Cthulhu Mythos anthology

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A Cthulhu Mythos anthology is a type of short story collection that contains stories written in or related to the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction launched by H. P. Lovecraft. Such anthologies have helped to define and popularize the genre.

Contents

[edit] Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by August Derleth and published by Arkham House in 1969, is considered the first Cthulhu Mythos anthology. It contained two stories by Lovecraft, a number of reprints of pieces written by members of Lovecraft's circle of correspondents, and several new tales written for the collection by a new generation of Cthulhu Mythos writers.

Derleth prefaced the collection with "The Cthulhu Mythos", an outline of his (sometimes controversial) views on the development and content of the Mythos. In this introduction, Derleth prematurely declared the genre to be dead--"for certainly the Mythos as an inspiration for new fiction is hardly likely to afford readers with enough that is new and sufficiently different in execution to create a continuing and growing demand".[1]

Lin Carter later wrote that Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos "marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the Mythos for many reasons, and one of the most important was that it introduced a number of new writers in the Mythos."[2]

The stories in the original edition included:

  • First appeared in the collection

[edit] The Disciples of Cthulhu

The Disciples of Cthulhu was edited by Edward P. Berglund and published by DAW Books in 1976. Berglund later described it as "the first professional, all-original, Cthulhu Mythos anthology".[3]

Perhaps responding to the introduction to Derleth's collection, Berglund wrote in his preface: "Whether or not there is a market for the Cthulhu Mythos stories, established and amateur writers will continue to write them for their own and their friends' amusement and enjoyment. It is inevitable that one or more readers of this volume will be influenced into trying his hand at writing within the Cthulhu Mythos genre."

When the collection was reprinted by Chaosium in 1996, the Carter and Brennan stories were replaced by "Dope War of the Black Tong", a new Robert M. Price pastiche of Carter and Robert E. Howard, and "Glimpses" by A. A. Attanasio, which was supposed to be published in the original Disciples but ended up in the Arkham House anthology Nameless Places instead.

[edit] New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was edited by Ramsey Campbell and published by Arkham House in 1980. In his introduction, Campbell noted that "[i]n recent years the Mythos at times has seemed in danger of becoming conventionalized," despite the fact that "Lovecraft's intention and achievement was precisely to avoid the predictability and resultant lack of terror which beset the conventional macabre fiction of his day." Therefore, Campbell wrote, "in this anthology I have tended to favor less familiar treatments or uses of the Mythos.... They contain few erudite occultists, decaying towns, or stylistic pastiches.... Indeed, one of our tales hints at the ultimate event of the Mythos without ever referring to the traditional names."[4]

One story in the book is an expansion, by Martin S. Warnes, of Lovecraft's fragment "The Book".

[edit] Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Golden Anniversary Anthology

Arkham House released a new edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos in 1990, edited by James Turner with a substantially different selection of stories, reflecting the editor's disdain for "Mythos pastiches in which eccentric New England recluses utter the right incantations in the wrong books and are promptly eaten by a giant frog named Cthulhu."

Turner eliminates some authors from the earlier edition and uses different contributions from others--while still suggesting that "a few of the earliest pieces in this volume...now seem like pop-cultural kitsch." The added stories, he writes, are from "the relative handful of successful works that have been influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos...exemplifying the darkly enduring power of H. P. Lovecraft over a disparate group of writers who have made their own inimitable contributions to the Mythos."[5]

[edit] Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos was edited by Robert M. Price and published by Fedogan & Bremer in 1992. In an introduction, Price provides a "sketch of the Lovecraft Mythos and its evolution into the Cthulhu Mythos"--raising a defense of August Derleth's interpretation of the Mythos along the way. Price writes that his in choosing selections was to assemble "an alternate version" of Derleth's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, though limited in scope to the writers of the pulp era. He included several pieces long out of print or reprinted only in obscure fanzines, and tried to focus on "stories in which certain important Mythos names or items are either first mentioned or most fully explained by the author who created them".[6]

[edit] Cthulhu's Heirs

Cthulhu's Heir's was edited by Thomas M. K. Stratman and published by Chaosium in 1994. With the exception of contributions by Ramsey Campbell and Hugh B. Cave, the stories included are original to the collection. Stratman describes the tales as "more than 20 writers' visions into the landscape of Lovecraft Country."[7]

