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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Cthulhu Mythos

  
  

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tSuibhne
12:50 / 15.11.01
Inspired by the Conan/Cthulhu thread, I've got a question.

What are the major books of the Cthulhu Mythos? And what are the good books in the mythos. With an idea as big and legendary as Cthulhu, I imagen more then a few hack writers have gotten into the mix. So who would a newbie focus on, and stay away from?

I've got a few of the Lovecraft works in the mythos, and one day I will finally get around to reading them. May be after I get out of this non-fiction thing I'm in. Yes, as soon as I'm done with Our Band Could Be Your Life, I'm going to dive into the Mythos. So between now and then (the next few days) what books are going to be breaking my credit limit?

NOTE: good web pages with info are welcome as are long rambling post from someone who's in love with the mythos.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
13:45 / 15.11.01
As someone who loves the Mythos (and has, indeed, been attempting to write- or should I say, putting off writing- a book about Lovecraft), I'd recommend:
Ramsey Campbell's Mythos stuff (can't remember the title of the anthology 'cos my books are all in boxes)- tho' if you get that anthology then be warned- the first few are a bit slavishly pastiche-like (they're printed in order of writing) but they get SO much better towards the end...
William Browning Spencer's "Resume With Monsters"- for once, a book's blurb says it all- A Cthulhu Mythos novel written by Woody Allen... also his "Irrational Fears"- Mythos-related book dealing with AA that posits the notion that alcoholics are a different species from the rest of humanity, descended from a race that worshipped Tsathoggua...
Apparently there's a Thomas Ligotti Mythos story... haven't read it, but if it's Ligotti, it'll be fucking smart. (Incidentally, non-Mythos related, but if you like Lovecraft, check out Ligotti for that "cosmic terror" feeling... really quite different, though... but a visionary on the same par).
Badly-written but fun is "Nightmare's Disciple" (can't remember the author's name. Fuck.)- a Mythos serial-killer novel. Full of injokes.
Also "The Primal Screamer" by Nick Blinko (the one out of Rudimentary Peni, not the other one)- a semi-autobiographical descent into Mythos-related madness.
You've opened a whole can of tentacles here, friend... I'll be back with more after I've had a bit of a rummage...)
Oh... I would highly recommend Creation Books' "The Starry Wisdom"- it's a tribute to HPL, though not all the stories are directly HPL-inspired. It has Burrough, Ballard, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison... fucking tons of cool stuff. It rocks a Great Old One's ass.
 
 
Jack Fear
13:51 / 15.11.01
Robert Bloch's novel STRANGE EONS.
 
 
rizla mission
13:59 / 15.11.01
right, here goes;

THE ESSENTIAL HPL MYTHOS STORIES (though any are good):

The Call of Cthulhu
The Dunwich Horror
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Haunter of the Dark
Dreams in the Witch House
At The Mountains of Madness
Dagon
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
From Beyond
The Thing on the Doorstep
Nyarlatheotep (more of a short prose-poem/dream memory really, but still weird and essential)
The Shadow Out of Time
The Lurker on the Threshold (post-humous book cobbled together & half-written by the awful August Derleth, but the HPL bits shine through)

Read all of those and you'll have as gooder idea as anyone of what's what..

..I don't know if they've ever all been collected in one volume, but Creation books Crawling Chaos anthology is my favourite.

Failing that, get Volumes 1 & 3 of the old HPL Omnibus paperbacks, or, if you can't stomach the nasty cheapo covers, the new 'classics' collection but out by Penguin looks rather cool.

Most of the essential mythos stories by other authors (Bloch, Ashton-Smith, Belknap-Long, Campbell, Carter etc.) can be found in this book.

Or for incredibly detailed, obsessive information, you'll be wanting this one.
(Amazon don't have it - bah! the fools!)

Or for terrifying, mostly non-sensical, magickal, modern avant garde takes on the mythos (including such big hitters as Grant Morrison, William Burroughs and Alan Moore and a cool as fuck comics apaption of Call of Cthulhu), check this out (though you have to wade through an awful lot of psychotic gothic wank to find the good bits).

As for Mythos web-trawling, there are millions of sites, many of them bad or scary, and this is the best place to start.

phew. took me ages that did.
 
 
moriarty
14:05 / 15.11.01
Crawling Chaos is my fave, too. Huge amounts of stories, and one of the heaviest fucking books I own. You could kill someone with that fucker.

