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 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…