

Just as Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn is, though it has its shortcomings, a widely-recommended source of raw information concerning late Victorian British occultism, Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy is widely considered the encyclopedia of occultism as it was studied in Renaissance Europe. Indeed, it and the Golden Dawn’s system are not unconnected; Francis Barrett catalysed a resurgence of occult interest in Britain in 1801 with his The Magus, or the Celestial Intelligencer, which largely just plagiarised substantial chunks of the Three Books and perhaps a pinch of a different source in order to deliver its information, and then later when the Golden Dawn was formed great chunks of their inner practices were adopted either from that or, less likely, Agrippa directly.

The reason that it’s more likely that the Golden Dawn leadership got their details from Barrett rather than Agrippa is that for a good long time a full English translation of Agrippa wasn’t available, aside from a 17th Century translation riddled with errors. Donald Tyson’s presentation of the Three Books is the product of a laborious process of reconstruction, bringing the full text back into print in English for the first time in ages, repairing errors, and extensively annotating everything (and when I say “extensively” I mean “in many chapters there’s a greater word count in Tyson’s footnotes than in Agrippa’s actual text”).

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…