Hey, that's not a bad idea...

[ 15-11-2001: Message edited by: moriarty ]
 
 
rizla mission
14:09 / 15.11.01
SUDDEN ATTACK OF SELF-LOATHING: Why does a healthy 19 year old know so much - and have a whole shelf of books devoted to - a mentally disturbed horror writer who died in 1937??? AAAAAGGGGHHHHHH...... that's real cosmic horror for you...


Oh yeah, and avoid August Derleth's stories at all costs - they are to Lovecraft what Bush are to Nirvana..

[ 15-11-2001: Message edited by: Rizla Year Zero ]
 
 
grant
16:24 / 15.11.01
There was a series of anthologies put out in I think the early 70s which collected the stories quite nicely - a couple were all Lovecraft, one of the Lovecraft/Derleth collaborations, and one good one called, I think, The Cthulhu Mythos. Nope, it was The Spawn of Cthulhu.
It was edited by Lin Carter, who wrote a few OK stories in the mythos his own self.
What's interesting is that it includes a couple short tales which *predate* the Lovecraft stuff, but got incorporated in, including Ambrose Bierce (who invented Hastur the Unspeakable and a couple other things - and was a genius writer) and "The Yellow Sign," which was a creepy-ass story written by a guy who had become a famous romance novelist by the time Lovecraft was writing.

It's also worth mentioning that the Stephen King novella "Jerusalem's Lot" ( the prequel to the novel Salem's Lot) is a Cthulhu Mythos story, and a pretty creepy one. About the Burrower Beneath. The novel is a straight-up vampire tale in the same location.

Looking over the question again, of course, the core story of the Mythos is "Call of Cthulhu" by HP Lovecraft. He wrote quite a few tales of terror that get lumped into the mythos without expressly being about them - like "Pickman's Model," which is about rat-like ghouls, or the stories about Randolph Carter's dream-quests.

And if you're wondering where the idea of the mythos came from, it's mainly because Lovecraft didn't get out much. He just wrote to younger writers, encouraging them and helping them finish stories that got into the same pulp magazines that he was published in. Robert E. Howard (Conan) was one, and so was Robert Bloch (Psycho). In my experience, it's more worthwhile seeking out anthologies of short stories by these guys rather than novels - the only successful novel I know is the Lovecraft/Derleth tale The Lurker at the Threshhold, and it's basically two novellas put together, as one main character replaces another due to, well, exposure to Unspeakable Horrors.
I will admit I haven't read the Campbell books, though, and hear they're pretty good.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
16:58 / 15.11.01
The essential of HPL's own tales: The Rats In The Walls. Still freaks me out now.
Did anyone in the UK hear (about 18 months ago) on Mastermind on Radio 4 when they had a guy whose chosen specialist subject was Lovecraft? That was cool.
Kind of with you on Derleth... he sets 'em up okay, then reduces everything to horror movie dynamics... wave the Elder Sign at it, everything'll be okay... NO IT FUCKING WON'T! THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT!!!
Like alcohol-free lager...
Off-topic (fairly)-Hey... why don't they do a Mythos episode of Buffy?
 
 
ghadis
17:00 / 15.11.01
A very welcome recent discovery is Thomas Ligotti he's done a couple of Mythos stories and is very 'Lovecraftian' but what sets him apart from so many others is the fact that he's actually a VERY good writer...as one reviewer put it 'as much Borges and Kafka as Lovecraft and Machen'

Which leads me on to Machen...Wrote most of his best stuff before Lovecraft had started on the Mythos...A great writer, much better than Lovecraft in many ways.Lovecraft was very influenced by him. Machens' books also have the added pleasure of being quite hard to find...So you end up rooting round dusty old shops seeking him out...He also pops up a lot in Alan Moores' new Snakes and Ladders...