  • "Watch the Whiskers Sprout" by D. F. Lewis
  • "The Death Watch" by Hugh B. Cave
  • "The Return of the White Ship: The Quest for Cathuria" by Arthur William & Lloyd Breach
  • "Kadath/the Vision and the Journey" by t. Winter-Damon
  • "The Franklyn Paragraphs" by Ramsey Campbell
  • "Behold, I Stand at the Door and Knock" by Robert M. Price
  • "1968 RPI" by Joe Murphy
  • "Those of the Air" by Darrell Schweitzer and Jason van Hollander
  • "Mr. Skin" by Victor Milán
  • "Just Say No" by Gregory Nicoll
  • "The Scourge" by Charles M. Saplak
  • "Pickman's Legacy" by Gordon Linzner
  • "Of Dark Things & Midnight Places" by David Niall Wilson
  • "The Likeness" by Dan Perez
  • "An Early Frost" by Scott David Aniolowski
  • "Scene: A Room" by Craig Anthony
  • "The Seven Cities of Gold" by Crispin Burnham
  • "Shadows of Her Dreams" by Cary G. Osborne
  • "The Herald" by Daniel M. Burrello
  • "Typo" by Michael D. Winkle
  • "Star Bright, Star Byte" by Marella Sands

[edit] The Starry Wisdom

The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft was edited by D. M. Mitchell and published by Creation Books in 1994. Declaring that "Lovecraft has suffered much at the hands of unmindful critics and even more from uninspired and talentless imitators," Mitchell declares that the collection's goal is "to dig deeper, to bypass the superficial and access the subterranean channels of archetype and inspiration with which Lovecraft was connected.... [Lovecraft] crafted morbid and disturbing allegories of social and biological upheaval--cryptically prophetic and spiritually exploratory--this latent content of his work now needs excavating."[8]

Some of the stories in the collection--notably those by Burroughs and Ballard--were not inspired by Lovecraft, but were seen by Mitchell as sharing his "visions of cosmic alienation". In those stories that make direct direct references to the Cthulhu Mythos, they are "used only in passing--in the same informal way in which Lovecraft himself intended."[9]

  • "Lovecraft in Heaven" by Grant Morrison
  • "Third Eye Butterfly" by James Havoc and Mike Philbin
  • "A Thousand Young" by Robert M. Price
  • "The Night Sea-Maid Went Down" by Brian Lumley
  • "From this Swamp" by Henry Wessels
  • "Prisoner of the Coral Deep" by J. G. Ballard
  • "Black Static" by David Conway
  • "Red Mass" by Dan Kellett
  • "Wind Die. You Die. We Die" by William S. Burroughs
  • "The Call of Cthulhu" by John Coulthart & H. P. Lovecraft
  • "Potential" by Ramsey Campbell
  • "Walpurgisnachtmusik" by Simon Whitechapel
  • "Meltdown" by D. F. Lewis
  • "Beyond Reflection" by John Beal
  • "This Exquisite Corpse" by C. G. Brandrick & D. M. Mitchell
  • "Extracted from the Mouth of the Consumer, Rotting Pig" by Michael Gira
  • "Hypothetical Materfamilias" by Adele O. Gladwell
  • "The Sound of a Door Opening" by Don Webb
  • "The Courtyard" by Alan Moore
  • "The Dreamers in Darkness" by Peter Smith
  • "Pills for Miss Betsy" by Rick Grimes
  • "23 Nails" by Stephen Sennitt
  • "Ward 23" by D. M. Mitchell

[edit] Cthulhu 2000

Cthulhu 2000: A Lovecraftian Anthology was edited by Jim Turner and published by Arkham House in 1995. As in his earlier collection, Turner criticizes the "latter-day Mythos pastiche" as simply "a banal modern horror story, preceded by the inevitable Necronomicon epigraph and indiscriminately interspersed with sesquipedalian deities, ichor-oozing tentacles, sundry eldritch abominations, and then the whole sorry mess rounded off with a cachinnating chorus of "Iä! Iä!"-chanting frogs." He declares that "the works collected in the present volume are not great Lovecraft stories; they rather are great stories in some way inspired by Lovecraft."[10]

The contents are:

[edit] The New Lovecraft Circle

The New Lovecraft Circle was edited by Robert M. Price and published by Fedogan & Bremer in 1996. Presenting the book as a sequel to Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, which focused on the circle of writers around Lovecraft that were collected in the first half of Derleth's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Price declares that "the present collection means to ape the second half, to commemorate that dawn of a new era of Mythos fiction." He describes the contents as "little known and seldom seen stories by most of the seven members of the New Lovecraft Circle numbered by Lin Carter and by other, more recent adepts as well, for the tradition grows. The cult will not be stamped out."[11]

