Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Its Imitators, Part 1

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.

Despite the fact that even during Lovecraft’s own lifetime the Cthulhu Mythos was well-established as a multi-author shared world type of affair, and despite the fact that the various contributions to it tended to be in the short story format, it took a surprisingly long time for a fully Mythos-themed short story anthology to appear. In the first few decades of Mythos fandom, when August Derleth exerted a lot of influence over the field and Arkham House as close to being the de facto “official” publisher of such material as anyone could claim to be, Arkham didn’t really put out any all-Mythos multi-author anthologies, unless you count books put out under H.P. Lovecraft’s byline that included falsified collaborations by August Derleth or essays by Lovecraft Circle members. Instead, Mythos stories were sprinkled among other material in Arkham House’s genre anthologies.

That changed in 1969 with Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos; this inspired a trickle of other all-Mythos multi-author anthologies, like the Lin Carter-edited Ballantine Adult Fantasy series entry The Spawn of Cthulhu from 1971 (an anthology now largely redundant due to the material mostly being reprinted in other, more easily-available sources), or the DAW Books release The Disciples of Cthulhu from 1976, to Arkham House’s own New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos from 1980. In the 1990s, the pace of such publications picked up, in part because of figures from fandom like Robert M. Price gaining prominence as anthologists and in part because of Chaosium starting up their own fiction line as a tie-in with the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

The anthologies I am going to review in this article series will cover Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and subsequent Arkham House releases that can be seen as sequels to it, as well as two series of anthologies that can be seen as attempts by prominent Lovecraft critics to craft their own take on Tales – one anthology grouping is by Robert M. Price, whilst the other is by S.T. Joshi.

Lovecraft’s Last Apprentices

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.

Among H.P. Lovecraft’s more laudable qualities was his eagerness to encourage other writers in their work, a trait that would develop early in his amateur press association writings and would continue right up to his death.

Two of his later proteges were Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, two pals who were both fans of his work. (Kuttner, in fact, would only correspond with Lovecraft in the last year of Lovecraft’s life). Though their early work involved a lot of Lovecraftian pastiches, they would each grow to be distinctive authors in their own right. Bloch is mostly famous today as the author of Psycho, whilst Kuttner would become extremely well-regarded in the science fiction, both in his own right and his creative team-up with fellow Lovecraft correspondent C.L. Moore, who he met and later married as a result of their mutual inclusion in the network of authors around Lovecraft.

Lin Carter, once again demonstrating that despite his deficiencies as an author he was certainly a discerning editor, hit on the idea of publishing collections of the Cthulhu Mythos stories of both authors. In his lifetime he did manage to put out the first edition of Mysteries of the Worm, the Bloch collection, named in honour of the Mythos tome that Bloch invented and added to the canon; unfortunately, he never got around to producing the intended Kuttner-focused equivalent, The Book of Iod.

When Carter’s friend Robert M. Price ended up overseeing Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu fiction line, he naturally made reprinting an expanded version of Mysteries of the Worm and bringing The Book of Iod to fruition an early priority. As a result, it’s now pretty easy to get a good look at this early work by both authors, with both collections putting the stories in chronological order of publication and, as a result, offering a cross-section of their early development as authors.