Didn't really answer the Mythos question i know but ya'll should seek these 2 out!!
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
17:22 / 15.11.01
Clive: what's The Nightmare Factory like? I've had a copy on order for over a year through alphabetstreet.co.uk, and they've just come back (for the ninth time) to tell me that they can't get it? Is it worth the perseverence?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:33 / 15.11.01
ALL Ligotti's stuff's ace... also check out two albums he did with Current 93- one was a book of short stories accompanying a soundtrack ("In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land"), one was a spoken word piece written especially for the purpose ("I Have A Special Plan For This World").
If we're gonna bring Machen into it, then I have to mention "The House on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson... one of Lovecraft's own favourite books, and recently reprinted with an afterword by Iain Sinclair...
(See how I nearly got back on-topic then?)
 
 
ghadis
17:33 / 15.11.01
It's exellent...Only got it about a week or so ago (30p ex ealing library stock!) so i havn't got through it all yet. It's a collection of his previous 3 collections plus some newer stuff...The Lovecraft/Machen mixed with Borges/Kafka is an apt description. 'Philisophical Horror' maybe.

I think you can download some stories from his website...
 
 
Traz
02:48 / 16.11.01
Let's take a break from the hero-worship; a number of Lovecraft's stories are utter crap. As I recall, "The Shadow out of Time" went into a long-winded treatise about how the Great Race of Yith were enlightened socialists that ought to be emulated. And then H.P. expected his readers to be afraid of them.

Right.

I think that some of the greatest horror stories deal with humanity, not nameless monstrosities from the court of Azathoth. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" was far more frightening than "Pickman's Model." (A painting! Yikes!) Heck, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is a serious contender against "The Colour out of Space."

Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" was sort of intriguing, though. It's a shame he didn't write more fantasy...or did he?
 
 
ghadis
04:39 / 16.11.01
I think most people would admit that lovecraft was not a great technical writer and came up with a lot of shit...(most of them re-visions he did were awful pap)...

His main contribution and the reason he's so popular is the Mythos which seemned to have a life of it's own (check out some of Kenneth Grants books for an interesting take on the occult aspects of the Mythos) ...and the fact that he was some tortured writer driven to exorcise his nightmares onto paper...

And when he was good he was VERY good...Dunwich horror is a classic and that flight across the rooftops in Shadow over Insmouth IS damn scary!!!
 
 
moriarty
05:03 / 16.11.01
quote:Originally posted by Traz:
Let's take a break from the hero-worship;

So, where's all the Lovecraft cocksucking at?

It seems to me that people are talking about their favourite stories by a particular author. No one so far has made him out to be a literary God, or said he didn't have a few clunkers. And comparing his worst work to the best work of others doesn't necessarily validate your point.
 
 
Sax
06:07 / 16.11.01
Go here for some real horror
 
 
The resistable rise of Reidcourchie
07:26 / 16.11.01
Originally posted by Grant
"And if you're wondering where the idea of the mythos came from, it's mainly because Lovecraft didn't get out much."

Ah the secret to being a good writer, no friends and headcases for parents (both of them had been instutionalised).

Now I read many years ago that Lovecraft adapted a lot of the Mythos from Sumerian mythos. I know there are bits and pieces from other belief systems (Bast, he loved cats, Nodens etc.) but the core mythos was very Sumeria (Cthulu=Tiamat). Does anybody no anything more about this?

Clive Barker did an excellent Mythos story in the Books of Blood, unfortunatly I can't remember the name of the story or which volume it was in. Er...sorry.
 
 
Sax
08:04 / 16.11.01
There's a compilation of Cthuloid short stories by many modern authors, including Neil Gaiman, who writes about a bar in R'yleh. It's called... fuck. Brain's failed me again. It's got Shadows over Innsmouth as the starting point. Aaargh! Riz, help me out here.
 
 
ghadis
08:40 / 16.11.01
I think it's actually called Shadows over Insmouth...havn't read it though
 
 
ghadis
08:43 / 16.11.01
Or maybe it's called,' Shadows over the Shadows over Innsmouth'...or something...

'Shadows inbetween the Shadows over Innsmouth'

'Shadows pretending to be the Shadows over Innsmouth'

sorry...i'm bored
 
 
Sax
08:52 / 16.11.01
You're right. It is called "Shadows Over Innsmouth", it's edited by Stephen Jones, and Amazon have a copy for eight quid-odd. I think it's worth a look, because you get some modern takes on Cthulhu. There are a couple of Ramsey Campbell stories in there as well, I think.
 
 
deja_vroom
08:59 / 16.11.01
Checkthis story by Thomas Ligotti. It's brilliant, and
this one is even more. The guy is really good, to say the least.
Oh, Traz, The Shadow Out Of TIme was crap, really. To me "The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward" is still his best story.
 
 
grant
12:48 / 16.11.01
quote:Originally posted by Traz:
Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" was sort of intriguing, though. It's a shame he didn't write more fantasy...or did he?

