Published April 1921
Illustration by idesignpre
Being something of a Lovecraft purist there are a handful of things about his work that I am wary of. Two of my biggest qualms are August Derleth's treatment of the Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraft's collaborations with other authors.
I've mentioned before my distaste for Derleth's contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. Don't get me wrong - without him no one, literally no one - would have ever heard of HP Lovecraft. He published collections of his stories which were almost totally forgotten in yellowing back issues of niche magazines. I have read his work and loved it because of August Derleth. And I don't think he was a bad writer! I'm no expert but I'm sure I've read some of his stuff in the past and enjoyed it enough. It's just that he started futzing with the Cthulhu Mythos in a way that makes one think he never really got HPL's work to begin with. He added things like the classical elements into the mythology; Cthulhu is water, Hastur is air, blah blah blah. He added the concept of good and evil into this realm, and other writers ran with that. In modern Lovecraftian gaming you can use crosses and holy water against these enemies because Derleth allowed traditional Christian tropes to sneak their way in. Lovecraft created things utterly alien, in both form and philosophy, and these purely human ideas are simply not part of the Mythos. Great Cthulhu, slumbering in the sunken city of R'leyh has no human motivations or feelings - that's one of the things that makes him so terrifying. That and the fact that he's like 200 feet tall.
Lovecraft's collaborations are a bit harder for me to hate outright. There is at least one fully ghostwritten story that I know of - Under the Pyramids, supposedly written by Harry Houdini but written entirely by HPL. There are some stories where he is clearly the chief writer and others where he may have really shared the work load. Then there are the dubious works where in HPL might make a suggestion of a story to someone in a letter and later that someone writes a story - or whole novel - put Lovecraft's name on it posthumously and sell books (Derleth being guilty of this a few times.)
My story today seems to be a true collaboration, a tale of cosmic horror and a dreaming journey. Our narrator is using opium and in the depths of his trip he seems to travel to another world. He is seeing a massive, shocking destruction of a world through enormous waves and storms. The writers paint a gorgeous and frightening picture of a world slowly being ravaged by the elements. There are hints that ancient gods might be behind the scenes, and that age-old civilizations have been destroyed and reborn.
This was a short little poetical journey that was interesting and fits well in the Cream Cycle. I can't say that I'm a big fan - it was a little simple and lacked a certain weight - but I have to say I will need to give some of his collaborations a look now. Though August Derleth is still on my shit list.
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I read The Crawling Chaos in this narrow little book called The Doom That Came To Sarnath. Ballantine Put out ten or so of these slim little volumes that basically collect all of HPL's major work in these nice, pocket-sized books in the 90's. The covers are details of a larger work by Michael Whelan that is featured on another collection of his work. I have several of these little guys. Publishers have been doing that for a long time; I have another half set of them from much earlier, each with a really shocking and ugly cover. Nice. Oh, and whose a lucky boy? Me, that's who. In the 90's I had gotten into non-sport collector cards - like baseball cards for nerds and such. One set was of illustrations by the aforementioned Michael Whelan. I happen to still have two cards that feature that painting. How many people can say their bookmark is a little mini version of the book cover they are reading? Huh? Not many I bet. NOT MANY.
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NEW FEATURE!!! I'm going to start sharing links to websites I find that are totally appropriate to the theme of this blog, and for the 31 Days of Lovecraft especially.
First up - an amazing catalog of illustrations of Lovecraft beasts called Yog-Blogsoth. I can't get enough of this thing. Beautiful illos of nearly every creature from Lovecraft's stories, with the descriptive text from each story. I keep getting lost in this site! Thanks goes to Sean Nelson for pointing me to this.
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