  • "The Plain of Sound" by Ramsey Campbell
  • "The Stone on the Island" by Ramsey Campbell
  • "The Statement of One John Gibson" by Brian Lumley
  • "Demoniacal" by David Sutton
  • "The Kiss of Bugg-Shash" by Brian Lumley
  • "The Slitherer from the Slime" by H. P. Lowcraft
  • "The Doom of Yakthoob" by Lin Carter
  • "The Fishers from Outside" by Lin Carter
  • "The Keeper of the Flame" by Gary Myers
  • "Dead Giveaway" by J. Vernon Shea
  • "Those Who Wait" by James Wade
  • "The Keeper of Dark Point" by John Glasby
  • "The Black Mirror" by John Glasby
  • "I've Come to Talk with You Again" by Karl Edward Wagner
  • "The Howler in the Dark" by Richard L. Tierney
  • "The Horror on the Beach" by Alan Dean Foster
  • "The Whisperers" by Richard Lupoff
  • "Lights! Camera! Shub-Niggurath!" by Richard Lupoff
  • "Saucers from Yaddith" by Robert M. Price
  • "Vastarien" by Thomas Ligotti
  • "The Madness out of Space" by Peter H. Cannon
  • "Aliah Warden" by Roger Johnson
  • "The Last Supper" by Donald R. Burleson
  • "The Church at Garlock's Bend" by David Kaufman
  • "The Spheres Beyond Sound (Threnody)" by Mark Rainey

[edit] The Children of Cthulhu

The Children of Cthulhu, published by Ballantine Books in 2002, was edited by John Pelan and Benjamin Adams. In the introduction, the editors wrote:

For this collection, we asked authors to break past the '[if it ain't broke,] don't fix it' mentality and bring Lovecraft's original concepts kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.... The stories in this collection range from the historical to the futuristic. What they share is each writer's reaction to the vision of H. P. Lovecraft and an affinity for his core concepts.:[12]

All the stories are original to the volume with the exception of Poppy Z. Brite's "Are You Loathsome Tonight?" which originally appeared in her 1998 collection of the same name.

  • "Details" by China Miéville
  • "Visitation" by James Robert Smith
  • "The Invisible Empire" by James Van Pelt
  • "A Victorian Pot Dresser" by L. H. Maynard & M. P. N. Sims
  • "The Cabin in the Woods" by Richard Laymon
  • "The Stuff of the Stars, Leaking" by Tim Lebbon
  • "Sour Places" by Mark Chadbourn
  • "Meet Me on the Other Side" by Yvonne Navarro
  • "That's the Story of My Life" by John Pelan & Benjamin Adams
  • "Long Meg and Her Daughters" by Paul Finch
  • "A Fatal Exception Has Occurred At..." by Alan Dean Foster
  • "Dark of the Moon" by James S. Dorr
  • "Red Clay" by J. Michael Reaves
  • "Principles and Parameters" by Meredith L. Patterson
  • "Are You Loathsome Tonight?" by Poppy Z. Brite
  • "The Serenade of Starlight" by W. H. Pugmire, Esq.
  • "Outside" by Steve Rasnic Tem
  • "Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
  • "The Spectacle of a Man" by Weston Ochse
  • "The Firebrand Symphony" by Brian Hodge
  • "Teeth" by Matt Cardin

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ August Derleth, "The Cthulhu Mythos", Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.
  2. ^ Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, p. 175.
  3. ^ Edward P. Berglund, "Preface to the Revised Edition", The Disciples of Cthulhu.
  4. ^ Ramsey Campbell, "Introduction", New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.
  5. ^ James Turner, "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!" Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Golden Anniversary Anthology.
  6. ^ Robert M. Price, "Introduction", Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos.
  7. ^ Thomas M. K. Stratman, "The Nameless Manuscript", Cthulhu's Heirs, p. 8.
  8. ^ D. M. Mitchell, "Foreward", The Starry Wisdom, p. 9.
  9. ^ Mitchell, pp. 9-10.
  10. ^ Jim Turner, "Cthulhu 2000", Cthulhu 2000, p. xv.
  11. ^ Robert M. Price, "Introduction", The New Lovecraft Circle, p. xvii.
  12. ^ John Pelan and Benjamin Adams, "The Call of Lovecraft, The Children of Cthulhu, pp. ix-x.

[edit] External link

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