Yep. There's an anthology called The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath - it was in that series with the grey-and-black, photorealistic covers put out by, ummm, Ballantine I think.
There's a fun little prose poem in there called "Memory," and quite a few other things that aren't explicitly horrifying.
I think according to this page, what I was reading was a reprint of two earlier anthologies, The Dream Quest and The Doom That Came to Sarnath.

On the Sumerian myth thing, nah, I never heard that. I'm not THAT familiar with the myths, either, so I can't really comment on it.
Pro that idea: he was a correspondent with/mentor for Robert E. Howard, whose "Cimmeria" was supposed to be a kind of fictional Sumeria.
Con that idea: I always thought most of the stuff about war in heaven & explicit myths came from August Derleth.
And I tend to think he got lots of inspiration from looking at things under a microscope - there's not much difference between a Shoggoth and an amoeba when you think about it, and a few of his other critters sound a bit like giant rotifers. And he was fond of phrases like "nuclear chaos," which points to not just atoms but also cellular nuclei. But there's no reason it couldn't be both Sumerian and microscopic.
 
 
DaveBCooper
13:32 / 16.11.01
Flippancy : as well as giving his name to Leicester Square’s most prominent sex shop, I seem to recall that HPL also popped up in the Planetary/Authority crossover from a year or so back…

DBC
 
 
rizla mission
13:44 / 16.11.01
Well there's a lot of freaky science in Lovecraft stories - check out 'Dreams in the Witch House' (my all-time favourite) for a unique approach to hyperspace / other dimensions.
Then (and this is one of my current little obsessions) compare and contrast it with 'Hinterlands' by William Gibson - two stories written in completely different eras by writers using completely different paradigms - and see how much they have in common. Blows my mind, man..

Even taken as pure Science Fiction,'The Shadow out of Time' and 'The Colour out of Space' are still amazingly ahead of their time.

And Traz, complaining that Lovecraft was a bad writer and that his stories aren't 'scary' in the conventional sense is really missing the point.

If you analyze his stories in an Enlgish Literature class manner, he certainly IS a bad writer, possibly one of the worst writers ever. But you've got to ignore his impossibly clunky language, wooden characters and poorly set up narratives and concentrate on the things that make him such a .. fucking essential writer of the weird, cult variety:
The endless academic mystery and unguessed at cosmic horror presented by the hints we get of the cthulhu mythos, the acres upon acres of seething, repressed sub-texts waiting to be explored - the disguised sexual, racial, political, technological fears hinted at in the text (see Morrison's story 'Lovecraft in Heaven' for a good examination of those), the..

..I say, I'm starting to come over all Lovcraftian myself in these poorly written paragraphs, best stop.

O, yeah, and the best thing of all - Lovecraft's refusal to reveal how much of it he made up, how much of it came to him in dream-visions and how much was based on genuine occult folklore .. the fear that one day you too might stumble upon a 300 year old copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten in an antiquarian bookstore, or that the impossible angles of Ry'leh might start to invade your dreams, or that you might be browsing in a museum and come across a certain strangely familiar Polynesian idol..

"Of course," says a wizened old professor in a mythos story I remember reading somewhere, "you may have heard these words before in comic books or pulp magazine stories. The writers often read manuscripts like these, and used the truth to inspire ideas for their fiction!"


..BWA-HA-HA-HA, HA-HA-HA-HA...
 
 
Lothar Tuppan
14:05 / 16.11.01
quote:Originally posted by grant:


Pro that idea: he was a correspondent with/mentor for Robert E. Howard, whose "Cimmeria" was supposed to be a kind of fictional Sumeria.


<sirens approaching>
Hold on there son. Officer O'Tuppan here with the Howard Geek Patrol.

Howard's Cimmerians were actually meant to be a proto-Celts. And the name Cimmeria was taken from the historical
Cimmerians who Herodotus also wrote about.

The predecessors of the Sumerians in Howards Hyborian Age were (according to Howard's essay 'The Hyborian Age') a mixture of the Hyrkanians and Shemites.

