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The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos
by S.T. Joshi. Poplar Bluff, MO: MythosBooks, 2008.One of the most remarkable things about this new volume about the curiousliterary sub-genre of the Cthulhu Mythos is that no-one until now has ventured such adetailed critical study. Lin Carter’s
 Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos
(1972) combined a rudimentary account of Lovecraft’s life and work with an attempt(equally rudimentary) to examine some of the better known tales of the “LovecraftCircle” – such writers as Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long and Donald Wandrei.But Lovecraft scholarship has made enormous strides in the last 30-plus years, muchof it due to the untiring efforts of S.T. Joshi himself.It is fitting, then, that the modern master of Lovecraft biography and criticismhas now turned his attention to the phenomenon of what his introduction aptly refersto as the “so-called Cthulhu Mythos.” – the dissemination of Lovecraft’s conceptsinto popular writing and culture, a limitless stream of stories, anthologies and novelsthat seem to surge forth inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque,malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare.Joshi divides his highly opinionated (and justifiably so) study into ninechapters. The first three deal with the “Lovecraft Mythos” – an already well-definedterm in Lovecraft studies which applies to the works of the (frankly inimitable)Providence writer himself, and his invented pseudomythology of gods, books andsites which, to a greater or lesser degree, crop up across the whole of his
oeuvre
. Thenext two chapters cover “Contemporaries” (that is, contemporaries of Lovecraft):Long, Bloch, Wandrei, as well as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, AugustDerleth, and Henry Kuttner and Fritz Lieber. There follows a chapter on “The DerlethMythos” which critically examines Derleth’s fatally flawed conception of theLovecraft Mythos, and a chapter titled “Interregnum” which interrogates works bywriters such as Colin Wilson and Ramsey Campbell which preceded Lin Carter’sstudy. The final two chapters, “The Scholarly Revolution” and “Recrudescence”, dealin short compass but with remarkable insight with the thirty-odd years of CthulhuMythos fiction which have appeared since the early 1970s, taking us up to 2008 withcommentary on Mythos works of writers such as Richard L. Tierney, Thomas Ligotti,Joseph S. Pulver, Brian Lumley, Wilum Pugmire, Donald Tyson and others.
 
In his introduction, Joshi makes no bones about his expectation that writtenwork which attempts to continue Lovecraft’s legacy should be possessed of “intrinsicliterary merits,” making clear that his study will seek to distinguish between “thescope of Lovecraft’s achievement” and “what others have written in imitation of or homage to him” (12). Joshi remarks the tendency for literary neophytes to producework of vastly variable quality which often amount to no more than a “tepid rewritingof Lovecraft’s own stories” (13), stories which usually lack the cosmic perspective socentral to Lovecraft’s own views.In Joshi’s terminology, the “Lovecraft Mythos” is the work produced byLovecraft himself, with the “Cthulhu Mythos” being an umbrella term for theLovecraft-inspired work of his contemporaries and successors. Joshi here, as ever,asserts the importance of studying Lovecraft’s work as a philosophical and aestheticunity, and the Lovecraft Mythos is therefore seen as a mythic framework in whichLovecraft strove to convey serious philosophical (as well as political, cultural andother) issues. Joshi does not resile from criticising Lovecraft where particular stories,such as “the Dunwich Horror,” apparently fail to meet Lovecraft’s own criteriaregarding mankind’s insignificance in the cosmos at large.Defining the key elements of the Lovecraft Mythos as fivefold (a fictional New England topography; a growing library of imaginary “forbidden” books; adiverse array of extraterrestrial “gods” or entities; a sense of cosmicism; and the usageof the scholarly narrator or protagonist), Joshi manages to make sense of the basicingredients of Lovecraft’s interconnected works, while allowing that there will always be problems of defining which particular stories are “part” of the Mythos.In the chapters dealing with Lovecraft’s own work, many perspicaciouscomments highlight aspects of tales which many of us have read, and read about,many times over; one of the delights of Joshi’s criticism is that he continually re-evaluates the tales in the light of all current scholarly knowledge. Nor does he alwaysassent to popular interpretations of them, making novel suggestions such as that themonster seen by the narrator of “Dagon” is “ not the
object of worship
, but
one of theworshippers
.” The volume is valuable for Joshi’s accumulated new insights intoLovecraft’s work alone, and his assessment along the way of various opinionsexpressed by other Lovecraft scholars ranging from,
inter alia
, Will Murray throughDavid E. Schultz to Robert M. Price.
 
But of course the bulk of the study is given over to elaborations of the Mythos by other hands. While of necessity many story plots must be recounted, the joy of Joshi’s retellings is his contextualisation of them, as he discusses how a given author developed their contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, and the critical appraisal of theliterary merits (or otherwise) of each tale. The discussions of the stories of Long,Bloch, Lieber and Kuttner are particularly enjoyable, as Joshi interweaves hisunparalleled knowledge of publishing minutiae and timelines, the derivation of termsand entities, and the relation of information from Lovecraft’s letters, to the literarycross-fertilisation that went on between HPL and his fellow
Weird Tales
writers.If one cannot always agree with Joshi’s assessments of individual tales by particular writers (I, for one, find Ramsey Campbell’s Mythos tales such as “TheVoice of the Beach” convincingly and effectively Lovecraftian), he is generally veryeven-handed. Even in the important chapter “The Derleth Mythos”, which at firstreading provides a scathing assessment of Derleth’s misconstruals of Lovecraft’sfictional aims, reducing Derleth’s so-called ‘posthumous collaborations’ withLovecraft to little more than conscious or semi-conscious plagiarisms of Lovecraft’swork, a second reading shows that Joshi has expressed himself far less contentiouslythan he might have. While Derleth partisans may well dislike and be tempted to takeissue with this section of the study, one can hardly argue with the bald facts of thecase as set out here by Joshi, leading to the conclusion that Derleth (whatever creditone might give him for preserving Lovecraft’s work in hardcover) “seriouslydisfigured the cosmic awe of the Lovecraft Mythos and replaced it with his ownfraudulent and aesthetically unimaginative knockoff.” (287).The book provides the odd laugh, as when the author caustically opines thatColin Wilson has now become “an intellectual buffoon” (220); and of Brian Lumley,that “one can only hope that this talentless hack will permanently abandon hisunwitting parodies of Lovecraft’s themes and conceptions” (233). Hugh B. Cave wasa “cheap pulp hack” (172); a story by Manly Wade Wellman “deserves nothing butoblivion” (173) and Peter Straub’s
Mr X 
is “tiresome, long-winded and staggeringlyverbose”(280). The amusing way in which Joshi reveals the shortcomings of Mythosworks by authors such as Graham Masterton, Michael Shea, and Jeffrey Thomas ismost entertaining, even if it is somewhat painful to read the drubbing given to RichardL. Tierney’s
The House of the Toad,
which Joshi dismisses as “a dismal failure”(275).Praise is dealt out to Mythos authors whose work deserves it – Karl Edward Wagner,
of 00

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This review was published in Lovecraft Annual No 3 (Hippocampus Press, 2009)

reply11 / 26 / 2009
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