Officer O'Tuppan signing off
<sound of sirens fading into the distance>

As for the Lovecraft Sumerian connection I find it interesting that most allegations of this appeared after the abysmal Simon 'Necronomicon' (which is a blasphemous tome but for all the wrong reasons). That book blatantly stated that the Lovecraftian deities were Sumerian and effectively misrepresented both HPL and Sumerian beliefs.

A pox on that mass market paperback!
 
 
Captain Zoom
14:07 / 16.11.01
Good HPL and others collections, though hard to come by, are the Chaosium series. These guys exhaustively have collected something like 28 volumes, all containing stories that focus on one aspect of the mythos.

for example: "The Shub-Niggurath Cycle" contains stories from HPL's inspirations and imitators, as well as his own, about horrific fertility goddesses.

you can find them here:
http://www.chaosium.com/cthulhu/fiction/index.shtml

well worth a look.

Also cool: Robert Morgan's "Things That Are Not There", a hard-boiled detective mystery with a Lovecraftian antagonist. Basil Copper's "The Great White Space", not totally Mythos related, but close enough. Fred Chappell's "Dagon" is fucking chilling. Roger Zelazny's "A Night In The Lonesome October" uses the Mythos for it's background, mixing it with the old Universal monsters. It is amazing. Lumley's "Return of the Deep Ones" is pretty good, but "Fruiting Bodies" is creepier, though with less of the mythos-related stuff.

I too have a whole shelf dedicated to this insane author and his followers. Sad.

Ia.

Zoom.
 
 
grant
15:53 / 16.11.01
quote:Originally posted by Lothar Tuppan:


<sirens approaching>
Hold on there son. Officer O'Tuppan here with the Howard Geek Patrol.

Howard's Cimmerians were actually meant to be a proto-Celts. And the name Cimmeria was taken from the historical
Cimmerians who Herodotus also wrote about.


Damn, I got in trouble with the law.
Had no idea, officer.


On the mythos thing, by the way, forgot to point out that one of those non-horror stories in the "Dream Quest" anthology I read was ghost-written for Harry Houdini. A straight up adventure story set in Egypt.

Fred Chapell's Dagon - I got given a copy of that by one of Chapell's students at Greensboro. It seemed like it was a bit stretched out, to me. Clueless guy gets enslaved and gimped by Dagon-worshipping cultist rednecks. It warps him.
The book, though, does make explicit the connections between Dagon the Deep One god and Dagon the fertility god worshipped by the Philistines (I think) in the Old Testament. (making the Bible part of the Mythos as well, by the way.)

[ 16-11-2001: Message edited by: grant ]
 
 
Captain Zoom
19:15 / 16.11.01
Always thought those beasties from Revelations were a bit familiar.

Zoom.
 
 
Traz
20:41 / 16.11.01
Sorry, moriarty. I frequently play devil's advocate just to make sure all sides are being aired.

Rizla, I agree that Lovecraft had a plethora of stark raving brilliant ideas, but I just can't overlook his frequently shoddy presentation. Maybe I've just read his worst works, though.
 
 
The Damned Yankee
18:25 / 17.11.01
Another Gaiman short story is "Old Shoggoth's Repose", or something like that. Funny stuff, considering.

Another one for the Mythos completist is called "Scream for Jeeves", by the illustrious I-Forget-Who. Basically it's G. K. Chesterton's Bertie Wooster and Jeeves encountering the horrors of the Mythos.
 
 
MJ-12
23:29 / 17.11.01
and let's not forget Shadow Over Outsmouth from the first Samurai Cat book
 
 
deja_vroom
08:28 / 19.11.01
Hey, what about the short story that Jorge Luis Borges wrote in memory of Lovecraft? Its title is in English, it's "There Are More Things". It's awesome.

And just in case you don't know, all Lovecraft's texts are online in one place, here.
 
 
rizla mission
14:39 / 19.11.01
ar, wow. thank's for that link - there's some stuff there I've never seen before (poems and essays for instance).

And pictures of HPL's grave! he he..

[ 19-11-2001: Message edited by: Rizla Year Zero ]
 
 
rizla mission
14:42 / 19.11.01
And gods almighty! You can buy a CD of MP3 files of all Lovecraft's stories for only $10..
 
  

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